Work & Career · 2 minute read
Why Bad Projects Are So Hard to Stop
Past effort can make a weak project feel too expensive to abandon, even when the next step no longer makes sense.
A normal situation
A team has worked on a product for eight months. Adoption is poor, but stopping now feels like wasting all that work. Another three months of funding starts to sound reasonable simply because so much has already been spent.
What is happening?
Money and effort that are already gone cannot be recovered by continuing. The useful question is whether the next investment is attractive from today forward.
Projects, subscriptions, relationships with vendors and even personal plans can continue long after the original reason has disappeared. The more visible the past investment is, the harder it can feel to change direction.
The useful lens
Escalation of Commitment
This does not prove that one bias caused the decision. It is a useful lens for asking a better question and checking the evidence.
Evidence note: Sunk-cost effects and escalation of commitment overlap but are not interchangeable. Sunk-cost research asks whether irrecoverable prior investments influence current choices. Escalation of commitment describes persistence or additional resource allocation to a failing course of action and can also be driven by personal responsibility, self-justification, project structure, and other factors.