The project had been in trouble for a year before anyone said the word cancel, and even then it was said in a corridor, not a boardroom. In the boardroom the language was different: rescoping options, revised trajectories, renewed focus. The money kept flowing for another two quarters. When the end finally came, it cost more to shut down than it would have a year earlier, and everyone involved already knew the outcome by heart.
I’ve been near enough of these to know the silence isn’t stupidity. It’s structure. Nobody gets promoted for stopping a project. The sponsor loses face, the team loses jobs, the executive who approved it loses the argument they won two years ago. Every incentive in the room points toward one more quarter.
Sunk cost wears a suit
The sunk cost fallacy sounds like a textbook problem until you hear it in a steering committee. It never says “we’ve spent too much to stop.” It says “we’re 70 per cent there.” That number is almost always fiction, because the last 30 per cent of a struggling project is where the unsolved problems live. The honest question is never what’s been spent. Money already spent is gone whichever way you decide. The only question that matters: knowing what we know today, would we start this project now, at this remaining cost, for this benefit?
If the answer is no, you’re not continuing a project. You’re funding a reluctance to admit.
Cancellation done well is delivery
Victoria walked away from hosting the Commonwealth Games and paid heavily for the privilege, and the decision was treated as a national embarrassment. Then Glasgow staged the Games on a fraction of the footprint, and the walk-away started to look like the first honest cost estimate in the whole saga. I wrote about that rescue in the Games that weren’t supposed to exist. Stopping, shrinking and handing over are delivery decisions. They just don’t photograph as well as ribbon cuttings.
The tell for a project that should stop is rarely the budget line. It’s that the original problem has moved and the project hasn’t. The market shifted, the regulation changed, the sponsoring executive left, and the project kept building the answer to a question nobody’s asking anymore. Delivery isn’t finishing what you started. It’s changing something real for the people you built it for, which is the standard I set out in what delivered actually means. A completed project that changes nothing is just a cancellation with better catering.
Make stopping thinkable
The practical fix is to put the exit on the table before anyone’s pride is attached to it. Agree at approval what conditions would end the project, in writing, with numbers. Review them at every gate as a standing item, asked by someone who doesn’t own the project. When stopping is a pre-agreed scenario rather than a personal defeat, it happens two quarters earlier and costs half as much.
If you’re carrying a project right now that you privately wouldn’t restart, that’s your answer. The kindest thing you can do for the team is say it in the boardroom instead of the corridor.
Ben Webb is an Australian project leader and speaker, AIPM Project Manager of the Year 2022 and IPMA World Project Manager of the Year nominee. He writes about delivery, leadership and events.
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