“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Introduction (1776)
Item seven on the monthly management agenda is an update on something launched about eighteen months ago – perhaps a push into a new region or a second product line. The person responsible gives much the same update as last month, and somewhere during the year the updates drifted from results to activity. Nobody argues for it, nobody argues against it, and it rolls forward to next month’s agenda, as it has for most of the year. Nobody in that room has decided to keep it. It’s simply that letting go of what isn’t working never appears on anyone’s agenda, while the thing itself appears on them all.
Afterwards, driving home or clearing emails that evening, the owner notices something slightly uncomfortable. If the idea were proposed today, from scratch, nobody in that room would approve it. And yet it’s still running, with a budget line, a name attached to it and a regular slot on the agenda. In every practical sense it has more standing than most of the good ideas the business hasn’t yet found time for.
Everything Has a Launch Date
Starting something in a business comes with a surprising amount of ceremony. There’s a business case, a budget, a kick-off meeting, an announcement to the team and, usually, one person who’s named as being responsible for it. In a well-run business that’s as it should be, because every launch is a strategic choice about where money and attention are going to go.
Ending something comes with almost nothing. There’s no template for it, no standing meeting and no point in the year when retiring things is formally on the agenda. When endings do happen, they tend to happen by accident. The person who championed the initiative leaves, a new system can’t be set up to produce the old report, or the one customer a product line was kept for finally takes their business elsewhere. Nobody actually decided to stop. Something else happened, and the stopping came with it.
You can see the result in most price lists. A product launched with a proper event and a sales incentive is still there years later, bought by three customers and supported by stock, catalogue space and a line in every pricing review. Or there’s the report first requested during a cash squeeze, still produced every month by someone who joined after the crisis ended and has never been told why it exists.
The Inventory Nobody Keeps
If you asked most owners for a list of everything their business is currently committed to, I doubt many could produce it. Nothing’s being hidden; the list simply doesn’t exist. It would include the old product lines, the supplier arrangement kept for reasons nobody can quite remember, the weekly meeting for a project that finished four months ago, the discount that was meant to be temporary, and the dashboard nobody has opened since the person who asked for it moved on. A capable new hire who asks, perfectly innocently, why the business still retains any of these old commitments tends to be told a story about how they started.
Many of them arrived opportunistically, and each yes made sense at the time. A customer asked, a supplier offered, an opening appeared and somebody capable took it. The harder part is what opportunistic growth leaves behind, because each of those yeses came with a continuing cost that was easy to overlook while everyone was concentrating on the opportunity itself. Strategic focus usually gets talked about in terms of which new opportunities to accept, and much less in terms of the old ones that have long since run out of steam but were never actually brought to an end.
Why Nobody Calls Time
The obvious explanation would be that nobody noticed. I’m not convinced that’s usually true. People generally know when the enthusiasm has gone out of an initiative, because you can hear it in the monthly update. The early ones were about customers and margin; the later ones are about activity, obstacles and what the team plans to try next. The language changes well before the formal decision does.
Most of the reasons for not letting go of what isn’t working are quite decent ones, which is part of the difficulty. There’s the money already spent, the familiar “we’ve put so much into it” that everyone recognises as sunk cost and almost everyone still feels. There’s loyalty, which is harder to argue with: to the manager whose project it was, still sitting in the meeting where it isn’t being discussed, to the customer the product was built for, or to the supplier who helped out in a difficult year.
And there’s how it looks. An owner who announced the initiative at the start-of-year staff meeting isn’t keen to be seen reversing it in September. Stopping can feel like admitting the original decision was wrong, in front of the team, the bank or the board. I’ve watched leadership teams take real care over rewording how a struggling initiative is described (“a pilot”, “a longer-term play”, “still bedding in”) rather than asking whether it should still exist at all.
Donald Sull, studying much larger companies, called something similar active inertia: the commitments that had made those firms successful slowly hardened into ruts. It’s easy enough to recognise at a much smaller scale. Then again, every owner can name something they very nearly stopped that eventually came good, which is why the question remains a difficult one, and keeps rolling forward to next month.
Nothing Fades for Free
We tend to talk about these things fading, as if they were gradually costing less. Nothing fades in a business for free, though, because someone is maintaining everything that hasn’t been ended: half a day a week of someone’s time, a standing slot in a meeting, stock in the warehouse, a software licence that renews every January. None of these looks large enough on its own to demand a decision, which is precisely how they last so long.
Taking your attention off something doesn’t stop it drawing on the business. A deprioritised initiative still has someone answering the occasional question about it, updating the spreadsheet and turning up to the meeting. A team that watches things drift on for years learns, fairly reasonably, that nothing here is ever really decided. It just goes out of fashion.
A slow fade also teaches nothing. Because nobody ever says out loud that something didn’t work, nobody asks what the business misunderstood, and the next similar opportunity arrives without the benefit of that learning. By late September the January plans have been tested against nine months of customers, people and margins, and extra effort may not be the scarce resource for the final quarter at all. And next year’s budget, due to be built over the coming weeks, will carry all of it forward again, cost and clutter included, without anyone having actually chosen to keep it.
The Same Pattern, Closer to Home
The same asymmetry applies to decision authority, usually much nearer the owner’s own desk. A sign-off threshold set when the business was a third of its current size. A final look at every proposal over a certain value, “just to be safe”. Most of these were handed over at some point, at least in conversation, and the manager was told they could decide. What nobody did was formally end the old arrangement, so the team keeps checking, the owner keeps answering, and the approval request still arrives with the words “I assume this is fine, but…”
Announcing that responsibility has moved is easy enough. Ending the owner’s old responsibility is a separate act, and it’s the one that tends not to happen. I suspect a good many of the decisions that still find their way back to the owner are there for exactly this reason. A correction deferred is often an ending refused.
A Decision, Made Once
Back to item seven. None of this is a process or a review cycle, and I’d be wary of anyone who tried to turn it into one. Where endings do actually happen, it usually comes down to one moment when someone says, plainly and on the record, that something is over. Not paused, not parked, not being kept an eye on. Over. The meeting disappears from the calendar, the report stops being produced, customers are told the product has been retired rather than left to find it gradually harder to buy, and an approval genuinely moves to somebody else.
None of that necessarily saves much on its own. What disappears is the ambiguity, together with the small amount of maintenance that ambiguity required every week. Bertrand Russell thought that “nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.” I’d question the futility, since indecision usually buys somebody a little comfort, but the exhaustion I’d recognise anywhere. Some of those endings will turn out to be wrong, and that’s part of the price of clearing ground. Anyone who has walked a Cape mountainside in the spring after a fire will know which patch looks more alive.
Which leaves a less comfortable question for the last quarter than what deserves more effort. What would my business feel like to run if everything we’ve stopped believing in had actually been ended, including the decisions I’m still holding onto myself?
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