The reality of unstop-ability
Just asking, "should we keep going with this strategy or stop" is a challenging but vital question.
One of the best reading sources is the Common Sense Substack, curated by Bari Weiss. Every day it sends me interesting, informative, and often challenging content. If you are open to learning and understanding different viewpoints, I couldn't recommend it highly enough. A recent posting on public health focused on a subject that has been coming up a lot recently. I have written about Unstop-ability before here, but as part of a different context – on why strategies fail. Given the learning journey I am on, I thought it might be worth a revisit.
Note: Should you read the substack on public health and find you don't believe it, I would ask you to consider the context for this discussion, not the blog's content.
What is ‘unstop-ability.’
We know and accept that not all strategies work regardless of how well you plan and execute them. You may have had the most brilliant of ideas, yet you fail. Sometimes you must accept that you are going to fail and that you need to stop what you are doing. As the old Will Rogers saying goes,
"If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
Yet, for some people, it can be tough to call a halt to their project. Whether it is a perceived embarrassment or just a fear of the implications of the failure, they keep going hoping something else will happen. Hope, as we know, is not a strategy. Whatever happens, they cannot seem to stop themselves from the course they are on. Good leaders know when a strategy has had its time and call a halt when seeing it. A bad outcome doesn't mean it was a lousy strategy, and that belief is called the Resulting or the Outcome Bias.
Ending a failing strategy is a brave thing to do and accepting the accountability for it is the right thing to do. Of course, you might be in an organization that punishes you for this, but if you are, that says more about the organization than you.
It seems simple - if your head hurts when you bang it on a wall, stop banging.
So why is it so hard to do?
Where does ‘unstop-ability’ come from
A team I worked on years ago had a leader who wouldn't change their plan regardless of what feedback we gave him. There might have been many reasons he did not want to stop strategies once they were underway and not working, and the reasons may be different as the context is different.
Here are a few to consider when you next see this in others or yourself. Of course, any situation may be one of these or even a combination. Additionally, many of these may look like a 'loss of face’ to an outsider, but something deeper may be going on.
Believing because it's a good strategy, that it must have a good outcome (Optimism bias or sometimes the Belief bias)
Because you have so much invested in it (Sunk Cost Fallacy)
Not thinking about what the group or team believes (Group Think)
Assuming because it worked before, it should work again (Confirmation Bias)
Trusting people who have been right before that they will be right again (Halo Effect)
Hoping that because it should happen, it will (Just World Hypothesis)
Ignoring evidence that challenges our beliefs to accept evidence and strengthen our support of our original stance (Backfire Effect)
I am sure you can add to this list.
Stopping Yourself
It is hard for all of us to stop, take a beat, and reassess what we are doing and why. Just asking, "should we keep going with this strategy or stop" is a challenging but vital question.
Of course, you may not want to take that step. You believe that everything is going so well, and it might be. Or that could just be a story you are telling yourself.