In Basel, when should a heavily committed project be stopped?
In pharmaceuticals, life sciences and Rhine logistics, projects absorb resources long before their outcomes are certain. For SHR — Swiss Human Resources' “Management complexe” programme, the specific question is this: how can managers reassess an international R&D or infrastructure project without turning the effort already invested into a justification for continuing?
What the literature establishes
In an experiment involving resource allocation decisions, Barry M. Staw (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) showed that personal responsibility for an initial choice could encourage further investment following negative results. This finding describes escalation of commitment: defending a past decision can take precedence over evaluating the next one. It does not mean that all persistence following a setback is irrational.
When past expenditure becomes an argument
Hal R. Arkes and Catherine Blumer (1985, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) document the sunk cost effect: having already invested money, time or effort can increase the tendency to continue. Concern about appearing wasteful helps explain this effect. For a project committee, the useful distinction is between past expenditure that can no longer be recovered and future costs and benefits that can still be influenced.
The overly hasty conclusion
One might conclude that a struggling project should be stopped as soon as its supporters invoke previous investments. That would confuse a warning sign of bias with evidence that continuing is unjustified: knowledge gained, contractual obligations and the consequences of stopping can alter future prospects. The point is therefore not to erase the project's history, but to avoid treating an irrecoverable expense as a future benefit. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these data cannot decide
These studies draw in part on experimental settings that do not reproduce the full complexity of a pharmaceutical portfolio or a logistics investment. They provide neither a universal stopping threshold nor an estimate directly transferable to Basel organisations. In practice, adding a project review is not enough if the criteria can be rewritten after every unfavourable result.
A practical check in Basel
At a Basel pharmaceutical or life sciences company, or a Rhine logistics operator, an exercise linked to the “Management complexe” programme could involve recording the criteria for continuing, redirecting and stopping a project before its next milestone, including projects with international R&D. At that milestone, measure the proportion of continuation decisions whose rationale explicitly compares future costs and benefits and checks results against the recorded criteria, with every amendment dated and explained. The numerator is the number of decisions meeting these conditions and the denominator is all continuation decisions reviewed: this ratio checks the traceability of the decision process, not project profitability or the elimination of bias. To go further: explore the Complex Management training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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