Troubled projects in Berne: when should investment stop?
Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ “Management complexe” programme, troubled projects raise a precise question: on what grounds should further investment be authorised after adverse results? In Berne, this question may concern a federal administration transformation, a public health initiative, telecommunications infrastructure or development work in precision manufacturing.
What the literature establishes
Barry M. Staw (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) demonstrated experimentally that responsibility for an initial decision could encourage further resource commitments after negative results. This finding challenges the assumption that decision-makers always reassess a project independently of their own past choices. It does not mean that all persistence is a mistake.
When defending the project means defending one's decision
Joel Brockner (1992, Academy of Management Review) offers a theoretical synthesis in which self-justification plays an important role without fully explaining escalation of commitment. Continuing can serve to maintain consistency with previous choices or defend their legitimacy in the eyes of others. The discussion then concerns not only the project's prospects, but also what stopping it would imply about the original decision.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that a project should be stopped as soon as it disappoints, or that its initiator should always be excluded from the decision. That would confuse a risk of bias with a decision rule: attainable benefits, future costs and the consequences of interruption still require examination. Costs that are already irrecoverable do not, by themselves, justify new spending; continuity obligations, however, can make stopping costly. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot decide
The experiment by Barry M. Staw (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) uses a constructed decision scenario rather than tracking projects in Berne. The synthesis by Joel Brockner (1992, Academy of Management Review) clarifies mechanisms but provides no universal threshold for abandonment. In practice, observing that a project is over budget is therefore insufficient either to diagnose escalation of commitment or to establish that it should continue.
A practical check in Berne
As an application exercise for the “Management complexe” programme, a team in Berne can spend four weeks documenting every request for additional resources for a troubled project: remaining expected benefits, future costs, consequences of stopping and an explicit condition for reassessment. Whether in federal administration, public health, telecommunications or precision manufacturing, someone uninvolved in the initial decision checks that these elements are present before a decision is made. The measure is the proportion of requests reviewed that contain all four elements in writing and have undergone this check; it indicates decision traceability, not yet economic quality or public value. To go further: explore the Complex Management training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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