Have you ever wondered if your company could be leap years ahead of where it finds itself positioned in the present day? I wonder about this way more than perhaps is healthy. After tons of endless planning meetings and dollars spent, I often ask myself why we seem to only make incremental progress. After my third cup of coffee, I feel the understanding wash over me. We’re idiots! That’s it! We must be the dumbest people on the planet! Okay. Maybe that is a bit too strong. Maybe I should switch to decaf.

The truth behind our low performance is not bound to our intellect. It is directly associated with our perception of failure. When we try to avoid failure, we fail miserably. That statement is a bit counter intuitive, but allow me to explain. I once worked on a project that was well-defined and had a specific target date for completion. That date came and went and there was still lots of work to be done. We grossly underestimated the amount of work required to bring this behemoth to its completion point. Rather than close the effort down, we added more people and money to the project. The new people required time to get up to speed on the project. Because they were now on the project budget, more money was spent and more was needed to sustain the effort. Now the effort was well beyond the original target date (and its useful life), but we finished it! What just happened?

The project was driven forward because of the stigma attached to the notion of failure. Logic and sensibilities be damned. We could not fail. This was the very reason that the effort, while completed, was never deployed. Stories, like this one, are all too common in today’s business world. This madness has to end.

While it is easy to point fingers at the people who actually work very hard to solve problems. The fear of failure must be taken from their minds. People will experience mental brick walls, but that is where their creativity engages. When the stigma of traditional failure is changed from a negative to a positive learning experience, people will feel a sense of personal empowerment to try something different that allows them to meet the original requirement, but not perhaps in the prescribed manner. In fact, I’m betting that the results might be more impressive than originally planned.

When projects plans go awry, don’t let the sunk costs and effort plunge you into a project death spiral. Pull the plug, reset and take a different approach. You and your team will be the better for having caught issues early in the process so that money and resources are not wasted to deliver a result that is no longer viable. Be innovative and open-minded while meeting the goals of your project, so you can deliver solutions that work, but most importantly, deliver them on time!