You can know a project isn't working and still feel unable to kill it. Not because you lack data. Not because you're irrational. But because stopping threatens your identity more than continuing threatens the company.
We're surrounded by persistence mythology. Founder hagiographies. "Never give up" graduation speeches. The implicit message: winners persist, quitters lose. It trains operators to treat strategic exits as moral failures rather than what they actually are: decision skills.
Here's what that framing misses: by definition, anyone who succeeded at something stuck with it. That's survivorship bias dressed as wisdom. It tells you nothing about whether persistence guarantees success, or whether the people who exited made the smarter call given their information at the time.
The real skill isn't persistence. It's discrimination. Success comes from picking the right thing to commit to and exiting the rest. Grit without selection is just expensive stubbornness.
Escalation of Commitment
Barry Staw, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, has spent decades studying what he calls "escalation of commitment." His research reveals something counterintuitive: the more personally responsible you feel for a decision, the more likely you are to keep investing in it when it's failing.
This isn't irrationality in the colloquial sense. It's self-protection. Abandoning a failing initiative feels like admitting you were wrong. So instead of cutting losses, you double down. The worse things get, the more you need them to eventually work out to justify your earlier calls.
Staw's work shows this pattern across contexts: managers throwing money at failing projects, governments escalating losing conflicts, executives staying in strategic positions long past their expiration date. The mechanism is the same. You're not evaluating the decision fresh. You're protecting a story about yourself.
The Pattern in Practice
Consider how this plays out in product development. You championed this initiative. You allocated budget. You made the case to the board. Now it's underperforming.
A rational assessment would ask: knowing what I know now, would I start this project from scratch? But that's not the question you're actually answering. You're asking: what does it say about my judgment if I kill it?
The second question has nothing to do with expected value. It's pure identity maintenance.
The Survivorship Problem
Most advice about persistence comes from people who persisted and succeeded. This creates a massive sampling bias. You're only hearing from the winners.
You're not hearing from the operators who persisted just as long, with just as much conviction, and failed. Or worse: the people who persisted at the wrong thing for so long that they ran out of runway to pursue the right thing.
The advice "don't give up" is unfalsifiable. If you eventually succeed, the persistence was validated. If you fail, you're told you should have persisted longer. It's a closed loop that sounds like wisdom but provides no actual decision guidance.
"Grit is not automatically wisdom. Sometimes it's just refusal to update."
The Virtue Complement
There's a useful frame: the opposite of a great virtue is also a virtue. Courage is virtuous. So is prudence. Aggressiveness in markets is virtuous. So is strategic retreat. These aren't contradictions. They're complementary skills that apply in different contexts.
Grit is virtuous when you're on a worthwhile path that's genuinely hard. Strategic exit is virtuous when conditions have changed, when new information reveals the path isn't worth it, when persistence is just ego protection dressed as discipline.
The skill isn't choosing one virtue over the other. It's knowing which context you're in.
The Discrimination Protocol
When you're unsure whether to persist or exit, these three questions can separate signal from noise:
Strategic Exit Assessment
- Has the context changed? Are the market conditions, competitive landscape, cost structure, or strategic priorities different than when you committed? If yes, your original decision may no longer apply. Circumstances changed; you're allowed to change with them.
- Am I relying on slogans or evidence? "We don't give up" is a slogan. "User engagement has declined 40% over six months despite three major iterations" is evidence. Which one is driving your decision?
- If the entire board was saying "it's time to kill this," would I listen? If the answer is no, ask why. Is it because you have information they don't? Or because exiting threatens something about how you see yourself as a leader?
What Comes Next
Recognising that persistence isn't automatically strategic is the first step. But knowing you should exit and actually doing it are different problems. There's a protocol for this: setting kill criteria before you're invested. It's what elite mountaineers and disciplined operators both use, and we'll build the full framework in the final piece of this series.
But first, we need to understand why strategic exits feel like failures even when they're clearly the right call. In the next piece, we'll examine how operators have been conditioned to keep score in ways that make rational exit feel like visible defeat.
The Strategic Exit Series
Decision Architecture for Operators
This is Part 1 of a series on strategic decision-making under uncertainty.
Next: Rigged Scorecards →This content is educational and does not constitute business, financial, or medical advice.