When the Obstacle Is Not the Way
A while ago, I watched a small creature moving forward until something blocked its path. It tried to continue in the same direction for a short while, then moved around the obstacle and carried on.
I remember thinking how much more complicated we make this in business.
We are taught to value persistence, and for good reason. Very little gets built without it. But during my years working in R&D and innovation, I also learned that persistence has a limit. Sometimes continuing is exactly the right decision, while at other times the most responsible thing you can do is stop.
Learning When to Stop
In my corporate work, we used a Stage-Gate process to manage innovation projects. At different stages, a project would reach a gate where we had to step back and assess whether it still made sense to continue investing in it, based on what we’d learned, the commercial potential, and whether it still fit the broader strategy.
On paper, that sounds very rational. In reality, killing a project could be one of the hardest decisions to make. By the time a project reached a gate, people might have spent months or years on it, with real costs and a team that believed in what they were creating. The more you’d invested, the harder it became to say the best decision was not to invest any more.
The money and time already spent cannot be the reason to continue spending more. What mattered was whether, based on what we knew now, the project still deserved the next investment. That sounds obvious when you’re not emotionally involved. It’s much less obvious when it’s your project.
When Previous Investment Starts Making the Decision for Us
I see this in business all the time. We continue a partnership because we’ve already invested so much time. We keep a product alive because so much money went into it. None of these are necessarily bad decisions. The problem starts when past investment becomes the main argument for continuing.
One question behind Stage-Gate was simple: knowing what we know today, is this still where we’d choose to invest our next euro and our next month of work? It changes the perspective, moving the decision away from what’s already happened and towards what makes sense now.
Persistence Is Valuable, but Not Always Strategic
Business culture admires people who keep going. Those stories matter, but they can give the impression that stopping means failing. My experience taught me almost the opposite: stopping a project at the right time could be a sign the process was working, because resources are limited. Every euro or hour spent rescuing one idea is unavailable for another opportunity.
The purpose was never to keep every project alive, but to find the ones with the greatest chance of creating value. You can be deeply committed to innovation without being committed to every individual project, just as a founder can stay committed to the company while letting one product go.
Why These Decisions Become Personal
Projects rarely remain just projects. People become attached to them. Deciding to stop can feel like saying all that work was wasted. Usually, it wasn’t. A project can end without being worthless; you may have learned something important about the market or why an assumption was wrong.
The important part is separating what you learned from the need to keep something alive just to justify what you already invested. Sometimes we continue because changing direction would force us to admit something we believed in isn’t working. From the outside, that can look identical to genuine persistence.
Trying Harder Can Delay the Decision
If you’re good at solving problems, you can keep an underperforming system going for a long time by compensating personally. In the short term, this looks like success. But the ability to compensate can delay the more important decision. Sometimes exhaustion isn’t from having too much to do; it comes from using personal effort to keep something running that should have been redesigned or stopped. Working harder can actually make the problem harder to see.
What Stage-Gate Taught Me About Leadership
Stage-Gate taught me to create moments where you deliberately stop moving and look again. Instead of asking only what to do next, it asks whether doing the next thing is still the right decision. Most businesses don’t naturally create these moments; we stay busy, and as long as something is moving, we keep it moving.
Leaders need their own version of Stage-Gate: a point to look at a project, partnership, or their own role and ask whether they’d still choose it today. Sometimes the answer is yes, and persistence is exactly right. Sometimes it’s no, and continuing simply because we’ve come this far isn’t persistence. It’s letting yesterday’s decision make today’s decision for us.
Knowing When to Go Around
That small creature was still heading the same general direction. It just had no reason to insist the obstacle in front of it had to be conquered.
Strategic leadership isn’t only about the discipline to continue. It also requires enough distance to recognise when a route no longer deserves the resources going into it. Some obstacles genuinely need to be worked through; the skill lies in knowing the difference.
Is the obstacle telling us to keep working the problem, or giving us information that should change how we move forward?
Leadership excellence requires both the courage to persist and the courage to stop. Perhaps the harder part is accepting that, depending on the situation, either one can be right.
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Leadership excellence requires both the courage to persist and the courage to stop. Perhaps the harder part is accepting that, depending on the situation, either one can be the right decision.