How To Overcome the ‘Sunk Cost Syndrome’
I am always amazed at how difficult it can be for individuals and organizations to avoid the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy, with dramatic consequences.
Not that I would be immune to the phenomenon – I always tend to store too much stuff thinking that I might use it sometime.
Still in my consulting assignments, with an external eye, it is with despair that I observe people persist on doomed projects just because of the effort and expense that has been involved in the past. The technology can be inadequate or obsolete, the object broken beyond obvious repair, still they persist.
Overcoming the ‘sunk cost syndrome’ clearly requires to avoid any emotional attachment with the object or the project. It thus generally requires an external independent view that was not involved. It can be someone from somewhere else in the organization, or an external party.
At any rate, every investment on an existing tool and any cleanup of storage needs to be done with the sunk cost syndrome in mind. It is often cheaper and more convenient to buy new than try to fix an old stuff. Always get an external view of someone that was not involved to get out of the ‘sunk cost syndrome’.
