The Plug Nobody Pulls

There's a project on your roadmap right now that everyone privately knows is dead.

It's been "in progress" for a year, maybe two. The demos got quieter. The updates turned into updates about updates. If you asked any one person on the team, in private, whether it's going to work, you'd get a long pause and a careful answer. And yet it's still there — staffed, funded, eating Monday mornings. Not because anyone believes in it. Because nobody wants to be the one to pull the plug.

Before I explain why that happens — and why it quietly poisons everything around it — I want you to feel it. This is Project Atlas. It's on life support. Pull its plug.

Did you hesitate? Most people do — for a project that isn't even theirs, that doesn't exist, that costs them nothing. Now scale that half-second of reluctance up to a real project: real money spent, real reputations attached, and a real person who started it sitting in the room. That's the force keeping your zombies alive. It isn't stupidity or cowardice. It's a set of very human pulls — and they're worth naming.

Why nobody pulls the plug

Sunk cost. We've all heard of it, and we all still fall for it. The €240k Atlas already spent is gone — gone whether we stop today or limp on for another year. The only honest question is whether the next euro is better spent here or somewhere with a pulse. But our minds don't compute it that way; they compute "we can't waste what we've put in." So we waste more, to avoid admitting the first lot was wasted. Continuing is the waste. Stopping is what ends it.

It's the founder who can't pull their own plug. In 1976 the organizational psychologist Barry Staw ran the experiment that named this — "escalation of commitment." His sharpest finding: people pour the most resources into a failing course of action precisely when they feel personally responsible for it. Read that again, because the whole trap is in it: the person most able to stop a project — the one who owns it — is the one least able to, because stopping means owning the loss. The plug is right next to their hand, and their hand is the one that can't move.

Pulling the plug looks like failure — and feels like blame. Starting a project is a celebration. Stopping one is a funeral, and funerals need someone to stand up and say the words. In most organisations that person pays a price — the awkwardness, the "told you so," the quiet mark against their name. So everyone waits for someone else to do it. I wrote about that dynamic separately: the moment a decision becomes about who carries the blame instead of what's best for the company, you've left strategy and entered micropolitics. Zombies are micropolitics' favourite habitat.

And there was never a line. Almost no zombie had a stop-criterion agreed in advance. So every conversation about ending it happens with no reference point — just vibes, politics, and whoever's most tired. With no pre-agreed line, stopping always feels arbitrary and personal — so it doesn't happen.

Why this is poison for an innovation culture

Here's the part most people miss. A zombie isn't just a wasted project. It's a teacher. And it teaches the worst possible lesson.

It eats the capacity new bets need. Start with the obvious: every person-day and euro trapped in Atlas is one that can't go to something alive. Sunk cost is the enemy; opportunity cost is the point. A portfolio full of zombies isn't a busy portfolio — it's a starved one. The bets that could actually move the business are underfed because the undead are first in the queue.

But the deeper cost is what it does to starting. Watch what your team learns when nothing ever stops: starting is forever. If every project you begin becomes permanent — impossible to end without a fight — then beginning one is a terrifying, high-stakes commitment. So people stop proposing bold things. They propose safe things, small things, things they're sure won't ever need to be stopped. The inability to stop quietly becomes an inability to start. You wanted an experimental culture; you built one where nobody dares run an experiment, because experiments are supposed to end and yours never do.

And it rewards the wrong instinct. In a culture that can't pull the plug, the person who keeps a doomed project shuffling forward looks committed and loyal. The person who says "this isn't working — let's stop and put the capacity somewhere better" looks like a quitter. You are, without meaning to, rewarding persistence over honesty and punishing the most valuable sentence anyone can say in a room: "I was wrong about this."

This is why I keep saying that killing well is the other half of innovation — wait, not killing. Pulling the plug well. You cannot have a culture of starting without a culture of stopping. They aren't opposites; they're the same muscle. The teams that explore boldly are exactly the teams that end things cleanly, because they know an ending is cheap and available. Take away the ending and you take the boldness with it.

How to make stopping safe

You don't fix this by telling people to be braver. You fix it by designing a situation where pulling the plug is the easy, normal, even admirable thing to do. A few moves that work:

• Decide the line before you start. The single highest-leverage habit: name the result that would make you stop — the kill-criterion — before the project begins, while everyone's calm and nobody's ego is on the line. Then stopping isn't a judgment in the moment; it's just honouring a decision you already made. That's the entire point of The Bet.
• Separate the person from the project. The founder can't pull their own plug while stopping means personal failure. So make it not personal: whoever ends a zombie and redeploys the capacity should be treated as having done something hard and valuable — because they have. Promote the person who stopped their own pet project. Watch what that does to everyone else's courage.
• Make the ending a clean ritual, not a slow fade. Zombies rarely get a decision; they get neglected until they're embarrassing. Give endings a moment instead — a clear call, a short message that carries the cover so it doesn't fall on one person, and an honest "here's what we learned and the capacity we just freed." That's exactly what the Zombie Test is built to give you: the verdict, the freed capacity, and the words.
• Go first, out loud. If you lead, pull the plug on one of your own projects, publicly, and say why. Teams read behaviour, not posters. The fastest way to make stopping safe is for the most senior person in the room to show it isn't fatal.

The plug is the point

We celebrate starting — launches, kickoffs, the energy of a new idea. We hide stopping; we let it happen quietly, late, and to no applause. But it's exactly backwards. Anyone can start. The organisations that actually innovate are the ones that have made stopping ordinary — so that starting can be safe.

If there's a project you've been carefully not looking at while reading this: you already know. The hard part was never the decision. It was being the one to pull the plug. Make that part safe, and the zombies take care of themselves.

Got one in mind? Run it through the Zombie Test — two minutes, an honest verdict, and the capacity you'd free. Or let's talk it through.