After irreversible commitments, schedule external reviews…
After making irreversible commitments, schedule reviews with someone uninvolved in the original decision and define success/failure criteria in advance, because escalation of commitment will corrupt your post-decision assessment.
When This Fires
- After making any one-way door decision (Classify every decision as one-way or two-way door before…) — schedule the review as part of the decision process
- After major investments, irreversible organizational changes, or long-term commitments
- When you notice yourself rationalizing disappointing results from a major commitment
- When evaluating others' irreversible commitments and wondering if sunk cost is operating
Common Failure Mode
Self-reviewing your own irreversible commitments: "I'll check in six months and see how it's going." Six months later, you've invested six more months of effort and emotional attachment. Your assessment is now contaminated by twelve months of commitment, and your brain will find reasons to continue. An external reviewer, looking at the same data without the commitment history, would see clearly whether the results justify continuation.
The Protocol
(1) At the moment of an irreversible commitment, immediately schedule a formal review at a defined milestone (date, spend threshold, or phase completion). (2) Define success and failure criteria in writing now, before outcomes are known: "This investment succeeds if [metric] reaches [threshold] by [date]. It fails if [metric] is below [threshold]." (3) Assign an external reviewer: someone not involved in the decision, with no stake in its success, who can evaluate against the pre-defined criteria. (4) At review time, the external reviewer assesses against the original criteria only. No moving goalposts. No "well, we also gained..." outside the criteria. (5) If criteria aren't met → the bias-free assessment is "this isn't working." Act on that assessment rather than on the rationalization your ego will produce.