Week 9 Day 3: Your Team Has Seen This Pattern Before

One of the hardest things about the start-strong-finish-weak pattern is that the leader usually does not see it. Each new initiative feels unique and important. The previous one that stalled had legitimate reasons -- market conditions changed, priorities shifted, resources were unavailable. But the team is not tracking individual projects. They are tracking the pattern. And after three or four cycles, the pattern is all they see.

A engineering director I coached asked his team for anonymous feedback and got a response that stopped him cold: 'We love your ideas, but we have learned not to invest too much in them because they have a shelf life of about six weeks.' He was shocked. He thought each initiative he launched was a genuine strategic commitment. His team saw them as serial enthusiasm. The gap between his self-perception and his team's experience was enormous. Here is how to test for this pattern in yourself. Look at the last twelve months. How many significant initiatives did you launch? How many are still active? How many reached their defined completion criteria? If the ratio of launched to completed is greater than 3:1, you have the pattern. And your team knows it. The fix is not to stop starting things -- that would suppress your genius. The fix is to build a completion mechanism into every launch. Before you announce a new initiative, define three things: the success criteria, the owner who will sustain it after the launch energy fades, and the first checkpoint where you will review progress. If you cannot name all three, the initiative is not ready to launch -- it is still an idea.

Research on organizational initiative fatigue by Abrahamson (2004) documents what he calls 'repetitive change syndrome' -- the organizational dysfunction that results from leaders who launch change initiatives faster than the organization can absorb them. Abrahamson's data shows that organizations subjected to rapid, overlapping change initiatives experience declining employee engagement, increasing cynicism, and paradoxically slower adaptation because employees learn to wait out each initiative rather than invest in it. This 'wait-and-see' behavior is a rational response to an environment where most initiatives are abandoned before completion. Staw and Ross (1987) researched the opposite problem -- escalation of commitment -- and found that leaders who do complete initiatives sometimes persist long past the point of rationality. The balance between these two failure modes (premature abandonment and irrational persistence) is what Sarasvathy (2001) calls 'effectual reasoning' in her research on expert entrepreneurs. Effectual leaders commit to initiatives with predefined 'affordable loss' thresholds: before starting, they define the maximum investment they are willing to make and the minimum progress required to justify continuation. This framework converts the emotional decision ('am I still excited?') into a data decision ('have we hit the checkpoint?').