Week 9 Day 7: Assignment: Pick One Stalled Initiative and Finish It

You have at least one. An initiative that launched strong, lost momentum, and is sitting in limbo -- not officially dead, not actively progressing. Your team is aware of it, and they are waiting to see what you do. This week, you resolve it. Not with another meeting or another plan. With a decision and an action.

Here is the process. First, list every initiative you launched in the last six months. If you cannot remember them all, that is data. Second, for each one, mark its status: completed, active (with recent progress), stalled (no meaningful progress in 30+ days), or abandoned (you have mentally moved on but never formally closed it). Third, pick one stalled initiative. Apply yesterday's three-question diagnostic. If the evidence supports completing it, apply the pre-mortem launch protocol from Day 5 and restart it with a 30-day completion commitment. If the evidence supports killing it, kill it publicly. Send the message. Tell the team: 'We started X, it is not going to work because of Y, and I am formally closing it. Here is what we learned.' If it needs a pivot, redefine the scope and success criteria and relaunch with a new accountability structure. The worst option is the one most leaders choose: leaving it in limbo. A stalled initiative in limbo consumes team mental bandwidth, signals that the leader does not follow through, and occupies space that a new commitment could use. Resolution -- any resolution -- is better than continued ambiguity. This closes the execution section of Part 2. Next week we move to what I consider the most practically powerful tool in this entire course: building your Leadership Operating Manual.

Research on the 'Zeigarnik effect' demonstrates that incomplete tasks create persistent cognitive activation that interferes with subsequent task performance. Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) showed that simply making a specific plan to complete an unfinished task is sufficient to eliminate the cognitive interference -- even before the task is actually completed. This means the resolution act itself (deciding to complete, kill, or pivot) provides immediate cognitive relief regardless of which option is chosen. Research by Beshears and Gino (2015) on organizational decision-making found that leaders systematically avoid formally closing initiatives because the act of closing feels like admitting failure. This creates what they call 'zombie projects' -- initiatives that are functionally dead but never officially terminated. Their data shows that organizations with more zombie projects have lower overall completion rates on active projects, because zombie projects compete for cognitive and political resources. The formal closure protocol ('We started X, it is not working because of Y, and we are closing it') is an application of what Weick (1995) calls 'sensemaking' -- the organizational process of creating shared understanding of ambiguous situations. Public closure creates shared meaning from what was previously ambiguous, which frees the team to redirect energy. The bridge to the Operating Manual in Week 10 is structurally intentional: the Operating Manual will codify the leader's follow-through mechanisms, making the completion commitment visible and accountable.