Stop Defending Yesterday: How the CHANGE Framework Turns Sunk Costs Into Smarter Business Decisions
Every bad business situation contains two decisions.
The first decision is the one that got you there: launching the service, making the hire, signing the partnership, buying the software, or investing in the marketing channel.
The second decision is whether to keep going.
That second decision is where many professionals lose even more time, money, energy, and confidence. They tell themselves they are being persistent. They are honoring the original plan. They are giving it one more quarter.
Sometimes that is wise. Often, it is the sunk cost fallacy wearing a professional outfit.
A sunk cost is a resource already spent and impossible to recover. It may be money, time, reputation, effort, or emotional energy. Rationally, the past should not determine what you do next. The question is not, “How much have we invested?” It is:
“Given what we know today, is continuing still the best use of our future resources?”
That question is central to the principles in Brad Young’s #1 bestselling Business Decision Making and his flagship book, CHANGE: Simple Concepts That Will CHANGE Your Life Forever. Growth is not only about making better choices at the beginning. It is also about having the courage to update your choices when reality gives you new information.
The decision hiding inside the decision
Escalation of commitment happens when we continue investing in a choice because we have already invested so much.
A service line never gained traction, but you keep funding it because the team spent six months building it.
A hire is clearly not working, but you keep extending the performance plan because you personally recruited the person.
A partnership creates more friction than value, but you avoid ending it because you announced the relationship publicly.
A marketing channel produces weak leads, but you keep increasing the budget because the original campaign was your idea.
A subscription tool sits unused, but you keep paying for it because switching feels like admitting the purchase was a mistake.
In each case, there are two separate questions:
Was the original decision reasonable based on the information available then?
Is continuing reasonable based on the information available now?
The first question belongs to yesterday. The second belongs to today.
Confusing them is expensive.
Why smart professionals defend yesterday
People rarely cling to failing choices because they cannot understand the numbers. More often, they are protecting something beneath the numbers.
Identity
Your project can become part of your identity. The service line is not merely a service line; it is proof that you are innovative. The hire is not merely an employee; it is evidence of your leadership. The partnership is not merely a contract; it represents your judgment.
When the choice struggles, it can feel as if you are struggling.
Ego
Stopping may require admitting that your forecast was wrong. That can feel especially painful for experienced professionals who are expected to be decisive and confident.
But confidence is not the same as pretending to be infallible. Strong leaders can say, “The decision made sense then. The evidence has changed. Our decision must change too.”
Public commitment
A decision announced in a meeting, presentation, press release, or company-wide email becomes socially harder to reverse. People want to appear consistent, even when consistency is no longer serving the goal.
Fear of admitting loss
Continuing allows you to delay the emotional experience of losing. You can call it “staying the course,” “giving it more time,” or “protecting the investment.”
But the loss already happened. Continuing does not recover the past. It only adds new resources to the risk.
A February 2026 study in Judgment and Decision Making explains another reason this trap is so powerful: managers can unconsciously interpret new information as more supportive of the option they already favor. That process, called information distortion, can increase confidence without a corresponding increase in evidence. Read the study by Boyle and Nye.
The second-decision rule
Here is a simple rule that can change how you manage almost anything:
Every day you continue is a brand-new decision made with today’s information.
You are not “just continuing.” You are actively choosing to spend another day of attention, another dollar of budget, another week of team capacity, or another ounce of credibility.
That means a previous commitment never gets to make today’s decision automatically.
Ask:
If I were starting fresh today, would I choose this again?
What do I now know that I did not know at the beginning?
What future benefits are still realistic?
What future costs will continuing create?
Am I continuing because the opportunity is strong, or because stopping feels embarrassing?
The question “If I were starting fresh today, would I choose this again?” is not permission to abandon every difficult goal. Some worthwhile efforts take time. It is a way to separate future potential from past investment.
Set kill criteria before you begin
The best time to decide when to stop is before you become emotionally attached.
Before launching a project, define your kill criteria or stop rules. These are pre-agreed conditions that tell you when continuing no longer makes sense.
For a new service line, that might be:
Fewer than 10 qualified customer conversations after 90 days
No repeatable sales process after six months
Gross margin below a defined threshold
No evidence of meaningful customer demand
For a marketing channel:
Cost per qualified lead above a set limit
No measurable contribution after a specific testing period
Engagement without conversion
Performance consistently below your existing channels
For a new hire:
Specific role expectations missed across two review cycles
No measurable improvement after clearly defined coaching
Repeated behavior inconsistent with the team’s standards
For a software subscription:
Fewer than a certain number of active users
No measurable time saved
No connection to a current business goal
A stop rule is not pessimism. It is a decision you make while calm so you do not have to invent one while defensive.
It also changes the meaning of stopping. You are not changing your mind randomly. You are following the conditions you established in advance.
Use a pre-mortem before commitment
A pre-mortem asks you to imagine that the decision has failed and then work backward to identify why.
Before starting, ask:
“It is six months from now, and this initiative has failed. What happened?”
Possible answers might include:
Customers did not value the offer
The partnership created conflicting priorities
The hire lacked a critical skill
The channel attracted attention but not buyers
The tool was too difficult to adopt
The project required more internal capacity than expected
Then turn those risks into measurements, review dates, and stop rules.
This is more useful than waiting until the end of the year for an annual autopsy. A pre-mortem helps you design the learning system before the project begins.
A bad outcome does not always mean a bad decision
There is an important distinction between decision quality and outcome quality.
A good decision can produce a bad outcome. You may have used sound information, reasonable assumptions, and careful judgment, and still encounter a market shift, unexpected competitor, economic change, or plain bad luck.
A bad outcome does not automatically prove that your original decision was foolish.
But this principle must not become an excuse to continue forever.
You can say:
“The original decision was reasonable.”
“The result was disappointing.”
“The evidence has changed.”
“Continuing is now a separate decision.”
“The best next move is to stop, pivot, or redesign.”
That is not failure. That is disciplined updating.
The 2026 PNAS study on complex strategic decisions offers a related reminder: in professional chess, faster decisions were associated with higher quality after accounting for complexity and time pressure. The lesson is not that every business decision should be rushed. It is that more time, more analysis, and more effort do not automatically create better decisions, especially when the extra effort is simply second-guessing or defending a preferred answer. See the full PNAS research.
The CHANGE framework for leaving well
The CHANGE framework gives you a practical way to challenge sunk-cost thinking.
Communication
Say the hard truth out loud: “This is not working as planned.” Naming reality reduces the power of vague optimism and creates space for a better decision.
Habits
Schedule regular reviews instead of waiting for a crisis. Monthly or quarterly checkpoints prevent small problems from becoming expensive annual surprises.
Attitude
Treat a stop as information, not failure. Ending an unproductive effort protects resources and creates room for a stronger opportunity.
Network
Ask someone with no stake in the outcome to review the decision. A neutral advisor, mentor, colleague, or trusted friend may see what the original champion cannot.
Goals
Measure the initiative against the goal, not against what you already spent. The money already invested does not make an ineffective channel more valuable.
Education
Turn every closed chapter into a lesson. Document what you believed, what happened, what you missed, and what you will do differently next time.
This is also where the modern business environment adds another layer. MIT Sloan research on decision rights recommends matching authority to the ambiguity and risk of a decision. High-risk, high-ambiguity choices require strong human judgment and accountability; routine, lower-risk decisions can use more automation and delegation. The same idea applies to stopping decisions: the person who owns the project should not always be the only person allowed to decide whether it continues. Explore the MIT Sloan framework.
Your next action: hold a fresh-start review
Choose one project, subscription, partnership, channel, or commitment that has been consuming resources.
Set a 30-minute meeting, or block the time on your calendar if you are reviewing a personal decision, and answer these questions in writing:
If I were starting fresh today, would I choose this again?
What future value remains?
What future cost will continuing create?
What evidence would justify stopping?
What is the next decision date?
Who can review this without a personal stake?
Then make one of three choices: continue with a clear reason, change the approach, or stop.
Do not defend yesterday simply because it was yours. Learn from it, respect what it taught you, and make today’s decision with today’s information.
For more practical ideas on personal and professional transformation, visit Brady Young Change. You can also explore the PodCentral Publishing Network on ART19 and listen to Brad Young CHANGE 2025 on Apple Podcasts.
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