Adaptability means knowing when to stop

14 January 2026

Technology

Deciding to stop what you’re doing can feel like failure. In reality: it’s not.

For your business to be adaptable, stopping things is essential.

You might realise a product isn’t going to work early on - perhaps even at the prototype stage. Or after many years of dependable service, a once-successful product might have ceased to be as valuable as it was. Either way, stopping or shutting something down when it’s no longer viable is a healthy decision, and making that choice in good time is something to celebrate.

One major benefit is being able to recover the opportunity cost: When you stop spending time and energy on propping up low-value products, you free up capacity to focus on your real, strategic priorities.

But more importantly, in a world where technologies and markets move quickly, being able to learn and adapt quickly is essential to survival. This shouldn’t be limited to sandboxed teams of mavericks and people with “innovation” in their job title. To develop this test and learn organisational muscle, you need a culture where stopping things is normal.

Why stopping is hard

Our decisions are influenced by powerful forces which can make retiring a product or even stopping an experiment feel deeply uncomfortable:

The sunk cost fallacy

The illusion that something is worth continuing purely because you’ve invested so much in it is a very compelling one.

A way to counter the sunk cost fallacy is to ask: “If you didn’t own this product today, would you buy it?”. If the answer is no, then it’s time to stop.

Bad feelings about sunk costs are real and shouldn’t be ignored. It can help to remember that building and running something, whether it’s a prototype or a mature service, inevitably teaches you valuable lessons you couldn’t have learnt any other way. Whatever those lessons are, but especially when the lesson is “this isn’t going to work,” you can either act on what you’ve learnt or carry on as you were. Which is the sensible choice?

Business-as-usual

In many organisations, leaders and teams are culturally - and materially - incentivised to keep working on a product, regardless of its value.

Even when the reality is obvious - whether it’s a product outmatched by a market competitor, or a service underpinned by technical debt which has slowed progress to a snail’s pace - it is often easier to stick to the status quo.

The risk factor

Ending a piece of work often triggers uncertainty. For both teams and leaders, stopping or shutting something down can carry:

Risk of the product being seen as a failure, damaging career prospects, remuneration, or job security
Risk of damaging relationships, whether it’s customers, internal stakeholders, or colleagues
Fear of the unknown: If we don’t carry on doing the thing we’re familiar with, what happens to us?

These fears can deter people from sharing - or even interrogating - the true picture of a product’s viability.

How to develop a healthy approach to stopping

In many cases, the people closest to the work will have known for a long time that a product has ceased to add value. The lag from it being ‘common knowledge’ (if you talk to the right people) that something is doomed, to a decision to do something about it, can be huge. As can the associated costs.

But the fears which prevent that information from being surfaced and acted upon - like the forces which promote maintaining the status quo - are valid, and demand serious attention.

To build a healthy approach to stopping within your organisation, here’s what you need to do:

Commit to and align around top-level priorities

The ability to deliver strategic objectives depends on all senior leaders committing to a set of shared priorities, and demonstrating that commitment through their actions. Stopping things is no different.

When a decision to stop something in one part of the organisation impacts the ability of another to meet their goals, this naturally creates conflict. This often results in a sense of “us vs them” which cascades down to team level with damaging effects. It’s only through commitment at the executive level that these difficult decisions can be made, and made right - for instance by changing a sales target in one area so nobody is penalised for a decision which benefits the organisation overall.

Build a culture focused on learning

Rather than embarking on projects with the assumption that they will succeed, treat each one as an experiment with a hypothesis which might be supported or falsified. Success is learning as much as you can, which might not mean a viable product at the first attempt, or even the second.

This test and learn approach means abandoning false certainty and acknowledging upfront what you know and what you don’t. For each new piece of work, teams need to ask:

What problem are we solving, for whom?
What’s our hypothesis for how we might solve it?
What are the quickest, cheapest ways to test that hypothesis?

Followed by:

How will we know when we need to change direction?
How will we know when we’ve solved the problem?
How will we know when it’s time to stop?

Leaders need to support this fundamental shift in approach through their actions: by showing they are receptive to new information, and taking accountability for acting upon it. Disincentives to adopting these new leadership behaviours, at any level of the organisation, must be surfaced and challenged.

Create psychological safety

For the above to work, people need to be able to challenge the status quo, embark on experiments, and share uncomfortable truths without fear of repercussions. That demands a culture of trust and respect - not one of blame.

Bringing a service or experiment to an end should trigger a retrospective, where teams share the lessons from what went well and what could be done differently next time. Instead of asking who is responsible for the failure and what should they have done to avoid it, start by acknowledging the benefits of stopping now rather than not later, and then ask: “Could we have learnt earlier that this wasn’t working?’’ and “Could we have learnt the most important lessons with a smaller investment or less fallout?”.

Leaders must show confidence in the teams who share difficult news by listening to them, supporting them, and celebrating the people who took the courageous step to say “this isn’t working”.

The work of creating something new inevitably involves learning. The only real failure is in failing to use what you learn.

When it’s time to stop: practice openness

News of a decision to shut something down can be difficult for teams to hear, particularly if a service has existed for a long time. But continuing to work on something which doesn’t add value is also a drain on morale. If the message is delivered well, apologies aren’t necessary, but people deserve to know how the decision was taken, and why.

Leaders need a confident, well-reasoned narrative which brings teams with them: explaining transparently what information led to the decision to stop, what they have learnt, and how this experience has strengthened the organisation. They can then begin to energise people around the valuable challenges they will have the opportunity to work on instead.

The risk of not stopping

Whether it's down to the gravitational force of the status quo, the potential threat to jobs and relationships, or a fear of the unknown, shutting something down often feels profoundly risky.

But continuing to pour resources into the slow decline of products which don’t add value is bad business. It prevents you from pursuing new, potentially transformative products or services.

It may feel risky, but stopping is your only alternative.

More fundamentally, failure to develop the practice of stopping means failing to develop a critical muscle in learning and adaptability. In a fast-changing world, that’s the greatest risk of all.