Sinking Sunk Cost

Tom Breur

8 May 2016

Making a commitment, and then carrying hopes for its positive outcome is human nature. Unfortunately, growing too attached to “hoped for” outcomes, the initial driving force, is also one of the greatest risks. Letting go of a flawed effort, climbing back out of a rabbit hole, haven’t we all been there before?

One of the agile credos is “fail fast”, meaning one should plan risky parts of an iteration (or project) early, so you can maximize learning from your initial attempts to solve a difficult part of the problem. It also implies you want to learn something valuable, even if the effort itself didn’t work out.

Learning from failure implies you are willing to actively and deliberately sink sunk costs. A cornerstone of Agile is that learning how to build is an important, even integral part of delivering. Once you learn how to embrace the learning, letting go of “sunk costs” becomes easier, I find.

As my friend Jerry Weinberg says: “you can’t always win, but you can always learn!”