You talked abut accountability and lengthy implementations that ultimately failed. So often we see the dynamic of needing to make good on our investment (of dollars, time, reputation as a decision maker, and more).

Often, leaders feel it would be career suicide to identify and kill a failing project, and the only way forward seems to be either trying harder to make the failure a success, or trying harder to ignore the warning signs or delay the day of reckoning.

“Failure is not an option” sometimes closes the door to a leader’s wish to just stop the bleeding already and kill the project.

One thing I think we can do is reconsider what failure means organizationally (and how that relates to organizational learning), thus giving leaders within a bigger, or at least clearer, box within which success can ultimately be built.