In general, none of us are as good at decision making as we like to think we are. In particular, there is one mistake that we make frequently and that’s not recognizing when it’s time to quit.
The photo below is one of my favourite sunset shots. It’s also a sharp reminder of a mistake I made that could have had serious consequences. It’s a time that I should have quit and didn’t.
It was the middle of winter and I’d headed out to one of my favourite parks to get some hiking in. I’d left later in the day then I normally would have but I had no specific plans for the hike. There are dozens of trails all over the mountain, extending about 600m in elevation from the parking lot to the top of the trail system.
I headed up the mountain and after a few hours, I was feeling great. The endorphines were flowing, the day was beautiful, and I was having so much fun. So I kept heading upwards, and by 4:00pm I’d made it to the top; 600m above where I’d left the car.
All of a sudden I realized that I’d made a serious mistake. While it was still bright outside right now, It was going to take me multiple hours to get back to the parking lot and I didn’t have multiple hours of sunlight left.
At the time I took this sunset photo, I was on my way down but still about an hour away from the car, and traveling across very icy trails. The ice itself wasn’t a problem as I had heavy spikes on my boots. What was a problem was the complete lack of light after sunset and not knowing how long my flashlight would hold out. This required me to move faster than I would have liked, across the ice.
Without trying to overstate the danger too much, coyotes, cougars, and other predators would have appreciated an injured snack, so a twisted ankle at this point would have come with some real risk.
I did get back to the car before the flashlight ran out, and now have a fabulous story to tell.
What practical things can we learn from this?
First, we humans tend to make poor decisions in general, and even poorer decisions when the endorphins are flowing. What I should have done is planned ahead and set a turnaround timer to ensure that I would have enough time to return before dark. In her book “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away”, Annie Duke gives many examples where people lost their lives because they didn’t do exactly this.
Although having significantly lower stakes, we see this all the time in business. We continue to work on a project well after we should have stopped. We start doing a practice and continue doing it long after realizing that it’s not really helping us.
If we ask why we’re doing something and the answer is “We’ve always done it this way” then we should probably consider if this is a place where we should have quit and didn’t.
I see this for retrospective actions. We decide to make a change during the retrospective and then we never revisit whether that change was positive or not. We just keep doing it. We need to make a point of explicitly stopping and reflecting on any of these changes.
Another place we frequently see this is in policies. Something bad happened once, so now we create a new policy that everyone has to abide with. We rarely revisit these policies and just keeping adding more on top of existing ones. Perhaps we should have re-evaulated those and quit the ones that are no longer relevant.
The first step to fixing any problem is to recognize that we have one. Let’s acknowledge that we’re not good at knowing when to quit, and take steps to get better at it.