Key Highlights
- They were all canceled within six months. The projects were abandoned “due to a lack of commitment from our leadership to complete them,” said Dixon, a marketing manager at PSS International Removals, a shipping and moving company for people moving to a different country.
- “The result of these failures is that our team has learned to view new initiatives as more of a performative theater rather than a serious attempt at making some type of meaningful improvement.
- So, when new initiatives were proposed, there was significantly less engagement by employees, and employees became reluctant to offer additional improvement suggestions because they felt like nothing would change.”The abandoned projects also produced measurable negative results on warehouse productivity and employee attitudes toward new initiatives, he said. It’s not uncommon for leaders to prioritize idea generation over follow-through.
- But that unintentionally normalizes incomplete work. Leadership and business consultant Nika White said the root cause is often emotional rather than operational.“Many leaders chase urgency or newness to avoid discomfort — the slow, disciplined middle of a project where challenges surface and progress feels less exciting,” White said.
- ”They may also underestimate the change management required, leaving teams to navigate shifting priorities without adequate support.” Teams can lose trust quickly in those environments, she said.“Dead initiatives send a message: ‘Don’t invest too much.
