Quality Management

The Concord Fallacy:

Or when to cut your losses.

Humans as opposed to animals seem to be very reluctant to write off their previous efforts even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the project is going nowhere.

The word ‘Concorde’ comes of course from the supersonic plane which despite being a wonder of technology for the period became tied up in the politics of the UK and France.

More and more was spent on it and the more that was sunk in the project the less able where the makers or politicians to let go. Eventually a few where built at vast cost and of course have never made a profit. The tax payer was left with the bill.

Strangely enough animals seem immune to this problem. Birds are quite prepared to abandon a nest if it becomes apparent that they have built it in the wrong place even though they have spent vast effort in the enterprise.

There is a great skill in deciding when to let go and when it is worth persevering. If anything medicine is more prone to this problem than other types of enterprise. Possibly it reflects the attempts to keep people alive against all the difficulties.

Huge projects are started on with no sense of how their success is to be measured. Once rolling they develop a momentum of their own despite evidence that they are not working.

That is not to say that the motivation behind them was not correct merely that the future is by definition progressively more unpredictable as time goes on.

Thus every scheme should be considered and be able to stand up to criticism before it starts. At the same time the system of review and checking needs to be in place so that consideration of the need to abort can be made at a stage where it become apparent that the scheme will not succeed.

This is easy to say but very difficult to carry out in practice.