This is the first in a series. A blind spot isn’t a lack of intelligence or effort. It’s a systematic error in how judgment works, one that operates below awareness, which is precisely why smart, diligent people fall into it as reliably as anyone else. You can’t fix a blind spot by resolving to be more careful, because the error happens before care gets a vote. You fix it by understanding the mechanism and building structure around it. That’s what this series is for. We start with the one that costs the most: escalation of commitment.
There is a project in your organization, or there has been, that everyone privately knows should be killed. The numbers don’t work. The original thesis has quietly fallen apart. And yet it continues, gets another quarter, another budget, another push. Not because anyone has made a fresh case that it will work. Because stopping it means admitting that the decision to start it was wrong.
That’s escalation of commitment, and it’s one of the most expensive errors in executive life. It’s the tendency to invest more in a course of action because of what you’ve already put in, rather than because of what you expect to get out. The prior investment, which should be irrelevant to the forward decision, becomes the reason to keep going. And the more you’ve committed, the harder it pulls.
The researcher Barry Staw named it in the 1970s, in a paper with the memorable title “Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy.” His interest was partly why the United States kept pouring men and resources into Vietnam long after the internal assessments had turned bleak. The pattern he described wasn’t stupidity or even ignorance of the facts. It was a specific, predictable distortion: decision-makers escalate their commitment to a failing course precisely as the evidence against it accumulates, because retreat would mean accepting that the prior commitment was a mistake. The facts were known. They lost to something stronger than facts.
It isn’t about the money. It’s about being wrong.
The usual way this gets taught is as the sunk-cost fallacy, and that framing, while correct, is too shallow to be useful, because it makes the error sound like an accounting mistake. It is not an accounting mistake. Most operators understand perfectly well, in the abstract, that past costs are sunk and shouldn’t drive future decisions. They can recite it. They still escalate, which tells you the problem isn’t that they don’t know the principle.
The real engine is self-justification, and it’s the same engine underneath the misdiagnosis piece that opened this series’ thinking. To stop is to accept that you were wrong. And for a decision you made, championed, staked your credibility on, “you were wrong” is not a neutral accounting entry. It’s a threat to the self-image. So the mind does what it reliably does under threat. It looks for reasons to keep going, finds them, and finds them genuinely persuasive, because motivated reasoning doesn’t feel like bias from the inside. It feels like a sober reassessment that happens, conveniently, to conclude what you needed it to conclude.
That reframes what’s actually being protected. When you escalate, you are not investing in the project anymore. You are paying to defer the moment you have to admit the first bet was wrong. The project is the cover story. The real expenditure is on your own consistency.
Escalation isn’t about the project. It’s the price you pay to not have been wrong.
