It's one of the hardest decisions a board can face: are disappointing results a temporary setback to push through, or a sign that the strategy itself is wrong? The answer is rarely obvious in the moment. It only becomes obvious afterwards.

Sunk cost is the quiet opponent

The more an organisation has invested in a strategy — time, capital, reputation, personal identity tied to the decision — the harder it becomes to change course. That isn't irrationality. It's a very human and very common bias that hits experienced boards just as hard as inexperienced ones. The further you've travelled down a path, the more expensive turning back feels — even when the real cost of continuing is higher.

The signals rarely arrive as one clear moment

That's why they're hard to spot in time. The early signals are rarely a single bad quarter. They're a pattern: results that consistently fall short of expectations without a clear, temporary explanation. Key employees who start leaving the organisation. Customers who become steadily harder to retain, without one specific cause you can point to. Management's own explanations that start requiring increasing creativity to hold together.

None of these signals prove anything on their own. Together, they form a pattern a board has a duty to take seriously.

The organisational courage it takes

Admitting a strategy needs to change isn't just an analytical exercise. It's a politically and personally difficult decision — especially when the strategy was adopted by the same people who now need to change it. It requires a climate in the boardroom where it's safe to say "I think we're wrong," without that being read as an attack on whoever set the original course.

When I returned to Conecto — and later, when I joined Zentura — that was exactly the decision that had to be made: that direction, leadership and pace had stalled, and that it required a real change of course, not another attempt to make the existing plan work. Neither decision was comfortable. Both were necessary.

A question worth asking yourself regularly

If we were starting over today, knowing what we now know — would we choose the same strategy? If the answer is consistently no, it isn't a question of holding on a little longer. It's a question of acting while there's still time to.

— David Hald