Coordinate and act
The Turnaround Time
Set the stop-or-continue rule in advance, while clear-headed, so a failing effort ends by rule rather than by argument.
Borrowed from Mountaineering, where climbers set a fixed time to turn back before a summit push. Read the original source.
Changes a rule or role · Minutes to start · Anyone on the team can start it
Try this first
Agree one thing before the push. The condition or time at which we stop, whatever it feels like then.
Use it when
A struggling AI initiative is being kept alive by "we've invested too much to stop.".
Skip it when
It suits high-commitment efforts where the pull to over-continue is real. Routine work does not need it, and the rule is a considered line rather than an excuse to quit at the first difficulty.
How to introduce it
Before a big push, set the stop criteria while everyone is clear-headed. A time, a threshold, a condition at which the team stops if it has not succeeded, however close it feels. Climbers fix a turnaround time in advance precisely to take the call away from the exhausted, goal-fixated brain that will be making it later.
How to show up
Set the criteria before the effort starts and make them specific. Then hold the team to them when the moment arrives and everyone wants to argue. Honoring the pre-commitment rather than reopening it is the discipline.
How long it takes
A few minutes to set the stop criteria before the effort begins.
What makes it hard
The hardest moment is the stop condition arriving while the goal looks close, which is exactly when the rule earns its keep. People will point at everything already invested. Overruling that is the whole purpose.
What it looks like when it's working
A struggling effort stops on the rule without a painful fight, and sunk cost stops keeping failures alive. Efforts running well past sensible stopping points means the rule is not holding.
How long until it sticks
A couple of times honoring the rule before the team trusts it and stops cleanly.
How you know it stuck
The team sets stop criteria before big efforts and honors them.
The idea behind it
Deep in an effort the pull to continue overwhelms judgment. Setting the rule in the calm hands the decision to reason rather than to what you have already spent.
Where it comes from
Mountaineering's turnaround rule. The rule exists to take the call away from the oxygen-starved brain near the top. Set the stop criteria for an AI initiative while clear-headed and sunk cost cannot keep it alive. Climbers fix a time before the summit push. If they have not reached the top by then they turn back, however close they are.
Why it matters for senior teams
It shapes direction and consequential decisions
Also fits: Failures get buried or blamed