I bet you have been involved in a project or change initiative that wasn’t working and yet instead of scraping it more time and energy was invested in trying to rescue it. Perhaps it was the CE’s pet project and so no one wanted to be the one to tell them the bad news. Perhaps  too much money had already been invested to admit that it had had been wasted or maybe some very well paid influential senior individuals jobs depend on the project continuing. This is a surprisingly common occurrence in organisation so frequently occurring that it has a name, The Dead Horse Theory.

When a horse is dead the logical thing to do is dismount instead organisations:-

• Buy a stronger whip
• Change riders
• Add more riders
• Feed the horse better hay
• Schedule daily updates to discuss why the horse isn’t moving
• Form a corporate working group to review the horse-riding strategy
• Invest in a sleek saddle  hoping it will inspire the horse to run
• When all else fails ,rename the horse something cooler like,”Strategic Unicorn”.

I have observed the Dead Horse phenomenon in action. Computer systems provide lots of examples sometimes it’s the new system that over promised but under delivers other times it’s the old system that has been ungraded, modified, and had so many modules added it resembles a Heath Robinson contraption and still doesn’t do what’s required.

In the end it takes the newly appointed head of IT to declared this particular horse dead.

Out sourcing was the big idea for Local Authorites it was an away of making budgets stretch further often resisted by service users who feared a drop in quality and resisted by employees concerned about job loses. A lot of political capital was spent on pushing through out sourcing so when it didn’t deliver the expected savings and quality suffered there was a great deal of reluctance to admit as much. But after much use of the whip and several changes of riders the horse was eventually declared dead.

A new chief executive of a large national organisation was appointed with a remit to modernise the organisation, his big idea matrix management. This involved moving from a specialist structure to a locality structure in which the regional manager was responsible for the full range of services in their region but with the national lead for one service. The Directors previously spread around regional offices were all relocated to the London office which was to replace Oxford as the organisations HQ. This involved a lot of senior managers applying for posts in the new structure and taking on responsibility for services they had no background in.

To speed up the process the organisation rented a house near the London office and required all the Directors to live there during the week whilst they sold their houses in the north and midlands and moved their families. Needless to say this was very unpopular but the CE was adamant. Management consultants were brought in to advise, additional funding was provided for  conferences and training to sell the idea. Exchange visits abroad were organised for senior managers with other organisations in European organisations that were operating a matrix management. The requirement to relocate to London was dropped but it took a new CE to declare this particular horse dead.

It’s down to the leader to declare the horse dead and this can be very hard to do which is why it is often left to the new incoming leader to say  “ we need to cut our losses” and admit that this horse is going nowhere.