TL;DR: Innovation projects rarely continue because everyone ignores the evidence. They continue because people can construct a plausible interpretation of the evidence that protects the existing commitment. Psychology helps explain the reasoning, but incentives, silence and weak governance turn it into an organizational pattern. When no one defines in advance what would justify scaling, require a pivot or stop the project, every result remains negotiable. Evidence becomes decision-grade only when the rules for interpreting it are set before reputations and capital depend on the answer.
Every struggling innovation project eventually becomes good at explaining why it should continue.
A missed milestone becomes a temporary resource issue. Weak customer interest becomes a positioning problem. Low willingness to pay becomes a pricing issue. A disappointing pilot is declared unrepresentative, while a new competitor is treated as proof that the opportunity must be real.
None of these explanations is necessarily false. Each may be reasonable on its own. The problem is their direction. They all lead to the same conclusion: give the project more time, more money or another chance.
I think of this as the press secretary in our heads—and, eventually, in our organizations. Its job is not to determine what caused the result. Its job is to produce an account that sounds coherent, defensible and compatible with what we already want to do.
The spokesperson is not the decision-maker
The metaphor comes from Robert Kurzban’s work on the modular mind. In Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, Kurzban argues that the mind is not a single, unified decision-maker with complete access to its own motives. It contains specialized systems whose interests and conclusions do not always align. The conscious explanation can therefore resemble a press secretary: it presents a coherent public account without necessarily having access to the processes that produced the behavior.[1]
This is best treated as a useful model rather than a precise neurological description. Its value lies in the distinction between producing a decision and explaining one. The explanation may feel like an investigation even when it is closer to representation.
Ziva Kunda’s research on motivated reasoning supports the distinction from another direction. People seeking a preferred conclusion do not usually abandon reason. They access, construct and evaluate beliefs in ways that make the preferred conclusion easier to reach, while remaining constrained by the need to produce a justification that appears reasonable.[2]
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson extend the argument to hidden motives. The reasons people publicly give for their behavior may coexist with less visible motives concerning status, signaling or self-presentation. We can sincerely believe the public account because introspection does not automatically reveal everything that shaped the decision.[3]
The press secretary therefore does not need to lie. It only needs enough ambiguity to select one plausible explanation from several.
Projects develop press secretaries too
Innovation projects reproduce the same pattern collectively.
Nobody appoints the spokesperson. It emerges through steering-committee decks, status reports, dashboards and the repeated need to explain why the expected results have not appeared. A weak signal enters the organization as evidence and leaves as a story about why the project remains promising.
This does not require manipulation. Product leaders, sponsors, finance teams and executives can all interpret the same evidence sincerely while protecting different interests. The sponsor protects the original decision. The team protects its work and identity. The executive protects a strategic narrative already communicated upward. Finance protects the credibility of earlier allocations.
The resulting story belongs to no single person, yet it has a consistent policy: continue.
This is why asking whether an explanation is true is often insufficient. Several explanations may be compatible with the available evidence. The more important question is whether the organization is testing among competing explanations or selecting the one that preserves the existing commitment.
Continuation protects more than the project
Recommending that a project stop creates an asymmetric personal risk.
If the project would later have succeeded, the person who argued against it may be remembered as the one who nearly killed the opportunity. Recommending another quarter is safer. It preserves relationships, avoids challenging the original sponsor and postpones the point at which someone must admit that the initial decision may have been wrong.
The dynamic becomes stronger when the people reviewing the project are the same people who authorized it. Barry Staw’s classic experiment on escalation of commitment found that decision-makers who felt personally responsible for an earlier choice allocated more resources to it after receiving negative feedback.[4] Continuing did not merely protect the project. It protected the meaning of the original decision.
Prospect Theory provides a complementary mechanism. Kahneman and Tversky showed that people evaluate choices relative to a reference point and may become more willing to accept risk when facing losses.[5] Applied cautiously to innovation investment, stopping can feel like realizing a loss, while continuing preserves a possibility—however uncertain—of recovering it.
The financial case for the project may be weakening at the same time as the psychological case for one more investment becomes stronger.
Organizations often call this commitment. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is self-justification with a budget line, and the two are difficult to distinguish from inside the room.
Private doubt becomes public confidence
The press secretary does not only protect individual judgment. It also solves a coordination problem.
Several people may privately doubt the project while each assumes that everyone else still supports it. Speaking first carries personal risk. Silence is safer, particularly when the sponsor has more status or the group has already communicated confidence publicly.
Morrison and Milliken describe organizational silence as a collective phenomenon in which employees withhold information about potential problems because speaking appears risky or futile.[6] Irving Janis’s work on groupthink describes a related failure: groups committed to cohesion and consensus can suppress dissent and discount contradictory evidence.[7]
The result is an organization that appears more confident than its members actually are. People update their private beliefs while the public narrative remains unchanged.
What looks like alignment may therefore be a measurement error. The meeting records the story people are willing to defend, not necessarily the judgment they privately hold.
Evidence does not speak—and it does not decide
This is why calling an organization evidence-driven tells us very little.
Evidence does not interpret itself. A lower conversion rate may indicate a weak value proposition, the wrong segment, poor execution, a flawed channel, insufficient time or a measurement problem. The data alone cannot decide among these explanations.
The important capability is not collecting evidence but allowing it to change a decision. Many organizations reward visible confidence, commitment and delivery more reliably than they reward someone for disproving an expensive assumption early.
Eric Ries built the Lean Startup around experiments that reduce uncertainty before more resources are committed, with evidence informing whether to persevere or pivot.[8] The organizational press secretary reverses that logic. Evidence stops testing the project and starts supplying material for why it should continue.
A dashboard full of green metrics may mean that the underlying assumptions are holding. It may also mean that the team has become skilled at selecting metrics that remain green.
Psychological safety helps, but it does not solve this problem alone. Amy Edmondson’s research shows that psychological safety is associated with learning behavior because people can discuss errors, ask for help and take interpersonal risks.[9] That makes difficult evidence speakable. It does not automatically make the evidence consequential.
I have sat in rooms where doubts were expressed clearly and without punishment, yet the project continued because the meeting had no mechanism for translating a concern into a capital decision. Psychological safety had done its job. Governance had not.
The governance failure happens before the pilot
The press secretary gains influence when nobody defines in advance what the evidence must change.
Ask a steering committee which result would make it stop a project and the answer often becomes vague: the numbers will be reviewed next quarter, the market needs more time or the team will know when it sees the signal.
Without a pre-committed threshold, every result remains negotiable. Continuing is the default. Stopping requires an active decision that can be challenged, delayed and reframed.
The team does not need to distort the evidence. It only needs the decision rules to remain soft enough that almost any outcome can be interpreted as encouragement.
Organizations would not accept a capital-expenditure threshold invented after the money had been spent. Yet innovation projects routinely define their stop conditions after a pilot has disappointed. At that point, the threshold is no longer an independent decision rule. It is part of the negotiation over whether the existing commitment should be protected.
The fix is not more analysis. It is better sequencing.
A threshold agreed before the pilot is different from the same threshold proposed after the result, even when the number is identical. The first was set before people knew which conclusion it would support. The second is proposed by people who already know what it will do to their project.
The board-level question
For executives and boards, the practical question is not whether the story supporting a project sounds plausible. Most continuation stories do.
Ask instead who defined the conditions under which the project would scale, pivot, stop or defer—and when those conditions were set relative to the capital already committed.
Then ask the harder counterfactual: If this initiative did not already exist, would we fund its next tranche today, knowing what we now know?
The question is not a complete decision rule. Stopping may carry costs, and an existing project may contain option value that a new proposal would not. But the counterfactual exposes how much of the current case depends on future value and how much depends on defending the past.
Evidence is not decision-grade because it is quantitative, recent or displayed on a dashboard. It becomes decision-grade when it is tied to a prior assumption, compared with an explicit threshold and allowed to change the allocation of capital.
Without that structure, the project is not being governed by evidence. The evidence is being recruited by the press secretary.
One question for you: What is one explanation you caught yourself defending after the evidence had already shifted? Reply with the situation, not the polished answer.
