Loss aversion

Every initiative carries an investment: money spent, time committed, people assigned. When the question of stopping comes up, that investment is what people feel first.

The capacity that stopping would free up is harder to feel. It is future, hypothetical, spread across work that has not happened yet. So the weight is uneven from the start. What would be lost appears larger than what could be gained.

This is not a lapse in judgement but simply how people are wired. Brown, Imai, Vieider and Camerer (2024) analysed 607 estimates across 150 studies and found that losses weigh roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains.

Against that pull, a fair comparison never gets made. The initiative keeps its place because giving it up feels like a loss, while the capacity it holds stays invisible.

The Existence Review forces both sides onto the table: it makes the invisible gain as concrete as the visible loss.