There are 7 of us around this mahogany table, a piece of furniture so heavy and permanent it seems to mock the fleeting nature of the project it’s meant to support. The coffee is stale. No one is making eye contact.

This is the corporate séance. We aren’t here to communicate with the dead. We are here to pretend the dead are still alive. Project Nightingale’s vital signs flatlined 7 weeks ago. The charts are a mess of reds and ambers, a visual scream of failure. Yet here we are, listening to Mark talk about a ‘strategic pivot’ that sounds suspiciously like doing the same thing again but with a different font on the PowerPoint.

We blame this on politics. We blame it on a senior VP who has staked their reputation on Nightingale. We blame it on inter-departmental turf wars. And sure, those things are the kindling. But the fire, the thing that actually consumes millions of dollars and thousands of hours of human potential, is our collective, paralyzing fear of admitting a loss. We are all complicit in a massive, institutional version of the sunk cost fallacy. We’ve spent too much to stop now. It’s a ghost logic that haunts every large organization, from software companies to government agencies.

The Cascading Flaw

I once tried to explain this feeling to my friend Camille C.-P., whose job title is, I kid you not, ‘Thread Tension Calibrator’ for a technical fabrics company. She laughed. “Oh, that,” she said, “we see that every day. Just not with projects.” She explained that when weaving advanced composites, you can have a thousand threads perfectly aligned, but if one thread has the wrong tension-even for a few centimeters-it creates a cascading flaw. You can’t fix it by tightening the others. You can’t ‘re-baseline’ the weave. The integrity of the entire bolt, hundreds of meters of it, is compromised.

Why do we? Because we’re not machines. The money already spent feels more real than the money we’re about to spend. It’s an investment of ego. Admitting Nightingale is dead means admitting to a collective mistake that cost the company $2.7 million so far. It means acknowledging that the last 17 months of work from dozens of people were, from a commercial standpoint, a waste. No one wants to be the person to sign that death certificate. So we hold a séance instead, drawing down another $777,000 in the hopes of a miracle.

The Personal Ghost

I’m not immune. I once kept a personal software project on life support for three years. After the first year, I knew its core premise was flawed. But I had invested a thousand hours. I had told my friends about it. It was part of my identity. So I kept tinkering, rewriting, ‘pivoting.’ I burned another two years and a significant amount of my own money chasing the ghost of that initial investment. Letting it go was painful, like admitting a part of my brain had been profoundly stupid. It’s an emotional hurdle, not an intellectual one. The logic is simple: the past is irrelevant to future decisions. But applying that logic feels like a betrayal of your own effort. It’s a discipline that feels unnatural, a muscle that must be trained. It’s a lesson you learn on day one using any decent stock market simulator for beginners, because in financial markets, the feedback is instant and brutal. You cut your losses or the market cuts them for you, without ceremony.

And these meetings are the worst possible way to deal with it.

The weekly status meeting, the steering committee, the ‘sync-up’-these are rituals of continuation. Their entire structure is designed to answer the question, “What are we doing next week?” They are fundamentally incapable of asking, “Should we be doing anything at all?” To ask that question in this forum is a career-limiting act of heresy. It’s like standing up in the middle of the séance and shouting that you don’t believe in ghosts. You don’t get invited back.

The Project Funeral

This is where my thinking used to stop. I believed the solution was to get rid of the rituals, to rely on pure, cold data. Just kill the project via email and move on. Efficient, right? I was wrong. I was as wrong as trying to ‘re-baseline’ Nightingale. The problem isn’t the existence of a ritual; the problem is that we’re using the wrong one. We’re holding a séance when what we really need is a funeral.

Imagine a different kind of meeting. It’s called the ‘Project Funeral.’ It’s scheduled when a project’s key metrics have been in the red for a set period-say, 7 weeks. The team is invited. The stakeholders are there. But the goal isn’t to resuscitate. It’s to honorably discharge. The project manager doesn’t present a plan for a pivot; they present a eulogy. They talk about what was learned. They highlight the smart work done by the team, even if the strategic container for that work failed. They celebrate the initial ambition. They name the assumptions that turned out to be wrong, not as blame but as learning.

Each team lead gets three minutes. They talk about their part of the work. They thank their people. The senior VP who sponsored it stands up and formally, publicly, releases the team from their obligation. They thank them for their effort and officially declare the project concluded. The project’s budget code is closed. The servers are decommissioned. There is closure.

This isn’t about being soft. It’s about being profoundly practical. A funeral allows for grieving, and letting go of a project you’ve poured your life into requires a form of grieving. Without that closure, the project doesn’t truly die. It becomes a ghost. It haunts the hallways, its name whispered as a cautionary tale. Its team members scatter, demoralized, carrying the psychic weight of unfinished business into their next roles. By refusing to admit a small death, we guarantee a slow, creeping decay in morale and organizational courage.

The Real Cost

The real cost of the corporate séance for Project Nightingale isn’t the next $777,000 we’re about to waste. It’s the brilliant engineer who is sitting in that room, thinking about a new, better idea, but who is psychically shackled to this corpse. It’s the trust that evaporates when everyone participates in a collective lie. The séance doesn’t just fail to revive the dead; it slowly poisons the living.