Projects rarely stall because someone decided to stop them; momentum tends to fade slowly, mainly due to delays, dependencies, unanswered questions, or waiting.
I got an early taste of this when I led one of the largest application lifecycle projects in our portfolio. It was extremely complex, with limited resources, no clear ownership, and many dependent parties. Progress was slow. I discussed the project goals, timeline, and risks with some senior colleagues, and the conclusion was sobering: we no longer believed we could meet the deadline. There were technical uncertainties, and there were numerous dependencies that we could not control. For these reasons, the project was slowly losing momentum.
I brought these concerns up with my manager, who encouraged me to continue.
So I kept going, focusing on what could still move despite the uncertainty.
Every day, I looked over the project, asking myself where we were, what still had to be done, what we were waiting for, and what I could do. One question was the most useful of all:
What can still move today?
When I realized that one item had been blocked, I checked to see what else could still go ahead in parallel, for example, another dependency, a decision, or the next meeting.
From Responsibility to Outcome
A common scenario was that we couldn’t move forward because we were waiting for the supplier. Although this might have been true from an operational point of view, the business team did not experience the project through its separate tasks and dependencies. They experienced the result.
That changed the question I was asking myself; rather than simply asking, “Who is responsible for doing this?”, I began to ask:
What can we still do to move the project forward?
Sometimes that meant escalating, following up, using internal resources, discussing what to do next, or moving on to the next part of the project while one dependency was still blocked.
Was It Actually Only Persistence?
For a long time, I thought of this refusal to let things stall as persistence. Then I started to wonder whether there is something deeper to it. I discovered the paper “Making Things Happen: A Model of Proactive Motivation” by Sharon Parker, Uta Bindl, and Karoline Strauss.
The authors define proactivity as a goal-directed process: deciding on the future you want to bring about, then acting to make it happen. What struck me was the gap between knowing the future you want and continuing to act towards it, even when it seems out of reach. In my case, the goal was clear, but making progress towards it had been hard.
This made me rethink the word persistence. Perhaps some of it should be viewed as proactivity, not only reacting to situations, but acting to change them in order to reach a desired result.
While I was looking into this more closely, I also came across Karl E. Weick’s paper, Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems. His idea of tackling large, complex problems by breaking them into smaller, achievable steps closely matched what I’d seen myself. Most often, I made progress by pushing one task, one decision, or one dependency forward at a time. Individually, each step seemed insignificant. Combined, they built real momentum.
Protecting Momentum
We finally finished the project, even though it was later than originally planned. We didn’t get there by one huge push, but by countless small actions.
Of course, some constraints are real, and there may be moments to wait or stop. What strikes me is how readily projects end up waiting, even when useful actions could still be taken.
I realized that moving a project forward takes more than making a plan and assigning responsibilities. I also had to pay close attention to what was hindering progress and take the next step to help things move again.
Maybe that’s part of getting things done: not having all the answers, not taking on everyone else’s work, not pushing for the sake of pushing, but focusing on the outcome and building enough momentum to reach the next decision, action, or solution.
What can still move today?
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