Plan Continuation Bias, or “Get-There-Itis”

I got pretty sick this week. I was wiped out with a nasty bout of tonsillitis – high temperature, exhausted and felt awful. The doctor put me on strong antibiotics, painkillers, and told me, in no uncertain terms, to rest up and take it easy. 

What felt even worse than the illness was having to cancel a client workshop. As far as I can remember, we haven’t cancelled one in about four years. We usually manage to build in enough redundancy for someone else to deliver it, but this time, for various logistical reasons, it just wasn’t possible.

And we really wrestled with it. We spent far too long trying to find a way to make it work. Maybe I could load up on painkillers and caffeine. Maybe the 3 hour drive there, delivering the workshop, driving back and then collapsing wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe I could just power through on adrenaline. 

Looking back, I can see all the forces pulling us toward keeping the plan on track: a worry about disappointing the client; all the preparation, travel planning and childcare we’d already arranged; and, if I’m honest, the deeply normalised idea that “pushing through” is the right thing to do. All of that created a powerful feeling that we should still try to deliver.

In reality it would have been a very bad idea for me, for the client, and for other road users! Eventually, we contacted the client, postponed the session… and they were perfectly fine about rescheduling.

This fierce desire to continue with the plan, even though it no longer makes any sense, or is actually unsafe to do so, is a great example of plan continuation bias.

What Is Plan Continuation Bias?

Plan continuation bias (also known as get-there-itis in aviation, course correction bias, or “summit fever” in mountaineering) is the cognitive tendency to stick with an existing plan even when the conditions have changed and the plan no longer makes sense or isn’t safe to continue.

It’s best known in aviation, where get-there-itis means that pilots may press on with planned courses in bad weather, continue flights with marginal fuel, or persist with unstable approaches that should really demand a go-around. The same pattern is common in mountaineering, and I’ve got many experiences of this myself – I can particularly remember one occasion on Crib Goch where we reluctantly turned around after bad weather set in, but the decision itself was really hard, almost emotionally painful, because we were already well up onto the ridge.

It happens in healthcare too, where teams continue to attempt procedures when it’s time to stop or change (as in the tragic case of Elaine Bromiley), and we also see it in product or project teams, where people press on towards the original brief even though the context around them has completely changed.

It’s worth noting that plan continuation bias isn’t plain old stubbornness – it’s about how we humans make sense of the world, particularly when we’re under pressure, operating in uncertainty, and subject to social risk.

“You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”
— Kenny Rogers

Cognitive load and confirmation bias.

When we’re under high workload and time pressure, our attention naturally narrows on the task – the goal we’re trying to achieve. We may simply not have the bandwidth to process everything, and our confirmation bias means that we pay more attention to information that appears to support the plan, and discount, or don’t even see, information that suggests we should change course. So even when most of the signs point towards “turn back”, we cling to the scraps of evidence that say “it’ll be fine, keep going”.

This is one reason why we can often spot plan continuation in hindsight, and it can become something of a counterfactual, as “obviously wrong” after it’s already happened. Although to an outside observer afterwards, it seems obvious that we should have changed course, this may have been cognitively invisible to the person in the moment. 

Sunk cost fallacy

There’s a strong sunk cost element to plan continuation – when we’ve already invested time, money, effort, and reputation something, it means that stopping or changing direction feels like a failure: “We’ve put so much into this, we can’t stop now.”

But of course, that’s a fallacy, even though it feels right and noble to continue. It doesn’t make sense to keep pouring resources into something that’s no longer going to deliver value, or is actively unsafe to ourselves or others. Yet the more we have invested, and the closer we are to our goal, the more we tend to rationalise continuing.

Power, authority, and interpersonal risk

Plan continuation bias is compounded when the plan was defined by someone in power – a CEO, senior leader, major client, or powerful stakeholder. In these cases, we may well predict that challenging that goal is likely to incur interpersonal or career risk. None of us want to disappoint our boss, and challenging decisions that were made by someone with power over our employment status or career success is rarely easy. And of course, there are other risks too. We might worry that in raising concerns about the plan, we’ll be seen as a poor team player, as not being “committed enough”, or as the negative one in the group.

We humans tend to have a deep need for harmony and belonging, so continuing with the plan often feels more coherent, comfortable and socially safe than being the dissident who says, “We should stop.”

Symbolic goal fixation 

Some goals become symbolic of what overall “success” means – in mountaineering, it’s the summit, but in organisations, it might be a launch date, a target, or an OKR. This is especially true if that goal has been made public, or committed to with large posters and announcements. Sometimes organisations even use mountaineering metaphors to describe these lofty and ambitious goals. All this can mean that we drift into an all-or-nothing mindset where summit = success, and turning back = failure.

If you’ve read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air about the Everest disaster in the ’90s (Everest is the colonial name for the mountain known locally as Sagarmāthā in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet), you’ll be familiar with this story: along with other errors and misjudgements, some climbers pushed for the summit even after bad weather set in and the safe window had closed. Summit fever, along with a great deal of sunk cost (it’s expensive to climb Everest, and climbers spend months preparing) meant that climbers became fixated on this singular goal of summiting Everest at any cost. For many of them, that cost was their lives. 

But as one of my climbing instructors used to say “Getting up is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” (I don’t think he was the first to say this!)

The same goes for organisations delivering projects and products: the real failure isn’t “we didn’t ship,” but shipping something that no longer makes sense and delivers no real value. It’s much wiser to be here the following day to try something new, than to risk the business, or our lives, on a potentially already failed project.

“Hazardous attitudes”

CRM (Crew Resource Management) in aviation talks about five “hazardous attitudes” that make plan continuation bias more likely:

• Macho: “I can handle it. I’m the expert.” This is practically one of the definitions of toxic masculinity: a sense of superiority, or an anxious need to prove oneself in the face of adversity.
• Impulsivity and a bias to action: “We should do something.” We often assume that action is better than inaction, and we tend to regret waiting, or pausing, more than we do taking a step – even a misguided one. In many organisations, people are punished more for not doing something (for holding back until they can make a better informed move) than for acting too quickly, even when it would make greater sense to pause and allow more information to surface.
• Invulnerability: “It won’t happen to me.” Success can incubate failure. Just because it’s gone right in the past, doesn’t mean it will this time. Indeed, if it had gone wrong in the past, we possibly wouldn’t even be here to make this judgement.
• Resignation: “What’s the use? I can’t change this.” We may feel that once we’ve settled on a plan, we’re stuck on the railway tracks, unable to change direction. But we are not trains – we can make decisions based on new information, and change direction. And even trains have brakes.
• Anti-authority: “I’m special. The rules don’t apply to me.” In so many books and movies, the hero is the subversive renegade who breaks the rules and succeeds. But real life doesn’t always play out the way movies do. Ignoring new risks because we believe we’re the exception doesn’t actually make the risk go away. 

All of these can mean that we’re more likely to press on than to pause, turn back, or “go around”.

Organisational Examples: Projects, Products, and OKRs

In product teams this shows up all the time. We might carry on building a feature even after a competitor has released something better and captured most of the market. We may stick to an OKR even though conditions have shifted and the objective is no longer a good idea. We become so fixated on achieving the “key result” that we stop asking whether it’s still a useful or sensible result. 

If the objective is the summit and the key result is “Reach the summit camp by 3pm”, what happens when a storm rolls in at midday?

In other cases in organisations, we simply keep burning money and time on a project that clearly won’t deliver the hoped-for return. Often because the goal has been cascaded from “higher up”, and as with symbolic goal fixation, not hitting it is framed as failure. “We said we’d deliver X by date Y” becomes more important than checking “Is X still the right thing to do?” This pressure intensifies when goals are publicly announced, a tactic often intended to “motivate” teams to deliver but which frequently drives teams to chase the original commitment rather than pursue the best outcome

Without psychological safety and sound decision practices, teams will often keep climbing to the summit because that’s the OKR, even when it’s clearly unsafe or pointless.

A Plan Continuation Feedback Loop

Plan continuation bias is dangerous because it becomes a feedback loop:

• The closer we get to the goal, the harder it feels to turn back.
• The more we invest, the more we rationalise continuing.
• The more things go wrong, the more urgent it feels to “just get it done”.

Research in aviation suggests that a large proportion of decision errors, (some suggest the majority of errors) are essentially plan continuation errors: pressing on when the safer option was to stop, divert, or go around. Charles West wrote about this goal proximity dynamic in “The Barn Door Effect”: pilots who would normally deviate widely around severe convective weather while en route often continue final approaches directly beneath dangerous thunderstorms when landing, simply because they can see the runway (the “barn door”) and because aircraft ahead of them have done so successfully (social proof of the Normalisation of Risk).

This certainly isn’t unique to pilots. It’s fundamental to how humans behave in dynamic, uncertain environments.

Where Psychological Safety Fits

Psychological safety doesn’t magically remove plan continuation bias, but it can provide some counter-pressure that helps to interrupt this feedback loop. In groups with higher psychological safety, people are generally more willing to say things like “Are we still doing the right thing?”, and point out issues like a storm coming or a competitor’s similar product launch. People feel safer in pulling the Andon Cord, call to Stop Work, or suggest a go-around. 

However, in teams with lower psychological safety, plan continuation bias is structurally reinforced, because people are more likely to stay silent with those insights, perspectives or concerns. If we’re in a team with low psychological safety, we don’t want to disrupt the group harmony, offend someone in power, or risk damaging our own status or reputation. We may end up pressing ahead not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it feels less interpersonally risky than challenging the plan itself.

How to Reduce Plan Continuation Bias

Plan continuation bias is a deeply human tendency shaped by many different cognitive biases and heuristics, so we can’t eradicate it, but we can reduce its impact through some practical approaches:

1. Define exit criteria in advance. We agree in advance that if certain criteria are met, we stop, change direction, or take an opportunity to re-evaluate. For example, if a competitor releases an equivalent or potentially better product, we reconsider the business case. Or if certain safety thresholds are crossed – deteriorating weather conditions or issues with the equipment – we pause or “go around”. Pre-defining the criteria for interrupting the loop takes some of the emotional and interpersonal load off making the call in the moment.

2. Establish decision points at regular intervals. Similar to above, we can also build in regular check-in points to re-evaluate and consider “Should we still be doing this?” or simply regularly ask ourselves “Do we continue, pivot, or stop?”. If we were climbing a mountain, we may check in every 30 minutes and simply ask “Are we all still good to go?” The point is to deliberately reopen the question, not simply assume the plan is still valid.

3. Invite dissent explicitly. Sometimes called “devil’s advocate”, but I prefer the less evocative and more straightforward practice of “inviting dissent” by asking things like “What are we missing?”, “How could we see this differently?”, or even “We’re not leaving this meeting until we’ve heard five reasons why this is a bad idea.” We may even designate a small “red team” whose job is to be strategically awkward: to poke holes in the plan and look for reasons we shouldn’t continue.

4. Train people to recognise hazardous attitudes. This is deeper work, often part of CRM and similar training, to help people notice these hazardous attitudes emerging – in themselves and in others. That might include an inappropriate bias to action, a sense of invulnerability, resignation or resistance to authority. The aim isn’t to blame or single people out, but to build shared literacy and the skill to spot and respond to the attitudes that make continuation bias more likely.

5. Build diverse teams. The more diverse the team in background, expertise, perspectives, and experience, the more likely it is that people in the team will see what others have missed. Diversity, in its many facets, increases the chances that someone will notice the storm building on the horizon.

6. Finally, normalise and reward course correction. This is perhaps the biggest cultural shift, and the most impactful (but rather more difficult, organisationally). Stopping, cancelling, or changing course when it no longer makes sense to continue should be seen as success, not failure. That might look like celebrating teams who say, “This project no longer makes sense so we’re stopping it and moving onto something of higher value,” or explicitly rewarding people who highlight new risks or factors reducing the value of a project. Storytelling can be a powerful tool here too, by having open discussions about times when not continuing saved money, delivered greater value, or saved lives. Fundamentally, changing the plan should be framed as competent, expert, adaptive behaviour, not as failure.

Plan Continuation Bias

Reflecting on this piece, I’d describe plan continuation bias like this: 

Plan continuation bias is the cognitive, emotional and social tendency to stick with an established plan even when new information or changing conditions mean it no longer makes sense, is unlikely to deliver value, or increases risk to intolerable levels. It’s amplified by confirmation bias, workload and pressure, ever higher sunk costs and proximity to the goal, symbolic goal fixation, power dynamics, and the myriad interpersonal risks of challenging the plan; and it often leads individuals and teams to press on long after they should adapt or stop.

And sometimes, avoiding it is as simple (and as difficult) as admitting that you might be too poorly to drive across the country and deliver a workshop.

Further resources:

Managing Plan Continuation Bias with Mike Adolph on the Delivering Adventure Podcast

Orasanu, J., Martin, L., Davison, J. and Null, C.H., 1998, January. Errors in aviation decision making: Bad decisions or bad luck?. In Fourth Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20020063485/downloads/20020063485.pdf 

“Just a Routine Operation” Martin Bromiley.

Continuation Bias: SKYbrary Aviation Safety. https://skybrary.aero/articles/continuation-bias

West, C.A., 2009. The “Barn Door” Effect. In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology. https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/162457.pdf