The Default Renewal
A project gets brought in for three months. Eight months later, nobody remembers what done was supposed to look like, and the whole thing has just quietly become part of how the place runs.
Nobody actually decides this. There is no meeting where someone raises a hand and says let us keep this going indefinitely. Ending something on schedule means somebody has to stand up and say out loud that the original scope is finished, and that is an uncomfortable thing to say when the person or the tool has genuinely been useful. So most of the time nobody says it, and the arrangement keeps running because stopping it would require somebody to be the one who called it, and nobody wants to be that person.
What actually gets lost is the chance to ask whether this is still the right use of capacity. An open ended arrangement never forces that question, because there is no date on the calendar where it naturally comes up, so for years sometimes it just does not get asked. Everyone is busy, the arrangement is not causing an obvious problem, and asking would mean opening something up that has been quietly settled for a long time.
The fix is not complicated, but it is uncommon. Define what done looks like before the work starts, as the actual shape of it, not as a formality nobody looks at again. If continuing past that point turns out to be the right call, make that its own decision, with its own scope, made by somebody who has to say yes to it on purpose. This applies to consultants and vendors, and it applies just as much to internal roles, tools, and programs that were built for a season and never got asked whether the season was still going.
Decide up front what done looks like, and treat continuing past that point as its own decision. Most places never do either one, which is how so many of them end up running arrangements nobody remembers choosing to keep.
Erin Peshoff is the Founder of Vivid Operational Advisors. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivid around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
