The five stages of grief a failed project

You may be familiar with the five stages of grief. In some circles, it is referred to as the Kübler-Ross model. At the core of the model are the five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

This model was originally created by observing terminally ill patients and their families but has expanded to include any form of loss. In this article, I am going to attempt to make a case for applying this model to a failed project. Failure can take on many forms. A project may have failed to meet the expectations of the team or even just an individual. The grief of failure, especially when repeated, can lower morale and suck the passion out of your team. Before you end up with a team full of zombies who have given up on success, learn to spot the signs of project grief and find a way to reignite the passion in your team.

Let us cut to a hypothetical future: You have recently completed a big project. For the sake of my argument, I will refer to a software launch. Like a new parent, you are full of hope and anxiety as you release your new app to your users. The first few weeks go by, and things are not going well. There are bugs. Features you thought you were promised are still on the roadmap or non-existent. Your users are complaining, leaving bad reviews, ripping you in social media, and leaving for your competitors. At that point, the first stage begins.

Denial

What went wrong? It can’t be anything we did. Maybe our users are just stupid. It must be the dev team. I thought they said they could make everything happen. I’m sure we scoped this out to include all those features. It’s not my fault, it must be marketing, or customer support, or the CEO, or….

At this point, reality crashes down and your honeymoon phase is over. You may have had a few unrealistic expectations about your product, and now that dream of success is dying. Maybe you don’t recognize it yet, but you surely want to think you can just hang on and wait for things to fix themselves.

Anger

Yelling at the project manager. Writing nasty emails to the development team. Getting the legal team to comb through vendor contracts for liabilities and loopholes. Fighting between departments and co-workers. Who is at fault? Someone is going to pay...

At the second stage, managers are pointing fingers and spending more time finding blame than looking for solutions. During this time, your users are still unhappy, your team is unhappy, and still nothing is happening.

Bargaining

OK, let’s stop fighting about this and figure out how we can stop the bleeding. I know, let’s to a marketing campaign and some social media to try to ensure users that the product isn’t flawed, it’s just “in beta.”

When applied to a relationship ending, this stage is where the one partner tries to convince the other that they will reform and walk the right path for one more chance. In corporate terms, that soon-to-be-ex is your customer base, and you just feel the need to beg them to stay. Depending on how invested they were, you may not have a chance. If you are still trudging through the bargaining stage, it may be too late.

Depression

We failed. There is nothing we can do. Our product is sub-par and that is just the reality of business. At least we have a few customers left.

I have known a few people at different companies who are living in this stage. Work sucks. The product sucks. Our service sucks. Whatever. Employees still come in every day and punch the clock, making no effort to improve because the motivation is gone. They complain a lot. The passion is gone.

Acceptance

You may think that there is acceptance at the depression stage. It just is what it is, we just have to live with it. No, you don’t. That’s the depression talking. At the acceptance stage, you still see clearly that there are flaws, but you see those flaws as opportunities and challenges. You can stop reacting with a negative mind and start reacting with a positive one.

Once you have reached this stage, you may be able to look back and feel a tinge of enlightenment. I did. I have been through this process a few too many times, usually bouncing between anger and depression. There was nothing I could do. I just wanted to complain. It is not productive or healthy to live in that space. Recognizing the patterns in yourself and others in your team is the first step to breaking the cycle.

How do you break that cycle?

Learn from your failure

You will fail if you don’t expect challenges. Learn from your mistakes. Make them often. Iterate faster. Be positive. Familiarize yourself with the Human Centered Design process. Learn more about User Experience (UX) and Service Experience Design (SXD). Teach and preach those to your team. Get everyone to see the big picture. Gravitate towards passionate people and learn how to engage them. Test your prototypes out on real people, not just the stakeholders. Listen to your customers.

Conclusion

Learn to recognize the stages of grief in yourself and your team. Life is too short to be angry, depressed, or complacent about your work. Accept things for what they are, come up with some ideas to improve them, and go try something.