Two questions always come up in front of a project. What does it bring in. What does it cost.
A third one rarely does. What will this stop us from doing later?
Yet it is the only one whose answer cannot be recovered from.
Where the irreversible sits
Rarely in the technology. A tool gets replaced, software gets uninstalled, a supplier gets changed, painful as that may be.
The irreversible sits elsewhere, and almost always in the same three places.
The data you hand over. Once a third party has processed your data for three years, it knows your business better than most of your managers. You can terminate the contract. You cannot withdraw what it has understood about you.
The skills you stop maintaining. Outsourcing a function is a reversible decision on paper. Two years later, the people who knew how to do it have gone, and rebuilding the team costs three times what keeping it would have. That is no longer a contract, it is a dependency.
The commitments you make on other people's behalf. A promise made to clients, an architecture imposed on partners, a standard your sector adopted on your recommendation. You can change your mind. They have already built on it.
What I suggest doing before signing
Take the project and ask the question out loud, in committee: if in eighteen months we wanted to reverse this, what would it take, how long, how much, and what would be permanently lost?
The answer usually fits in two lines. Write them down anyway.
If nobody can answer, the project is not badly prepared for that. Its real risk has simply never been identified.
Why I call this responsible innovation
This is not about innovating less, or more slowly. An organisation that makes no irreversible commitment builds nothing.
Responsible here means that the exit price is known at the moment of entry, and that it has been accepted by the people who will have to pay it, not only by the people who sign.
The difference between a bet and a recklessness often comes down to that one line, written at the right moment.
On the last project approved in your organisation, did anyone ask? And if so, is the answer written down anywhere?
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