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WORKBOOK — THE CORPORATE EXECUTIVE

Chapter I.08 · When It Stalls

For the person with a P&L, a signature limit, a board, and a portfolio of initiatives of which some fraction is currently not moving. This workbook uses the language of the firm without apology, because the firm's own numbers already support most of what follows — the carrying cost of a paused programme is already being paid, and it has simply never been booked anywhere a director could see it.

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THE PREMISE, STATED COMMERCIALLY

You are being asked to do one thing: stop treating a pause as a zero-cost state, and start treating a stall as a measurement you have already paid for.

Both halves are financial. The first is a spending disclosure — a paused programme decays at roughly 20 percent of its build cost per year while foregoing its return, which on a modest pilot is a five-figure monthly run rate that appears in no report. The second is an asset valuation — the survivor ratio is a reading of institutionalisation that no running programme can produce, and it is worth, in restart-window terms, the difference between a three-year option and an eight-year one.

Neither requires a new belief about anything. Both require a clause, a register and a one-page arithmetic that your finance function will recognise on sight.

And there is a third reason to do this, which is the reason it will actually get approved: you almost certainly have a portfolio of stalled initiatives right now, and nobody can tell you how much they are worth or which of them to restart. That is a live governance gap with a quantified answer, and it is what this ninety days produces.

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PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Days 1–30: find the stalls and read them

Exercise 1.1 — The dormant portfolio sweep (one week, with your PMO or controller)

Do not commission a review. Pull four lists and merge them.

1. Approved but not drawn. Every capital or project authorisation approved in the last three years against which less than half the budget has been drawn and against which nothing has been drawn in two quarters. Finance can produce this in a morning.

2. Owner departed. Every initiative whose named sponsor or programme lead has changed role since approval. HR and the project register together give you this. Chapter I.08's sponsor hazard — median CFO and CEO tenure reported around five years — means roughly a third of any three-year-old portfolio is in this category, which is usually a surprise to the person reading the list.

3. Reporting gone quiet. Every initiative that stopped appearing in a standing pack without a close having been written. This is the most diagnostic of the four and the one nobody keeps.

4. Still in the plan. Every initiative that appears in next year's plan because it appeared in last year's, with no activity behind it. Ask your planners; they know.

Output: one page listing every stalled or dormant initiative, with its approval date, its draw, its original sponsor, and the date of its last reporting line. Most organisations of any size will find between eight and thirty. Almost none will have a number against them.

Exercise 1.2 — Take the survivor register on the largest three (two weeks)

For each of the three largest by build cost, reconstruct the activity list as it stood at the pause and walk it. Every activity gets one mark: still running, with nobody pushing it — yes or no.

Rules, and they matter:

• From the activity list, not the calendar. A steering group that still meets is not an activity that still runs. Count what is produced, not what is attended.
• Taken once. Do not put σ in a pack that recurs; it becomes a target within two cycles and is then trivially inflated by keeping defunct meetings alive.
• Taken by someone who did not own the programme. Internal audit is ideal and is usually free, and the same person will later verify the restart.

What you will find, and it is the most valuable half-day in this workbook. The surviving activities cluster. They will be the ones that were embedded in a cost line, a contract, a standard operating procedure, a system configuration, or somebody else's routine. The dead ones will be the ones carried by attendance and advocacy. That clustering is a design brief for every initiative you approve from now on, and it cost you nothing because the experiment had already been run.

Exercise 1.3 — Ask the appreciative question, out loud, in a room (one hour)

With the operating leadership:

"Name something here that stopped being pushed and kept running anyway. What was it embedded in?"

Take notes on the conditions, not the outcomes. Then the second question, which is harder and more useful:

"Which of our current reports would still arrive next month if everyone who commissioned them left tomorrow?"

That second answer is a map of what is actually institutionalised in your organisation, and most executives have never seen one.

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PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Days 31–50: put a number on each of them

Exercise 2.1 — Build the firm's own W (one day, with the controller)

The chapter's five components are a decomposition to be replaced, not adopted. Build yours.

Only the last is a measurement. Use your own figure — it is in the HR pack — and be careful to use voluntary turnover of the specific function, not the group-wide number, which is usually much lower and will flatter the model.

Exercise 2.2 — Book the carrying cost (half a day)

For each stalled initiative on the Exercise 1.1 page, compute two lines:

  annual decay     =  ( W(t−1) − W(t) )  ×  build cost to date
  annual foregone  =  the verified or best-estimated annual benefit

Add them. Divide by twelve. That is the monthly cost of the stall, and it goes on the page.

On the worked pilot from Chapter I.01 — £180,000 built, £62,000 a year of verified saving — that is about £8,000 a month, and cumulative carrying cost crosses the build cost at month twenty-four. Across a portfolio of twenty stalled initiatives, this number is very frequently the largest unbooked figure in the organisation.

The framing for the room, and it is important to get right. This is not an accusation and it must not sound like one. Some of those pauses were correct; capital constraints are real. The claim is narrower and unarguable: a pause is a spending decision, and until now it has been the only spending decision in the firm that nobody had to quantify. You are proposing to quantify it, which is the sort of proposal a finance function agrees to on principle.

Exercise 2.3 — Estimate f by counting signatures (one hour per initiative)

For each candidate restart, take the original approval path and count:

• S — total signatures required.
• S_new — how many of those roles now hold a different person.
• S_record — how many of those people have this stall in their file.

Write f as a judgement, with the count beside it. A useful working rule: f rises steeply with S_record and only moderately with S_new — a new person has no position, whereas a person who watched it stop has one. Three signatures with the stall on the record is a high-f room, and a high-f room calls for a small scope, not a louder argument.

Exercise 2.4 — Run the gate on all three (one hour)

        restart while    W(t)  >  1 + f  −  1/(1 − σ)

Produce one line per initiative: σ, W, f, verdict, and — where the verdict is restart — the scope, which is the survivor set plus the smallest rebuild that makes it whole. Never the original scope.

Expect at least one of the three to fail the gate. That is the workbook doing its job; see Part Four.

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PART THREE — DESIGN

Days 51–75: the clause, the register, the block

Exercise 3.1 — Amend the facility template (one afternoon, with legal and treasury)

Add a dormancy clause to the standard internal facility document. Six terms.

Two of these do the work and should not be traded away. Repayment pausing rather than accelerating, because a facility that accelerates on dormancy will never be allowed to go dormant and the programme will be killed instead. And pre-agreed restart terms, because those remove the signatures that generate f in the first place — the restart clause is worth more than the reserve, and it costs nothing at all.

Exercise 3.2 — Add the dormant block to the standing pack (one cycle)

Four figures per line. Date it went dormant · last σ · W today · the year W crosses f. Nothing else. No commentary, no RAG status, no narrative.

This is the highest-leverage governance change in the chapter and it takes one conversation with whoever owns the pack. Chapter I.01's rule applies exactly: anything reviewed monthly persists, anything reviewed by exception does not. A dormant initiative in a standing block is periodically seen by someone whose eye stops on it. A dormant initiative in a folder is gone.

Exercise 3.3 — Fund the reserve (one signature)

On the worked pilot the reserve is around £7,500 a year against a £180,000 build, and it preserves about £33,600 of warm-start value over three years — a 1.5× return on the reserve itself.

But the reserve's real argument is the balance sheet, and this is the conversation to have with your auditors early. Where the programme capitalised an asset, dormancy raises an impairment question at the next reporting date. An unbroken measurement series lets you show the cash-generating unit's performance through the dormancy rather than assert it. A £7,500 annual reserve that supplies audit evidence against a write-down is not an insurance product. It is the cheapest evidence available, and the discussion it belongs in — service potential and useful economic life — is one your auditors have with you every year anyway.

Exercise 3.4 — Establish the closing rite (one page of policy)

Every ended initiative gets a written close: what it cost, what it returned while it ran, its final σ, and one paragraph on which layer proved load-bearing. Published internally, not filed.

This is the component people leave out and it is the one that makes the other three honest. Dormancy is only a real status where ending is also a real status. Where nothing can be ended, everything is dormant, the register fills with fiction, and inside two years nobody reads the block.

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PART FOUR — THE BOARD PAPER

Days 76–90

One page. This structure.

1. The disclosure. "We currently hold N dormant initiatives with a combined build cost of £X. The carrying cost of holding them still — decay of built value plus foregone verified benefit — is £Y a month, which has not previously been reported. Nothing here is a new cost. It is an existing cost, now measured."

2. The reading. "We took a survivor register on the three largest. The activities that survived without sponsorship were, in every case, those embedded in a cost line, a contract, a system configuration or a standard procedure. Those carried by meetings and advocacy did not survive. This is a design criterion we can apply to every initiative we approve from here."

3. The decisions. One line per initiative: σ, W, f, verdict, scope. Restart two at survivor scope; end one in writing, with its close attached.

4. The change requested. A dormancy clause in the standard facility template; a four-figure dormant block in the standing pack; a reserve inside each facility; and a closing rite. "Total incremental cost: the reserve, at approximately 4 percent of build cost per year, held inside committed structures."

5. The number that decides it.

                                    1
        W(t)   >   1 + f   −   ─────────
                                 1 − σ

What to expect in the room, and how to handle it.

"Is this not just a way of keeping dead projects alive?" It is the opposite, and say so with the arithmetic: the inequality can return no, and this paper is recommending that one initiative be ended on exactly that basis, with a written close. A method that cannot return no is not measuring anything.

"Why not simply be more disciplined about not stalling?" Sponsor tenure is around five years and voluntary turnover is what it is. A portfolio of three-year initiatives will always have a stalled fraction; the governance question is whether that fraction is measured or invisible.

"What does the reserve actually buy?" Audit evidence against impairment, at roughly 4 percent of build cost a year. Lead with that, not with the 1.5×.

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WHERE THE FIRM'S OWN NUMBERS ALREADY SUPPORT THIS

Four of them, and every one is already in your systems.

1. Voluntary turnover is in the HR pack and it is the only decay rate in the model you do not have to assume.
2. Undrawn authorisations are in the capital register, and the gap between approved and drawn is the size of the dormant portfolio, already computed for a different purpose.
3. Sponsor change is in the org history; the fraction of approvals whose sponsor has moved is a five-minute query and is usually around a third at three years.
4. The verified benefit of each stalled pilot is in its own original case, which was approved on it. You do not have to re-forecast anything to compute the foregone half of the carrying cost. The number was already blessed; you are simply reading it in the other direction.

That last point is the whole commercial argument of this workbook. You are not asking the organisation to believe anything new. You are asking it to read a number it has already approved, in the direction it has never been read.