6  Abrupt Closure

when the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order

• Worst case: the project does not continue and you get one shot to close it down

6.1 What People Actually Do

• Under time pressure, experts do not compare options: they recognize a situation as an instance of a familiar type and act on the first workable course of action that comes to mind (Klein 1998)
  • This is called recognition-primed decision making: the decision is primed by experience, not constructed from first principles
  • Experience that team members have handling emergencies in other domains can be misleading
  • But is also more useful than they realize
  • Asking “has anyone seen something like this before?” activates usable tacit knowledge under pressure
• Similarly, attention narrows under acute stress
  • Specifically, this impairs the ability to hold multiple competing priorities in mind simultaneously (Easterbrook 1959; Starcke and Brand 2012)
  • As a result, teams focus intensely on the most visible problem while forgetting entire categories that would be obvious under calmer circumstances
  • This is not a failure of knowledge: it is a predictable feature of how the brain responds to pressure

6.2 Convergence as a Resource

• (Dynes 1970) describes four types of groups that form in emergencies:
  • Established organizations that stick to their routines despite breakdown
  • Other organizations that extend their routines to cover the new situation
  • Ad hoc groups form specifically to respond
    • Their tasks are modeled on those of established organizations:
    • They know what to do, they just need to come together
  • Emergent groups with no prior or subsequent existence
    • They invent both their structure and their tasks in the moment with no existing template to follow
• Research shows that people converge on a crisis without being told to (Fritz and Mathewson 1957)
  • People who step forward do so because the project mattered
  • They are likely to help if given the minimum viable information
  • In software and research projects this translates into unofficial mirrors, public documentation posts, and community email threads
  • If you can support this without endangering yourself, do so

6.3 A Loose Interpretation of the Rules

• (Lipsky 1980) found that frontline workers routinely depart from formal rules when applying them mechanically would produce worse outcomes than exercising judgment
  • This is called street-level bureaucracy: the real policy of an organisation is made in the moment-to-moment decisions of frontline workers, not in headquarters
  • Waiting for formal approval that cannot be obtained is itself a decision, and usually a worse one
• When formal procedures are inapplicable because time or infrastructure is unavailable, the people present should act within their own discretion rather than waiting for authorization they cannot obtain
  • Copying data, setting up a forwarding address, or sending a brief notice are all within the discretion of the people present
• Members of marginalized groups often have more practice navigating hostile bureaucracies their tactics can be instructive

6.4 Pause…

• (Gawande 2009) found that the most common failures in surgery were not failures of skill but failures to perform steps the surgeon already knew needed to be done
  • The intervention that worked was not additional training but a checklist
  • The same principle applies directly to abrupt project closure
• First, establish exactly how much time you have and what constraints are non-negotiable
  • Organizations sometimes keep shutdown news secret to prevent morale collapse
  • This backfires: rumors and information vacuums are more destructive than bad news
  • Silence, denial, and diminishment all increase reputational and community harm
• Second, spend a few minutes writing down every category of thing that must be addressed before attempting to resolve any of them
  • Access credentials, data backups, stakeholder notifications, community communication, legal obligations
  • The list does not need to be complete or correctly ordered
  • It just needs to exist so that urgency doesn’t lead to tunnel vision
• Second, triage ruthlessly using the MoSCoW method:
  • Must do: obligations that carry legal or financial risk if unmet
  • Should do: the minimum viable record of the project’s work
  • Could do: give the community a way to find each other after you are gone
  • Won’t do: everything else, including anything that amounts to “do it properly”

6.5 …then Speak…

• (Coombs 2021) identified three communication errors that increase reputational damage:
  • Silence: stakeholders fill the vacuum with rumour
  • Denial: asserting the crisis is not serious
  • Diminishment: acknowledging it but minimising its severity
• Rapid, honest, minimal communication is best even when you do not yet know what you will do
  • A single paragraph saying “here is what we know, here is what we do not know, here is when we expect more information” is not a plan
  • But prevents the harms of silence

6.6 …then Act

• You probably don’t have time to clean up code, data, or publications
  • A README and a runnable script are a viable minimum handover for research software
• Notify funders and stakeholders with binding claims before the project goes dark
• Provide a forwarding address:
  • A working email address is better than silence
• Do not let guilt, pressure, or optimism make you promise maintenance you cannot deliver
• The first conversations after the announcement are not about logistics: the next section covers the human side

6.6.1 When You’re the One Being Hit

• Most participants in project closure are not the ones making the decision
  • The advice above is written from the project lead’s perspective
  • This section addresses the individual contributor
• If your own work is about to disappear, do the minimum viable handover yourself: push a copy somewhere public, and export your issues and notes.
  • Hand credentials to a trusted person outside the organization if it’s safe to do so
• Pause before speaking or posting publicly: have someone you trust review anything before you say or send it
• Broader individual-level advice lives in an appendix

6.7 Exercises

6.7.1 Categories Before Tasks

1. Working individually, take three minutes to write down every category of thing that would need to be addressed if your project shut down at the end of this week. Write only categories, not specific tasks.
2. Compare your list with a partner. What categories did your partner include that you missed? What did you over-specify?
3. Debrief as a group. Most lists focus heavily on one or two categories (usually code or data) while omitting others entirely (credentials, legal obligations, community communication, contributor welfare, domain names). This is not a failure of knowledge, but a predictable failure of recall under pressure.

6.7.2 Triage Under Pressure

You have just been told that your project is shutting down in 48 hours.

1. Apply MoSCoW: sort the categories from the previous exercise into must, should, could, or won’t, given a five-day deadline and one person working half-time.
2. Identify the single most important thing you can do in the first two hours.

6.7.3 Leak Response

You planned to announce your project’s shutdown next Monday with a carefully drafted message to contributors, users, and funders. On Thursday afternoon, a community member posts on social media that the project is being killed by management. You haven’t notified your team or your funder yet, but the post is gathering attention.

1. Draft the message you send to your team in the first 30 minutes. What do you tell them, and what do you ask them not to do?
2. Draft the public post you publish within the next 2 hours. How does the premature leak change the tone, timing, and content of what you had planned to say?
3. In groups, discuss which stakeholder relationships are most at risk from the leak. What can you realistically salvage, and what is likely already damaged beyond repair?

Coombs, W. Timothy. 2021. Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding. 6th ed. SAGE Publications. ISBN 9781071816646.

Dynes, Russell R. 1970. Organized Behavior in Disaster. D.C. Heath.

Easterbrook, J. A. 1959. “The Effect of Emotion on Cue Utilization and the Organization of Behavior.” Psychological Review 66 (3). https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047707.

Fritz, Charles E., and J. H. Mathewson. 1957. Convergence Behavior in Disasters: A Problem in Social Control. National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council.

Gawande, Atul. 2009. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Metropolitan Books. ISBN 9780805091748.

Klein, Gary. 1998. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262611466.

Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. Russell Sage Foundation. ISBN 9780871545268.

Starcke, Katja, and Matthias Brand. 2012. “Decision Making Under Stress: A Selective Review.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 36 (4). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.02.003.