The Psychology Crippling Innovation Decisions Right Now
There are three psychological conditions, each with clinical terms and decades of research behind them, that are shaping how companies make technology decisions right now, and many leaders in music haven’t even heard of any of them.
That's a problem. Because if you can't name what's happening, you can't deal with it, and by the time you feel it, it's usually too late. It’s my hope that with some increased awareness and focused conversations, we can prevent history from repeating itself in our industry.
One: Escalation of Commitment
In 1976, organizational psychologist Barry Staw published a paper called "Knee Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action." It became one of the most-cited papers in the history of organizational behavior.
His finding was deceptively simple: the more personally responsible someone feels for an original decision, the harder it becomes to abandon it even as evidence mounts that they should.
Staw didn't just theorize this. He ran controlled experiments, placing subjects in the role of a corporate financial officer managing a failing investment. The results were consistent and striking. The people who had personally made the original call kept committing more resources to the failing course of action. The people who had inherited the same decision from a previous manager? They cut their losses and moved on.
Same information. Completely opposite behavior. The only variable was whether their ego was attached to the original choice.
Now apply that to your organization. Someone, maybe a VP or your Chief Product Officer, went upstairs six months ago and made a bet. They sold the big boss on a platform, or a vendor, a technical approach. They got the budget. Their reputation is on the line. Then something better comes along: new infrastructure, a purpose-built solution, a different architectural direction, or a new capability.
To take the new path, they'd have to go back upstairs and say: "Hey, that thing I told you? We should rethink it."
Staw's research tells us exactly what happens next. In most cases, they don't. They keep going. They commit more resources. They find new reasons the original plan will work. And the company pays for it in time, in money, and in their competitive position while the person who made the call protects their standing.
This is Escalation of Commitment. It's not a character flaw. It's a documented, structural feature of how human beings respond to accountability and threat. Which is what makes it so dangerous from the inside; it feels exactly like conviction, courage, or even insight.
Two: The Semmelweis Reflex
Escalation alone, though, doesn't fully explain what happens next. Human beings have a powerful capability to convince ourselves that something is or is not true, even when we’re presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t just happen in politics; it happens in healthcare, and in families, and it happens at work…all the time.
That's the Semmelweis Reflex. And it has a history worth knowing.
Ignaz Semmelweis was a physician practicing in Vienna in 1847. Through careful observation of patient outcomes, he demonstrated that if surgeons washed their hands before delivering babies, maternal mortality dropped from over 10% to under 2%. He had the data. He published his findings.
The medical establishment rejected him almost universally. They dismissed him, attacked him professionally, and ultimately had him committed to a psychiatric institution, where he died at 47. Germ theory was confirmed a decade later.
Why did they reject him? Because accepting that handwashing worked meant accepting that distinguished, respected surgeons had been unknowingly killing their patients for years. The professional and psychological cost of that admission was simply too high. So instead of accepting the evidence, the institutions rejected the messenger.
The Semmelweis Reflex is that pattern: the automatic rejection of new information not because it's wrong, but because accepting it is too costly to the person's prior commitments and sense of self.
Here's another story that illustrates the dark side of this pattern:
Thirty-four years after Semmelweis, President James Garfield was shot in a Washington, D.C. train station. The first physician to reach him was Dr. Charles Purvis, a Black doctor, co-founder of Howard University's medical school, and, by historical account, a practitioner who understood antiseptic care. Purvis was pushed aside by the lead surgeon, Dr. Willard Bliss, who repeatedly probed the president's wound with unwashed hands and unsterilized instruments. This all unfolded in 1881, more than a decade after the surgeon and pioneer Joseph Lister's antiseptic methods had been accepted across Europe.
Garfield spent 79 agonizing days dying of infection. The bullet itself hadn't hit anything vital. At the murder trial, the assassin's own defense made an argument that historians largely agree with: "Yes, I shot the President. But his doctors killed him."
The Semmelweis Reflex isn't a historical curiosity. It has a body count, and in business, it has a balance sheet.
Three: Organizational Silence
Here's where it gets personal for most people. Because the first two conditions describe the decision-maker. This one describes everyone around them.
What happens when someone in the room does recognize the better path, genuinely sees it, maybe even feels urgency about it, but says nothing?
That's Organizational Silence, a phenomenon named by researchers Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken in a landmark 2000 paper in the Academy of Management Review. They defined it as the collective tendency of people within organizations to withhold what they actually know, not because they lack views, but because speaking up feels more dangerous than staying quiet.
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson spent twenty years studying the conditions that produce this silence. Her conclusion, backed by research across hospitals, tech companies, and organizations of every kind: when people don't feel psychologically safe raising a concern, because doing so risks their standing, reputation, or relationship with those above them, they go silent. Individually, and then collectively. As Edmondson put it, people become so focused on managing others' impressions of themselves that they stop contributing to building a better organization.
So you can end up with an entire room full of people who privately know the company is heading in the wrong direction. And nobody says a word.
This sounds like dysfunction. But unfortunately for many organizations, it’s just Tuesday.
What This Looks Like Right Now
You don't have to look hard to find all three conditions operating in parallel, particularly in the way organizations are approaching AI, automation, and new infrastructure.
A senior product officer commits to a vendor and a strategy the year before an emerging technology is viable, then all of a sudden, it is a viable option and a far superior solution to their current plan. Instead of doing the difficult work of resetting expectations, altering course, and implementing the best solution, they put their heads down and plow forward. Their Semmelweis Reflex builds a case for why the new option isn't actually better. And the people around them who see the truth stay silent because the cost of saying something feels too high.
The tell, if you want to do an honest audit, is simple: would you evaluate the new option differently if you hadn't already committed publicly to the current path? If the answer is yes, that's not analysis. That's self-preservation masquerading as analysis.
The Cost of Staying Stuck
Here's the uncomfortable truth.
Staw's research on commitment escalation has been replicated across dozens of experiments over five decades. The Semmelweis story is a standard case study in organizational behavior programs worldwide. Morrison and Milliken's work on organizational silence is among the most-cited papers in the management literature. Edmondson's psychological safety research is the backbone of Google's Project Aristotle findings on what makes teams perform.
These aren't obscure ideas. They're well-documented, predictable patterns, which means that getting stuck (and its cost) isn't bad luck or market timing.
It's a choice made under the cover of reasonable-sounding objections, by reasonable-seeming people, in reasonable-looking meetings.
Recognizing these patterns is important right now, as the very infrastructure for how industry operates is shifting. These conversations about real costs and benefits are critical, and organizations that invest in having the difficult ones will have a structural advantage.
The need for difficult conversations is particularly pressing in music. The music industry hasn’t always been quick to adopt new technologies, and the marketplace has amply rewarded those who saw the change coming and built toward it.
Instead of the technology industry dictating how the next major innovation cycle in music goes and reaping the rewards, let’s make sure we’re not falling into these traps and drive the innovation ourselves.
Barry M. Staw, "Knee Deep in the Big Muddy," Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, Vol. 16, 1976. Staw, B.M., "The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action," Academy of Management Review, 1981. Morrison, E.W. & Milliken, F.J., "Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World," Academy of Management Review, Vol. 25, 2000. Edmondson, A.C., The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, Wiley, 2018. On Dr. Charles Purvis and the death of President Garfield: Millard, Candice, Destiny of the Republic, Doubleday, 2011.
