Stopping is a hard design and policy issue as people are fundamentally driven to keep going.
However, both people with good purpose and people who are completely lost move forward and it’s impossible to differentiate them.
They both create datasets of action. They both can answer that they are doing what seems best solution to them now.
Stopping is understanding
Only stopping enables a moment to clarify what is actually going on.
- Sometimes it’s good to carry on.
- Sometimes it is better to go back.
- Sometimes just ending the journey is best.
But only Stopping enables that discovery.
The pause to consider and think matters in all projects and yet they are also swept up in the bias to movement.
It’s hard to stop
People don’t like stopping and communities are generally supportive of people who want to keep moving.
Thus policy arguments for Just Stop Oil and imposing 20mph speed limits clash with the movement bias.
Meanwhile, innovation and change are supported even when the protagonists seem to be incompetent or lost. Techbros and AI are enabled as stopping them is somehow bad.