Was It Worth Doing? The Question Organisations Are Afraid to Ask

Was It Worth Doing?

Having spent decades inside organisations, I have noticed a quietly destructive pattern.

An extraordinary amount of work gets done. Ideas are invested in, teams are mobilised, plans are built, tools are shipped, programmes are delivered. By any measure of activity, the organisation is busy and productive.

And then everyone moves on to the next thing.

The question that rarely gets asked — before the work begins or after it ends — is the simplest and most important one: was it worth doing?

Not whether it was delivered on time or on budget. Not whether the launch went well or whether the training session was well-received. Whether the value the work was supposed to generate actually arrived.

Change programmes are completed and declared a success. Six months later, nothing has changed. Tools are rolled out, trained on, and embedded into process — and slowly drift back into disuse while the licences quietly renew.

Workshops generate genuine energy — and that energy evaporates within weeks because nobody designed what happens next. Initiatives consume significant money, time, energy and attention across the organisation, ship on schedule, and are never evaluated against the value they were supposed to create.

This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure to close the loop.

Teams stay busy. Work gets done. Value remains elusive — not because people are not trying, but because nobody ever turned around and asked whether the investment produced what it was supposed to.

This is not just a financial problem. It is a human one. People want their work to matter. When effort disappears into the next priority without acknowledgement or evaluation, something erodes — trust, motivation, and the belief that what you do connects to anything that actually counts.

So why does this keep happening? And what would it look like to stop?

Three questions worth stealing

The writer Henry James once proposed three questions for judging a work of art:

What was the artist trying to achieve?
Did they succeed?
Was it worth doing?

These questions translate remarkably well to organisational life. And yet they are almost never asked — not because organisations are careless, but because they have never established a clear picture of what value they were actually chasing in the first place.

That is the real problem.

The investment cycle that stops too soon

Most organisations are reasonably good at the front end of work. Ideas are generated. Investment is secured — money, time, energy, attention. Activity sets are built. People are mobilised. The creative work happens. Something is shipped.

And then it stops.

The question of what value the work was supposed to generate — and whether it did — is rarely asked with any rigour. Often it is not asked at all. The initiative closes, the team disperses, the next priority begins.

This is the gap at the heart of most organisational waste. Not a failure of effort. A failure to close the loop between investment and value.

Understanding why this happens requires being clear about what value actually means — because it is not one thing.

The four types of value

Every piece of work an organisation does is an investment in one of four types of value. Being explicit about which type you are chasing changes both how you design the work and how you evaluate it afterwards.

Financial value

Keeps the business alive. This is revenue — the only one of the four types that is externally generated and externally validated.

When a product sells, the market tells you. When a campaign drives acquisition, the numbers confirm it. Financial value is the one type that should, in theory, be easiest to measure.

And yet — particularly in large organisations — it frequently goes unmeasured or is measured so loosely that no one can actually explain the connection between the investment in an idea, the work itself and the revenue it was supposed to generate. Correlation is claimed. Causation is assumed. The question is considered impolite.

Enablement value

Keeps the business operating.

This covers everything that must exist for the organisation to function: compliance work, internal tooling, HR, payroll, legal and regulatory requirements, infrastructure, and the operational systems that hold everything else together.

Nobody buys a product or service because of your internal payroll software or your risk management software. But without them, nothing else works. Enablement investments are costs — chosen, necessary costs — and the question "was it worth doing?" translates here to: did this actually enable what it was supposed to? Is the compliance need met? Is the tool being used? Is the system more reliable than what it replaced?

Cost reduction value

Keeps the business efficient.

Automation, process improvement, consolidation, renegotiated contracts — these are investments made in order to spend less in the system. The paradox, as explored in When Cutting Costs Destroys Purpose, is that cost reduction work without connection to purpose, frequently generates costs somewhere else that are never attributed back to the original decision.

The savings are claimed. The downstream consequences are absorbed by a different team, a different budget line, a different quarter. The question "was it worth doing?" forces the full accounting: did we actually reduce cost, or did we relocate it?

Experiment value

Keeps the business learning.

Pilots, prototypes, research spikes, market tests, innovation programmes, experiments — these are investments in knowledge.

The expected return is not revenue or operational stability or efficiency. It is learning: confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis, capability built, assumptions tested.

The question "was it worth doing?" applied to an experiment does not ask whether it succeeded. It asks whether the learning was captured, acted on, and used to inform the next decision.

An experiment that produces a clear "no" and changes what the organisation does next is worth more than an experiment that produces an ambiguous "maybe" and is quietly filed away.

Why reflection so rarely happens

The external/internal asymmetry explains a great deal.

Financial value is externally validated — the market speaks. The question is forced on you whether you ask it or not. Revenue either arrives or it does not. Customer retention either holds or it falls.

The other three types of value are all internal. They are costs the organisation chooses to bear — investments that do not generate external income but make the organisation more viable, more efficient, or more capable. And because there is no external signal to force the question, the question is not asked. The work is done. The budget is spent. Everyone moves on.

This is compounded by the human dynamics around reflection. Leaders move on quickly after disappointing initiatives, sometimes to save face, sometimes simply because the next priority has arrived.

When reflection is skipped, teams experience the silence as dismissal. The people who did the work learn not to invest as much of their finite human resources next time — because investment without acknowledgement is a poor trade.

Over time, this is how disengagement compounds. Teams learn to wait out the next initiative rather than invest in it. They have seen the pattern. They know how it ends.

The question applied — before and after

Henry James' three questions can be reframed as a pre-flight check before any significant piece of work begins:

What problem are we actually trying to solve — and which type of value are we investing in?

This is not an abstract question. It determines how the work should be designed, what success looks like, and how it should be measured. An experiment designed like a delivery project will fail as an experiment even if it delivers on time.

How will we know if we have succeeded?

For financial value: what revenue outcome, by when? For enablement: what operational capability, and how will we confirm it works? For cost reduction: what savings, measured how, and where will the bill arrive? For experiments: what hypothesis, and what evidence would confirm or reject it?

Is this worth doing at all?

The question that prevents work that should never begin. Not every problem is worth solving. Not every efficiency gain justifies the disruption. Not every experiment deserves the investment. Asking this question before momentum builds is the cheapest intervention available. Is it worth it? How much will it cost? What problems will it create? What opportunities will it open up?

And after the work ends — for all four types:

Did we get the value we expected?
What did we actually learn?
Should we do this again — or never again?

Reflection as a capability

Reflection is often treated as an event: a retrospective, a post-mortem, a lessons-learned session held once and then forgotten. In reality it is a capability — and like all capabilities, it compounds with practice.

Teams that reflect well learn faster. They abandon bad ideas earlier. They repeat good patterns deliberately. They build judgement over time rather than just accumulating activity. They don't repeat poor investment choices in the same way again.

Sometimes reflection produces an uncomfortable answer: no, it was not worth doing.

That answer is not failure. Failing to learn from it is.

When organisations normalise reflection — before work begins, during it and after it ends — wasted effort decreases. Not because people try harder, but because they choose more carefully. And when effort consistently translates into value of any kind, work starts to feel meaningful again.

That is how ideas stop evaporating — and begin to matter.