If your organization is carrying tools, systems, or commitments that were genuinely worth acquiring and are now genuinely worth reconsidering, and the reason you haven’t reconsidered is that it feels like admitting the original decision was wrong, this piece is for you. There is a third option between keep and discard that most planning frameworks never name.
I started the John Muir Trail carrying 95 pounds.
Sixty of it was camera equipment. The John Muir Trail runs 220 miles through the Sierra Nevada. From Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, north through Yosemite, through scenery that rewards the kind of sustained photographic attention that requires equipment. I knew this going in. I brought the equipment.
On day one, before the trail properly began, we climbed to the summit of Mount Whitney and slept there. I carried 95 pounds to the top. I made it, but the word “made it” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The weight was at the edge of what I could move through high altitude terrain. I moved it. I arrived.
By day four or five, I was running on approximately 600 calories a day. The food calculation had been wrong, or the effort calculation had been wrong, or both. The body was depleting faster than the intake was replacing. I was getting weak.
I made a decision.
Somewhere on the trail, we came across a ranger tent. A temporary structure, unoccupied. I packed 30 pounds of camera equipment, left it there, and continued with 65 pounds instead of 95.
It was a significant decision. The equipment I left behind was not generic. It was specific lenses and bodies chosen deliberately for the light and landscape of the Sierra Nevada. Leaving it meant not making certain photographs. The decision had a permanent cost.
I made it anyway. And the trail became what it was supposed to be.
What you carry is a choice
The 95 pounds was a choice. Not a careless one. A deliberate choice made in advance, with genuine reasoning. The equipment was worth carrying. The photographs it would produce were worth the weight. At the planning stage, the calculation made sense.
What the planning stage cannot fully account for is the compounding cost of carrying something through sustained effort over time. The 95 pounds on day one was heavy but manageable. The 95 pounds on day four, on 600 calories, at altitude, with 200 miles ahead, was a different weight entirely. Not because it had changed. Because everything else had.
This is the organizational equivalent of the tool, system, process, or capability that was genuinely worth acquiring and is now genuinely worth reconsidering. Not because it was a mistake. Because the conditions have changed and the weight-to-value ratio has shifted. The equipment is the same equipment. The trail is longer than you thought it was.
Most leaders carry the 95 pounds all the way to the end. Not because they have assessed the weight and decided it is worth it. Because putting it down feels like admitting the original decision was wrong. The camera gear represents the investment, the intention, the identity. Putting it down means something about what kind of photographer you are.
This is the sunk cost in its most personal form. Not the financial cost but the identity cost. The thing you carry has become part of how you understand yourself, and setting it down requires a small revision to that understanding.
“The equipment is the same equipment. The trail is longer than you thought it was.”
The ranger tent
There is a specific feature of the camera gear decision that is worth examining. I did not throw the equipment away. I left it in the ranger tent.
This matters. The decision to leave the gear was not a decision to abandon photography or to declare the equipment unnecessary. It was a decision to separate the weight from the journey. To put the equipment somewhere it could be retrieved, to preserve the optionality without carrying the cost.
Most organizational decisions about what to carry are presented as binary. Keep it or discard it. The ranger tent is the third option that most leaders don’t look for. The project that is paused rather than cancelled. The capability that is maintained in a lower-cost configuration rather than fully deployed or fully abandoned. The strategic option that is preserved at reduced investment rather than exercised at full cost or written off entirely.
The equipment in the ranger tent was not being used. It was not generating value. But it was not gone. The decision created a different relationship with the weight. Not carrying it, not losing it, not letting it slow the journey while preserving the possibility of return.
I did not go back for it. The trail did not pass that way again. But the decision to leave it there rather than discard it was part of what made it possible to leave it at all. The third option lowered the cost of the decision enough that I could make it.
The sandals
On day two, my feet failed. Blisters from a prior weekend’s climb made the hiking boots unwearable. I had brought a pair of sandals. Backup footwear, never intended for primary use on a 220-mile trail through the Sierra Nevada.
For the next ten days, I hiked the John Muir Trail in sandals.
Word travels on the trail. I apparently became known as “the guy in sandals.” Not the guy with the camera equipment, that was invisible. The sandals were visible. They were the thing other hikers could see and assess and form a view about.
The sandal decision was not a preference. It was an improvisation under constraint. The optimal tool had failed, and the available alternative was unconventional but functional. The sandals worked. They were not ideal. They kept me moving.
The organizational equivalent is the solution that is visibly unconventional and functionally adequate. The team that delivers with the wrong headcount. The product that ships on the wrong platform. The process that works through informal channels because the formal ones have failed. These solutions are the sandals. Visible, discussable, not what anyone planned for, and the reason the journey continued.
The improvisation that works is often the one that marks you as someone who had to improvise. This is not a cost. It is the evidence that you assessed the situation accurately and responded to it as it was rather than as you had planned for it to be.
THE TEAM TEST
Look at what you are currently carrying. The tools, systems, processes, capabilities, commitments that are consuming weight in your organization.
Now ask the weight-to-value question honestly. Not “was this worth acquiring?” but “is this worth carrying at this point in the journey, in the current conditions, on the calories we have available?”
If the honest answer is no, ask the ranger tent question before the discard question. Is there a way to set this down without losing it? A pause rather than a cancellation, a reduced configuration rather than a full deployment or a full write-off, an option preserved at lower cost rather than exercised at full weight?
And if the optimal tool has failed, if the boots are unwearable and you are looking at the sandals, ask whether the unconventional alternative will get you to where you are going. Not whether it is ideal. Whether it works.
The trail does not care what you are wearing. It only cares whether you keep moving.
