Our society has a troubled relationship with death and decay, to put it mildly. We avoid thinking about it or planning for it, while we obsess over youth and extending our lifespans.
It shows up everywhere, including in how we run our businesses. We hold onto products and initiatives longer than we should. We end projects, collaborations, and employment contracts badly because we can't picture what a good death looks like.
The cycles of living systems have a lot to teach us: growth, conservation, then release, and the phase we most ignore, reorganization. In a forest, a fallen tree becomes a nurse log, hosting more life dead than it ever did standing. Insects, birds, and rodents shelter in it; fungi and moss break it down; and seedlings root in the softening wood, feeding on the nutrients it releases. The decaying tree becomes the soil the next one grows in.
Post-mortems and sunset criteria are some of the only ways we acknowledge death in our business lifecycles, but we rarely treat them as substrate for what grows next. Most sunsetting conversations produce "learnings": some useful, many too vague to operationalize.
What if instead of sunset criteria we had nurse log criteria?
What happens to the skills that were gained, the institutional memory that accumulated, and most importantly, the trust that was built along the way?
Born to Die: The Adobe Flash case study
Adobe Flash got one of the few good deaths in tech history, even though several tech giants like Apple and Microsoft spent a decade circling it like vultures. In 2017, Adobe coordinated Flash's death with its would-be scavengers. The criteria were written down in advance (open standards had matured enough to take over the job), the date was set three and a half years out, and almost everything got composted.
The skill: Adobe kept the animation tool alive under a new name, Animate, and taught it to publish in the open web formats that replaced Flash.
The institutional memory: Flashpoint Archive preserved over 200k Flash games and animations, and Ruffle re-hosts old Flash content in modern browsers. In an ironic twist of fate, dead Flash content now lives on the very standard that killed it.
The trust: five companies that had spent a decade at odds agreed to one public deadline, so users could plan against a real date instead of guessing which browser would break first.
Every member of the ecosystem got its share: Adobe composted the skills and runtime on purpose, the community composted the memory, and even the scavengers got their feast. Good compost criteria account for all, because a good death leaves enough behind for other beings to grow out of the log.
So before you sunset the process, the product, or the partnership, see if the remains can become a nurse log: Who carries the skills forward? Where does the memory live? Which relationships need a new home before this one dissolves? Reimagining death as a substrate for new life might make us want to avoid it less.