Impact Trust • Working glossary
Path dependency / lock-in
Past choices trap us in certain paths that are hard to change.
Details
Our Take
The infrastructure we built, the systems we designed, the assumptions we embedded now constrain what we can do next. 'Locked-in choices' lands better than the academic label. (Think fossil fuel / natural gas dependency in energy infrastructure making transition to renewables harder.
Synonyms/Variants
Lock-in; Institutional inertia; Sunk cost dynamics; Legacy constraints
Typical everyday wording
Stuck with decisions made years ago that now limit what we can do.
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