Leadership fills calendars with sanctioned program work, reviews, and sprints while it makes a contested structural decision within its authority, so there is little spare attention for a campaign against it.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
Three months into a portfolio review, the president of a media group's broadcast division had decided, within the authority the chief executive and board had given him, to sell four small-market stations. He also had a real operating agenda: audience growth, cost discipline, and a move to two-week product sprints. He launched all three at once, with weekly working groups and a status deck every Thursday, and staffed them with his general managers. A small committee prepared the sale and briefed the board's finance committee every month. The general managers were told a portfolio review was under way and that recommendations would go to the board in the fall. When the sale was announced, two of them objected that they had not been asked which stations. By then the buyers were lined up and the board had approved.
Why it works
Going along is the path of least resistance because the cadence is already built: showing up costs nothing, and declining is what draws notice. A campaign against the structural decision seems to add little in an organization this busy, and it has become expensive, since the time, side conversations, and synthesis it needs are committed to program work. Those are three of the four ways; the decision itself is never sold. It needs control over calendars, reporting lines, and project staffing, work that matters, and a decision that moves faster than the program.
The thinking behind it
Herbert A. Simon Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971) argues that what information consumes is the attention of its recipients, so in an organization full of information, attention is the scarce resource. A heavy program cadence spends that resource on sanctioned work, and little remains for the reading, side conversations, and synthesis a campaign against a structural decision would need. Restoring discretionary time is therefore the first defense.
Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) describes fast, automatic System 1 and slow, effortful System 2, which engages only when something demands effort. The two-system account is a descriptive framework, and some studies the book cites have not replicated. On its account, people under time pressure or overload tend to accept the intuitive answer, here that a busy organization is a productive one with no reason to question the decision in progress.
Erving Goffman Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) describes frames, the principles by which people answer the question of what is going on here. Calling a cadence agility or operational excellence frames heavy work as progress, which is part of why few people question it. Goffman's definition of a fabrication, managing activity so that others form a false belief, marks the line: projects invented to absorb opponents cross it.
When it fits
Leaders with formal authority over a structural decision, and an operating agenda that needs doing anyway, can use it. It fits when broad debate would delay a decision that is yours to make, and the program work you launch is work the business needs on its own merits.
How to use it well
Launch only work you would launch anyway. The program has to stand on its own.
- Keep the structural decision with the people entitled to make or review it, and brief them fully and on schedule.
- Tell the wider organization that the decision is being prepared and when it will come, without opening it to a campaign.
- Staff the program with the people best suited to it, including the skeptics.
- Keep a forum where strategic concerns can be raised, so a busy calendar does not become a wall.
Announce the decision with its reasons as soon as it is made.
What it costs and where it backfires
Dissent with no outlet goes elsewhere, often to the board, customers, or the press. If the volume of program work becomes absurd, the busywork becomes the political issue and draws the scrutiny you wanted to avoid. Managers who learn of a decision late trust the next program less. Inventing projects only to absorb opponents, or keeping people entitled to review the decision away from it, is concealment.
When it is used on you
Restore your capacity first: delegate program attendance, track the structural decision dates next to the program's milestones, and convene with other senior people outside the official cadence. A question from the board, a regulator, or a major customer can force the conversation the cadence avoids.