Leadership tells staff to act first and ask forgiveness later, then forgives the unauthorized moves that suit its politics and punishes, by the strict rule, the ones that cut against them.
An example
Every all-hands at the payroll software company that spring ended with the same slide: Ship it, then tell us. In May a product lead switched on a new pricing tier for 2,000 small customers without the pricing committee's sign-off, and the chief executive praised her by name at the next all-hands. Three weeks later an engineering manager held back a feature the chief executive had promised a large client, because a penetration test had found a flaw. He had not asked either. He received a written warning for "acting outside approved process," citing the same approval policy the product lead had skipped. An engineering director who had watched both cases started keeping a list. By October it held nine unapproved actions. The five that matched what the executive team wanted had been celebrated, and the four that slowed its plans had ended in warnings or transfers.
Why it works
The slogan makes acting on your own look good to everyone, which keeps a supply of people willing to take initiative. For moves that suit leadership, the missing approval costs nothing: forgiveness comes fast, often with public praise that blesses the bypass after the fact. For moves that cut against leadership, the strict rule returns ("you should have asked") with consequences out of proportion to the breach, and because the culture said acting was welcome, the penalty reads as a personal misjudgment. It depends on rules vague enough to apply selectively, on the same leaders holding enforcement discretion, and on bystanders reading each penalty as an individual case.
The thinking behind it
Michel Foucault In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault describes disciplinary power: people who know they may be observed and judged at any moment regulate themselves, so enforcement is rarely needed. The trap runs on that logic. A few penalties, chosen by political direction, teach the whole staff which initiative is safe, and most people adjust in advance. Documenting the pattern and publishing enforcement criteria removes the uncertainty that makes the self-policing work.
George A. Akerlof Akerlof showed in The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism (1970) that when one side knows what the other cannot check, the uninformed side discounts every offer. Here leadership knows the real rule for which unauthorized acts will be forgiven, and staff cannot see it. Once employees sense the gap, they discount every invitation to take initiative, which is why the trap so often ends in a retreat to asking permission for everything.
Warning signs
Public praise for people who acted without permission is loud and specific, while the reasons someone else was disciplined are never explained. Penalties for unauthorized action track whether the action helped leadership's agenda; the rule broken and the damage done predict very little. Two people skip the same approval in the same quarter, and one becomes a story at the all-hands while the other becomes a file in HR.
How to defend yourself
Before you act on a permission announcement, ask which actions it would actually protect and how you would know in advance. Get the answer in writing if you can. Then keep a record of the cases you see:
- who acted without approval, on what, and when
- which approval rule each one skipped
- what happened to each of them afterward
When the pattern is clear, take it to someone who can ask for published enforcement criteria, such as the head of HR, the general counsel, or an audit committee member, and push for independent review of any significant penalty. If you are the one being punished, put your case next to the forgiven ones that broke the same rule.
How a leader shuts it down
Publish, before anyone acts, which kinds of unauthorized action will be forgiven and which will not, and apply the standard in both directions. Send significant penalties for process breaches to a reviewer outside the chain that made the call. If doers get speeches and the punished get silence, staff will soon retreat to asking permission for everything, which defeats the culture program the slogan was meant to support.