Allies across finance, IT, procurement, and HR make small, apparently accidental mistakes on a rival's initiative over months, adding up to serious damage with no single traceable act.
An example
An auto parts maker launched a direct-to-garage online ordering pilot run by its e-commerce director, over the objection of the vice president who ran the distributor channel. Over six months, procurement miscoded forty part numbers on the pilot's reorder forms, IT set up the pilot's customer accounts with the wrong tax codes, finance sent eleven invoices to a closed address, and the pilot's sales were left off the weekly sales report twice. Each error came with an apology and a fix. Each was small. Together they delayed the pilot's first-year review by a quarter and made it look like the project that could not get anything right. The e-commerce director started logging every error with a date and a function. The count was sixty-three in six months, against nine for a comparable channel pilot the year before.
Why it works
Each error raises the initiative's cost a little, in rework, delays, and rescheduled meetings, and none is big enough to investigate. As they pile up, the initiative's reputation erodes and it becomes the project that is always behind, which makes it look worse to the sponsors who backed it. Allies across the functions the initiative depends on, a normal error rate high enough to hide each act, and months of patience are the requirements. Three things expose it: a sponsor senior enough to demand a root-cause review, centralized error logs, or one careless actor's obvious mistake.
The thinking behind it
John M. Darley Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility (1968), by Darley and Latané, found that students who believed others could also hear an apparent emergency were less likely to help, which the authors explained as each witness feeling a smaller share of the obligation to act. Errors spread across finance, IT, and procurement reproduce that condition: each function sees one small problem and assumes someone else owns the pattern. A senior sponsor who demands one root-cause review across all of them puts the responsibility in one place.
Warning signs
Routine approvals for one initiative fail at several times the rate of comparable projects. The errors span functions: miscoded forms, misrouted shipments, wrong tax codes, omissions from distribution lists. Each comes with an apology and a quick fix. The people making the errors have ties to someone who opposed the initiative from the start.
How to defend yourself
Log every error, with the date, the function, and the effect, and resist arguing each one separately, which keeps each one small. Compare the rate with a comparable project's. Once you can point to the aggregate, such as sixty errors against a baseline of ten, take it to a senior sponsor and ask for a root-cause investigation across the errors, treated as one pattern. Ask for error logs to be centralized by project so the pattern stays visible to others. Watch for the careless error that exposes intent, since one obvious tell often opens up the rest.
How a leader shuts it down
Track errors by project across functions, and compare rates. Give sponsors a straightforward way to request a cross-functional root-cause review. Treat a cluster of small errors against one initiative as a governance issue, and look at who in each function had a stake.