Every review step the process allows is applied to an opponent's initiative, until its backers run short of time or patience and reshape it, merge it, or give up.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
As chair of the IT change board at a mid-size airline, the head of crew systems believed the digital team's new trip-swap app for crew members duplicated his own system and would create integration risk. He did not argue against it. He applied every review the change policy listed for externally hosted applications: a data flow diagram, a security impact assessment, a reconciliation of the two, and a vendor continuity plan. Each request went out in writing, citing the policy section, and each submission was reviewed within the board's two-week standard. His own group's internally hosted tools needed fewer steps under the same policy. Eleven months in, the chief executive's office asked why the app was late. The head of crew systems offered to build trip swapping into his platform within two quarters, and the digital team's app was folded into his roadmap.
Why it works
Each cycle of delay makes the blocked initiative worse: market windows close, sponsors are reassigned, the business case ages, and the urgency passes. Each new request makes pursuing it costlier, in the champion's time, the team's morale, and political capital, and the costs compound, since every new document must be reconciled with the last. There is never a formal no to appeal. All it needs is an obstructor who controls at least one gate, such as legal, security, finance, or change management, and backers who are on a clock or rewarded for speed.
The thinking behind it
Oliver E. Williamson Williamson's Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications (1975) argues that organizations exist partly to safeguard transactions against bounded rationality and opportunism, which is why controls and review steps exist at all. Change boards, security reviews, and continuity plans have real reasons behind them, and that gives a gatekeeper who applies every step legitimate cover. The defense measures time at each gate, because each step is defensible alone and the pattern shows only in the total.
Hal R. Arkes Arkes and Blumer's The Psychology of Sunk Cost (1985) describes a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once money, effort, or time has been invested, partly to avoid looking wasteful. A sponsor who has already produced three rounds of documents keeps producing a fourth, and each submission feeds the process. That is why the defense begins by refusing more documents and asking for a go or no-go decision by a date.
When it fits
Owners of an approval gate, such as change management, security, legal, or finance review, facing an initiative they believe carries real risk or duplicates work, whose sponsor is on a clock. The process must already require the steps you apply.
How to use it well
Apply the process as written. Every step you ask for should be one the policy lists for this kind of item.
- Ask for each requirement in writing, citing the policy.
- Review each submission on time and say exactly what is missing.
- Apply the same steps to comparable items, your own included.
- Offer a path: tell the sponsor what would get the item through, or what alternative you would support.
The aim is to have your concerns resolved, or the initiative reshaped around them, on the record.
What it costs and where it backfires
Sponsors measure cycle times, and if yours run long for one sponsor only, the pattern will reach your boss. Strong people leave initiatives stuck at your gate, and you can be blamed for the departures and the delay. The policy itself is the boundary. Once you invent requirements the policy does not contain, sit on submissions without review, or apply steps to the rival you waive for your allies while claiming you do not, the process has become a pretext, and an executive with a deadline will cut through it.
When it is used on you
Stop feeding the gate more documents. Measure cycle time for your items against comparable ones, escalate to someone who can force a go or no-go decision by a date, put an outside deadline on the process, and compare notes with other initiatives held at the same gate.