Two real initiatives go forward together, one loud and expendable, so opponents spend their attention and goodwill on the one the sponsor can afford to lose.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
Two changes were on the chief strategy officer's list that year at a four-hospital group: moving surgical block scheduling under the system office, which mattered most, and outsourcing food and environmental services, which would save $3 million but which the system could live without. Both went to the board's planning committee in the same February packet, each with its own business case and a named executive. The outsourcing plan drew the town halls, the petitions, and the medical staff's fire, as the strategy officer had expected. Block scheduling came up as item nine, with its full case attached and every hospital president briefed beforehand, and passed in four minutes. In August, after a summer of negotiation, the strategy officer agreed to shelve the outsourcing plan pending review and gave the medical staff two seats on the review panel. The scheduling change had taken effect in July.
Why it works
Opponents have a fixed supply of attention, meeting time, and political capital. The louder initiative draws most of it, which makes the important change easier to pass, because fewer people are looking at it, and makes resisting it costlier, because every hour spent on the loud fight is an hour not spent on the change that matters. It depends on the expendable initiative being genuinely threatening and credible (a budget, named executives, announcements), and on timing the important change to land at the peak of the debate.
The thinking behind it
Herbert A. Simon Herbert Simon's essay Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971) argues that information consumes the attention of its recipients, so that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Attention becomes the scarce resource. The move works on that scarcity: opponents, boards, and committees can examine only so much, and a loud initiative uses up the scrutiny that would otherwise reach the quieter change, even when both are fully documented.
Daniel Kahneman In Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974), Tversky and Kahneman describe availability: people judge how frequent or likely something is by how easily instances come to mind. A heavily announced initiative, with town halls and named executives, is the change everyone can picture and keeps hearing about, so it is the one people expect to matter. The quieter change, discussed once as an agenda item, comes to mind less easily and draws less resistance.
When it fits
Two real changes, one far more important than the other, are the starting condition, along with an opposition whose attention and capital are limited. You need the standing to sponsor both, the budget to make the expendable one credible, and a timetable that lets the important one land while the other draws the debate.
How to use it well
Pick the expendable initiative from changes you would really carry out if it passed, since a proposal you would never implement is a bluff and gets read as one.
- Give it a real case, a named executive, and a visible budget.
- Put both through normal channels at the same time, each with complete papers, so nothing is kept from the people entitled to review it.
- Time the important change for the height of the debate on the other.
- Decide in advance what you will trade the expendable one for, such as seats on a review panel or a concession elsewhere.
If someone asks you directly which matters more, answer truthfully.
What it costs and where it backfires
Expendable initiatives cost real money and management time, and dropping one can look like defeat. People notice the pattern after one or two rounds, and your next loud proposal gets discounted. The line comes earlier than it seems: telling people the expendable initiative is your priority when it is not, or keeping the important change from people entitled to review it, makes the move depend on deception or concealment, and the clean form is gone.
When it is used on you
Ask, at each contested moment, what else is moving right now. Keep a list of every change in flight in your area, including the dull ones on operations agendas, and hold back some scrutiny for those. Ask a board member or another outside observer to look across the whole agenda, and when a loud initiative is dropped, check what passed while it ran.