A rival is named sponsor of a high-risk initiative whose failure risk the assigner has privately assessed, while the assigner's allies take advisory seats, so any collapse lands on the rival's record alone.
An example
At a mid-size telecom carrier, the chief operating officer recommended that the head of enterprise sales, his main rival for the next chief executive role, sponsor the move of forty thousand business accounts onto a new billing platform. It would give her visibility with the board, he said. The sponsor letter went out in January. Two of his own lieutenants took seats on the advisory council and the data-quality review, roles that appeared nowhere in the charter's ownership table. The previous autumn, an internal assessment had warned that the old account data was too inconsistent to convert cleanly; that memo went to the chief operating officer and no further. Cutover in September produced six weeks of wrong invoices. The board's review named one owner, and the advisers were thanked for raising data concerns early.
Why it works
For the assigner the move is cheap. Allies in advisory and second-line roles cannot be named in a post-mortem, and nothing visible happens until the project fails on its own. For the rival, documented ownership of a venture whose risk someone else has already sized is a liability that comes due only on failure. It needs influence over assignments that does not look engineered, a risk that is real and not obvious to the rival, and a culture where ownership is binding. It fails on diffuse ownership norms, on a rival who sees the asymmetry, or on a project that succeeds and hands the rival a career-making win.
The thinking behind it
George A. Akerlof The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism (1970) shows that when one party knows the quality of what is on offer and the other cannot check it, the uninformed side is exposed. The assigner has privately sized the program's risk, and the rival accepting the sponsorship has not. The defense targets that gap directly: make your own risk assessment, and ask whether an earlier one exists, before you sign the sponsor letter.
Jonathan Baron Baron and Hershey's Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation (1988) found that people rate the same decision, made with the same information, as better and its maker as more competent when the outcome happens to be good. The sponsor of a program that fails is judged by the failure, whatever risk they inherited. That is why ownership of the riskiest program is such an effective liability to hand a rival, and why putting your risk assessment on record early matters.
Warning signs
A rival is named sponsor of the riskiest program in the portfolio, usually with a pitch about visibility or a career step. The assigner's allies take advisory, analytical, or second-line seats close to the program and outside its ownership table. Sponsor letters, charters, and responsibility charts are signed early, before the program's real risk is visible. Somewhere there may be an assessment of that risk that the assigner has seen and the sponsor has not.
How to defend yourself
The decisive moment is the assignment, so do the work before you accept.
- Make your own assessment of the program's failure risk, and ask directly whether any earlier assessment exists.
- Read the ownership table: who owns, who advises, and whose allies hold the advisory seats.
- If the risk is real and the asymmetry plain, decline, or accept only with shared ownership written into the charter, with the advisers named as co-owners of the parts they advise on.
- Keep a dated record of the risks you raised at the start.
If you are already in the role, put your risk assessment in front of the board early, so the risk is on the record under your name before the outcome is.
How a leader shuts it down
Separate the people who assign sponsorship from the people who stand to gain from how it turns out, and share any existing risk assessment with the sponsor before the letter is signed. In post-mortems, review the roles around the owner as well: who advised, who knew the risk, who chose the owner. Where ownership is binding, make it binding for the advisers who shaped the plan too.