Tying a change to revered figures and past triumphs, and its alternatives and opponents to discredited people and failures, gets people to choose by association without weighing the options themselves.
An example
At a family-owned building-supply distributor, the new president wanted to move all purchasing onto a single national buying group. In every meeting about it she mentioned that the founder had built the company on scale, and she showed a photo of the first regional warehouse opening in 1987. When the purchasing director argued for keeping local suppliers for lumber and roofing, where prices swung sharply, the president said it sounded like the 2016 decentralization, the one that had cost two quarters of margin. Heads nodded. Nobody in the room had been there in 2016 except the purchasing director and the controller. The controller remembered that the 2016 problem had been a failed inventory system, unrelated to the choice of suppliers, but said nothing. The proposal passed, and the purchasing director stopped raising objections.
Why it works
Tying the change to revered figures and past triumphs makes backing it look better, and by elimination the preferred plan starts to look like the only safe one. Tying the alternatives and their advocates to known failures makes them look worse: they are judged by resemblance, through the memory of the old failure, and never on their own mechanics. Dissent gets costlier, because the dissenter must first prove they are not repeating history or siding with a discredited camp. For the links to stick, the symbols must carry real emotional consensus, the person invoking them needs standing and control over how the past is told, and the audience must lack the memory to contest them.
The thinking behind it
Erving Goffman In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), Goffman describes stigma as an attribute that discredits a person and notes that it spreads by association, so people close to the stigmatized share some of the discredit, a courtesy stigma. Tying an alternative to a remembered failure gives it a stigma, and its advocates acquire the courtesy version by standing near it. Separating the failure's real cause from the alternative's features breaks the association.
Daniel Kahneman Tversky and Kahneman's Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974) describes availability, judging probability by how easily instances come to mind. A vivid past fiasco is easy to recall, so an alternative that resembles it feels likely to fail, whatever its mechanics. Asking whether the group is evaluating the proposal or its resemblance to the past moves the judgment from the vivid instance back to the case at hand.
Warning signs
A revered founder, a former leader, or a famous past success comes up in every discussion of the initiative. Alternatives are introduced by their resemblance to a past failure ("we tried something like this before," "this is the instinct that gave us the old reorg") and are never examined on their own mechanics. Critics hear their reasoning compared to people or programs the organization remembers badly. The few who remember what actually happened say little.
How to defend yourself
Better arguments on the merits will not land while the association is doing the work. Contest the association itself.
- Name the move in the meeting: "Are we evaluating this proposal, or its resemblance to the last one?" Once the audience starts watching the pairing, much of its pull goes.
- Find out where the revered figure actually stood on this kind of decision, and say so if it differs.
- Bring in veterans who remember what caused the earlier failure, and separate its real cause from the features your alternative shares with it.
- If the "failed" project has been misremembered, reclaim it with the numbers.
Work out which association is carrying the argument and take that one on first.
How a leader shuts it down
Ask for proposals and their alternatives to be judged on their mechanics, in writing. Any comparison to a past program should come with an account of what caused that program to succeed or fail. Keep honest post-mortems of past failures where people can find them, so their history cannot be retold to suit a current fight.