Experts asked to support a rival's initiative exaggerate the complexity and time the work needs, delaying it and making the initiative look too costly to pursue.
An example
Spring painting season was the target for a coatings manufacturer's new lower-cost industrial primer, made with resin from a new supplier. The launch needed the process engineering group to qualify the new resin. Its head, who had backed a competing reformulation project, estimated fourteen months and six engineers, citing batch variability and safety review. The commercial vice president had seen the same group qualify two comparable resins the year before in four and five months. The estimate went to the product committee, where the initiative's projected return fell below the hurdle rate once the delay and cost were added. The commercial vice president asked a process engineer at the company's other plant for an informal view, and the answer was five months and two people. The committee asked for a second estimate, but by then the spring season was lost.
Why it works
Nothing in it requires arguing against the initiative: the expert simply reports on the work, professionally and at length. Padded estimates add time, budget, and political capital to the rival's plan, which makes it costlier, and put its unchanged upside behind a wall of effort, so it looks worse on any return calculation. Genuine expert credibility is the foundation, along with decision-makers who cannot check the estimate independently, a rival who cannot switch providers without political cost, and a culture that discourages second-guessing specialists. A rival who can route around the expert, or a peer expert who counter-estimates, defeats it.
The thinking behind it
Daniel Kahneman In Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974), Tversky and Kahneman describe anchoring: people estimate by adjusting from a starting value, and the adjustment is usually too small. A fourteen-month estimate from the recognized expert becomes the starting value for the committee's thinking, and even a skeptical committee adjusts down only part of the way. A second estimate from a peer expert gives the committee a different starting point.
George A. Akerlof George Akerlof's The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism (1970) shows that when one side knows what the other cannot check, the uninformed side either accepts the claim or discounts every claim alike. Effort estimates are such information: the expert knows how long qualification takes, and the commercial side does not. Calibrating against past projects and keeping a second provider turn an unverifiable claim into one that can be checked.
Warning signs
This expert's estimates for one rival's requests run several times their estimates for similar work elsewhere. The estimates come with long lists of risks and reviews no one asked about before. The expert has a stake in a competing initiative. Each status update adds to the projected effort, and the date moves with it.
How to defend yourself
Do not debate effort estimates as if they were statements of fact. Get an independent estimate from a peer expert, inside or outside the company. Calibrate against prior projects of similar scope, using the expert's own past numbers where you can, and put the comparison in front of the decision-makers. Keep a second provider available for critical work, so the expert's contribution is not a single point of failure. If inflation shows up once, ask for an audit of the same person's estimates on other projects, since it is rarely a one-off.
How a leader shuts it down
Build independent cost estimation and redundancy in expertise for work that crosses faction lines, and calibrate estimates against past projects as routine. Keep estimators separate from people with a stake in a competing initiative. Track each estimator's accuracy over time.