Leadership attributes a stalled transformation to delivery gaps in IT, HR, or other shared services, so the board sets about fixing operations and never reexamines the strategy behind it.
An example
Digital sales at a regional department-store chain were forty percent below forecast two years into its plan to become an online-first retailer. The chief executive's board updates explained the gap in one recurring section: the warehouse system IT had installed was late, and HR had been slow to hire fulfillment staff. Both were partly true. The board approved a new head of IT and an outside staffing firm. An audit committee member who had once run a mail-order business asked a different question at the next meeting: whether customers in the chain's markets wanted to buy furniture online at all. The chief executive replied that the strategy was sound and IT had the problem in hand. The member asked for an independent review of the demand assumptions anyway. It found that the forecast had assumed online conversion rates three times the industry norm.
Why it works
Blaming shared services turns the fix into something bounded and operational, such as replacing the IT lead or unblocking hiring, and that makes staying the course cheap next to a strategic reset. Questioning the strategy then looks worse, like overreach, because the diagnosis seems settled. It is costly too: whoever probes the premise must contradict a named leader's operational account and risks looking out of touch or political. It depends on real delivery gaps in the blamed function (invented ones collapse under technical review), on a board without independent technical advice, and on shared-services leaders too junior to the sponsor to tell their side without seeming insubordinate.
The thinking behind it
Lee Ross In The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (1977), Ross describes the fundamental attribution error: people blame individuals and miss the situation that produced the outcome. A board told that IT was late and HR slow attributes the shortfall to those functions, which is easy because the gaps are partly real, and the strategy that placed impossible demands on them stays out of view. Requiring every account to separate strategy assumptions from execution is how a board corrects for it.
Barry M. Staw Staw's Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action (1976) found that people committed the most additional money to a failing course when they were personally responsible for its setbacks, which Staw read as self-justification. A chief executive who designed the strategy is badly placed to review it, and blaming shared services lets the commitment continue. An independent review of the demand assumptions is the remedy his work points to.
Warning signs
Every board update attributes shortfalls to IT, HR, finance systems, or other shared services, and none to the design of the strategy. The remedies on offer are all operational: a new leader for the function, an outside firm, more delivery budget. Leaders of the blamed functions are junior to the sponsor and say little in board meetings. The gaps they are blamed for are real, which makes the account hard to dispute.
How to defend yourself
Separate two questions the account has merged.
- Accept what is true about delivery. IT or HR probably did under-deliver in part, and denying it costs you credibility.
- Then ask the question the account replaces: is the strategy sound on its own terms? Test its core assumptions about demand, pricing, and adoption against independent data.
- If you lead the blamed function, give the board a written account of what you were asked to deliver, when, and with what resources, through the audit committee or the chief operating officer.
- Ask for an independent reviewer with credibility across functions to sort strategy failures from execution failures.
Make the request before the remedies are approved. Once a new IT leader is in place, the question looks settled.
How a leader shuts it down
Keep a chief operating officer or transformation office whose job includes calling out misattribution, and give the audit committee independent technical advice on large programs. Require any account of a shortfall to separate strategy assumptions from execution and to test the assumptions on their own. Let the heads of shared services report on the program directly.