Sponsors launch high-risk initiatives timed so that failure surfaces after they have rotated to new roles, collecting credit for boldness while the junior staff left behind absorb the blame.
An example
Expected to rotate into a business-unit role within eighteen months, the chief information officer of a regional power company won board approval to replace its thirty-year-old customer billing system. The launch earned a feature in the company newsletter and a strong annual review. The real technical risk sat at cutover, thirty months out. By then the former chief information officer was running the retail energy division, and a program manager eight years into the company owned the cutover plan. Data conversion failed on two hundred thousand accounts, and the call centers ran three weeks of overtime. The post-mortem listed the program team and the systems integrator. The original business case, with its compressed timeline and its decision to skip a parallel run, appeared only in an appendix that nobody cited. The program manager's next review rated her "needs development."
Why it works
Sponsoring a bold, visible initiative pays early, at announcement and through the first progress reports, when the sponsor is seen as decisive and willing to bet, and those qualities drive the next promotion. Structuring the work so that failure shows only after the sponsor has moved on brings the personal cost of sponsoring close to zero. The sponsor takes the upside inside their tenure and leaves the downside to whoever stays. Predictable rotation cycles let the sponsor forecast an exit window, and weak institutional memory blurs who sponsored what. Grading leaders on launches over outcomes invites the move, and junior staff who stay in role long enough are there to absorb the blame.
The thinking behind it
Jonathan Baron Baron and Hershey's Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation (1988) found that people judge a decision and its maker by the outcome, even when the outcome says nothing about how the decision was made. The original sponsor of a long initiative is graded on the launch, which went well, and the person in the chair at cutover is graded on the failure. Rebuilding the full sponsor chain in the post-mortem puts the original decision back in front of the people judging it.
Lee Ross Ross's work on the fundamental attribution error, in The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (1977), shows observers underweighting the situation and blaming the person in front of them. The program manager who inherits a compressed timeline and a skipped parallel run is that person. Recording the sponsor's assumptions in the program's own documents, while the sponsor is still in role, gives later reviewers the situation they would otherwise miss.
Warning signs
The sponsor's expected rotation date falls before the initiative's first real outcome milestone. The business case front-loads visible wins and puts the hardest technical step late. Leaders are rewarded for launches, and no bonus depends on how the initiative lands. When trouble comes, the post-mortem names the current team and treats the original sponsor's choices as background, if it mentions them at all.
How to defend yourself
Before you take a role on a long initiative, ask whose tenure the failure point falls outside of. If it falls outside the sponsor's and inside yours, you are the one who will be holding it.
- Record the sponsor's key decisions and the assumptions behind them in the program's own documents, with dates and names, while the sponsor is still in role.
- Put scope and timeline concerns in writing to the sponsor before they rotate.
- Ask that the original business case be part of any review.
- When a post-mortem is drafted, ask that it reconstruct the full sponsor chain from approval to failure.
If you are offered ownership after the sponsor has left, renegotiate scope and timeline as a condition of taking it.
How a leader shuts it down
Tie sponsors' pay to outcomes through deferred, tenure-locked compensation and clawback provisions, and grade leaders on how their initiatives land as well as how they launch. Require post-mortems to name every sponsor from approval onward. When a sponsor rotates out midway, have them sign a handover stating what risk remains.