Sponsors sometimes build a new unit that does a slow group's work faster to the same standard and let internal customers choose it, so work moves across and the old gatekeeping fades.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
At a regional power company, commercial solar customers waited nine months for the engineering standards committee to approve their interconnection reviews. The vice president of grid modernization chartered a six-person interconnection team with a published sixty-day standard, the same engineering criteria, and a chair from her own group. Developers could still file through the committee if they preferred. Within a year, eight of every ten new requests went to the team, and the committee kept the transmission-level reviews where its depth mattered. At the next budget cycle two committee positions moved to the team, and the committee's chair joined it as senior technical reviewer. Interconnection revenue grew by a third.
Why it works
The new body is built for less friction: faster turnaround, lighter paperwork, published service levels. As work migrates, the old group's approvals matter to fewer decisions, and filing through it starts to look slow. A group whose power is saying no cannot veto a structure built beside it, because its veto covers only what is brought to it. The move needs a sponsor with authority to charter the new unit, real friction that internal customers already resent, and patience across budget cycles. It fails when the old group has a strong sponsor who folds the new body back in, or when the old group's expertise is what the work actually requires.
The thinking behind it
Jeffrey Pfeffer Pfeffer's The External Control of Organizations (1978) holds that whoever controls a critical, scarce resource gains power over those who depend on it, and that people act to reduce their own dependencies. A gatekeeping group's power rests on internal customers needing its approval. A parallel unit with the same standards gives those customers another source, so their dependence on the old group falls, and its power falls with it.
Ronald H. Coase Coase's The Nature of the Firm (1937) explains that work moves to whichever arrangement makes transactions cheaper, inside the firm or in the market. Inside a company the same logic applies between internal routes: when one channel takes nine months and another sixty days to the same standard, work flows to the cheaper channel without anyone ordering it. Letting customers choose is what makes the shift legitimate.
When it fits
Use it when an existing group is a bottleneck that internal customers resent, its delay costs the business, you have the authority to charter a unit, and the work can be done to the same standard faster. It suits a sponsor willing to wait several budget cycles for the shift.
How to use it well
Charter the new unit openly, with a defined scope and the same standards the old group applies.
- Publish service levels for both routes, and let customers choose.
- Measure both on the same bar: time, quality, cost.
- Offer roles in the new unit to people from the old group.
- Leave the old group the work where its depth matters, and say so.
- Set a review date to merge, resize, or close one of them.
Tell the old group's sponsor what you are doing before the charter goes out.
What it costs and where it backfires
Two bodies doing similar work cost money, and the old group will fight for its budget and may win if its sponsor is strong. A looser performance bar for the new unit hides its real record and invites a backlash later. Lowering the standards that protect customers, or starving the old group of resources for work it is still accountable for, would harm customers or set the group up to fail.
When it is used on you
Show your sponsor the overlap and the numbers when a new council's remit overlaps your group's and work volume shifts across over several budget cycles, and ask for a clear boundary. Cut the friction that sent internal customers looking for a faster path, and press finance for a side-by-side comparison of results and costs.