Steering-committee members sometimes hold a full critique of a project's leadership for the formal post-mortem, where it carries the most weight, and deliver it once the outcome is known.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
Early in an airline's loyalty-program relaunch, the head of partnerships, who sat on its steering committee, raised one concern in writing: the partner earn rates were too low to attract the target segment. It was noted and overruled. After that she voted with the committee and kept her own file of enrollment by week, partner feedback, and sign-up drop-off in the app. The relaunch missed its targets by forty percent. At the formal post-mortem she presented the file, said plainly which concern she had raised and which ones she had formed later, and argued that the program director had treated the earn-rate decision as settled when the data said otherwise. The chief commercial officer moved the program under her team the following quarter.
Why it works
The critic looks better, apparently having seen more than others, and criticizing is easier, because the outcome is known and the critique no longer risks being wrong. The leader's defense looks weaker, since a bad result recasts a reasonable bet as poor judgment, and mounting it costs more, because the leader looks defensive and pointing at the critic's earlier votes looks petty. That is all four ways. It needs an undisputed bad outcome, a formal review where judgments are made, and an audience ready to grade decisions by results.
The thinking behind it
Jonathan Baron Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation (1988), by Jonathan Baron and his coauthor Hershey, found that people rated the same decision, made with the same information, as better thought out when the outcome was good than when it was bad; a large replication reproduced the direction of the effect. A post-mortem audience grades the project's decisions knowing the outcome was bad, which is why a critique delivered there carries more weight than the same critique offered mid-project.
Erving Goffman Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) describes frames, the principles by which people answer the question of what is going on here. A post-mortem invites the frame of foreseeable failure, and a critic who supplies it shapes how the room reads the whole project. Goffman's definition of a fabrication, managing activity so that others form a false belief, marks the line: claiming warnings never given turns framing into fabrication.
When it fits
Steering members with substantive concerns and a seat at the formal review can use it, when a project is on a course they cannot change from inside and the post-mortem will decide who leads next. It needs a record you kept as you went, and any material concern raised on time.
How to use it well
Raise any material risk when you see it, in writing; holding back a risk the project needed to hear about is concealment.
- Keep your own dated record of the data and of your concerns as they formed.
- Vote honestly at each gate, and let your votes stand on the record.
- At the post-mortem, separate what you raised at the time from what you concluded later, and say which is which.
- Make the case about decisions and evidence, and let the audience judge the leader from that.
Expect the room to remember your votes. A critique that owns them is far harder to dismiss than one that claims you saw everything.
What it costs and where it backfires
Silence after your first concern is on the record, and a senior attendee may ask why you said nothing more. You will be seen as having waited for the outcome, which costs trust with the leader and their allies. The move crosses the line if you claim to have warned when you did not, or if you saw a material risk and kept it back so the project would fail; that is falsifying the record and setting someone up to fail.
When it is used on you
Force a record while the project runs: written sign-offs at each decision gate, red-team sessions where every stakeholder states concerns, and minutes of who voted how. When a late critic arrives, let a senior attendee point to the earlier votes, and ask the critic which concerns were raised at the time.