Lower-level staff are held strictly to account for carrying out a change, while the senior leaders who designed the flawed strategy behind it are shielded from its consequences.
An example
A regional airline rebuilt its summer schedule around faster turnarounds at twelve stations, a plan drawn up by network planning and approved by the executive team. It assumed ground crews could turn a narrow-body aircraft in thirty-five minutes. On-time performance fell to sixty-one percent. The post-mortem, chaired by the chief commercial officer who had sponsored the plan, listed station staffing, crew training, and "local execution discipline" as causes, and four station managers were replaced. The director of ground operations had sent a memo before launch saying thirty-five minutes had never been achieved at those stations with current staffing, and she asked that the turnaround assumption be reviewed. The steering minutes recorded that strategy and execution would be "reviewed separately." The strategy review was never scheduled, and the next winter schedule kept the thirty-five-minute turn.
Why it works
Pointing accountability at the people who carried out a change strips career risk and political cost away from the people who designed it. By the time the failure is visible, the accountability process is already set up to run downhill. Owning the design flaw becomes costly for any leader who tries: they would contradict the account being enforced on their own subordinates, invite board scrutiny that had been deflected, and break ranks with their peers. Its foundations are a board that treats strategy and execution as cleanly separate and rarely audits the line between them, implementation roles that can be refilled without stopping the program, and solidarity in the senior team.
The thinking behind it
Lee Ross Ross named the fundamental attribution error in The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (1977): observers explain outcomes by the traits of the people involved and underestimate the situation. Post-mortems that list "local execution discipline" invite exactly that reading of station managers working to an unachievable turnaround assumption. Tracing each failure to the assumption it rested on, and to whoever set it, restores the situation to the account.
Jeffrey Pfeffer Pfeffer's Power in Organizations (1981) treats control of the decision process as a main source of power. A senior team that chairs the post-mortem and writes the steering minutes controls which questions get asked, and "reviewed separately" is a decision about process. That is why the defense works on process too: an independent chair, a mandate to test design assumptions, and a board that audits the strategy paper trail.
Warning signs
Every post-mortem names implementation gaps such as training, staffing, or discipline, and none reopens a design assumption. Scorecards and named-owner charts all point downward. Steering minutes treat strategy and execution as separate questions and defer the strategy one. Implementers are replaced while the program carries on unchanged. The people chairing the reviews are the people who approved the plan.
How to defend yourself
Arguing that leadership should be more accountable plays into the structure, which is built to deflect exactly that. Contest the line between strategy and execution, one failure at a time.
- For each failure the post-mortem lists, trace the assumption it rested on (the turnaround time, the staffing ratio, the adoption rate) and who set it.
- Put pre-launch warnings and design memos into the review record, with dates and recipients.
- Ask that the review be chaired by someone who did not approve the plan.
- Find one senior leader willing to accept design responsibility in public. A single defection from the senior team breaks the pattern faster than any argument.
Keep your own copies of the design documents you were sent. The paper trail is what lets anyone reopen the strategy later.
How a leader shuts it down
Have the board audit the strategy paper trail after any major program miss, with the assumptions reviewed by someone outside the team that set them. Give post-mortems a chair independent of the sponsor and a mandate to test design assumptions. When a plan you approved fails, say so in public; one leader accepting design responsibility breaks the pattern for everyone below.