Rival departments get chartered to deliver a high-stakes project together, with goals that contradict each other and overlapping authority, so the predictable failure looks like their own dysfunction.
An example
Pricing was due for a relaunch at a business software company, and the chief executive named the heads of product and sales as co-leads. The charter, drafted by the chief strategy officer, gave product a target of raising average contract value by eighteen percent and gave sales a target of cutting the discount rate while hitting the same bookings number. Both heads had approval rights over the final price book. When the head of product pointed out at the kickoff that the targets could not both be met in one year, the strategy officer said the point of a joint mandate was for leaders to work things out. The relaunch slipped twice. In the board deck that spring, the delay appeared on a slide about cross-functional alignment, and in June the strategy officer took over pricing.
Why it works
Contradictions written into the charter pay the orchestrator's political costs in advance: the failure belongs to the rivals' apparent dysfunction, so discrediting them takes no visible move. Raising the contradiction looks worse because the program recodes it as an inability to collaborate. It is costlier because naming the trap means accusing one's own principal of bad faith, with little proof, while a visible deliverable is in flight. The design works when the orchestrator controls the charter and the resources, when the rivals already distrust each other, when failure is costly to both, and when the contradictions pass for complexity.
The thinking behind it
Lee Ross Lee Ross's The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (1977) names the fundamental attribution error: people explain others' failures by their traits and underestimate the situation. A joint mandate with contradictory targets produces a failure the charter guaranteed, and observers read it as the co-leads' inability to collaborate. That reading is the payoff for whoever drafted the charter, and an outside review of its measures puts the situation back in view.
Muzafer Sherif Muzafer Sherif's Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (1961) found that competition for rewards only one group could win was enough to produce hostility, and that superordinate goals, which neither group could reach alone, reduced it. A charter whose targets cannot both be met builds in the competition. Two rivals who draft a joint fix to the charter turn it into a shared problem, which is why an open alliance defeats the design.
Warning signs
The charter gives two rivals overlapping authority over the same output and success measures that cannot both be met. Anyone who points out the contradiction is told to collaborate better. The orchestrator stays out of the working sessions and reappears when the deadline slips. Resources for the project come through one office, which also drafted the charter. Status reports frame each delay as a relationship problem.
How to defend yourself
Read every joint mandate as a political document before you accept it, and ask whether its rules could support cooperation even if both of you wanted to cooperate.
Renegotiate contradictory targets at the start, in writing, while the request still looks like diligence. Ask for an outside review of the charter's measures if the stakes are high. The strongest counter is a conversation with your counterpart: two rivals who agree on a fix to the charter and bring it up together defeat the design. The earlier this happens, the cheaper it is, because once the project is in flight, raising the problem sounds like an excuse.
How a leader shuts it down
Have someone outside the sponsoring office test every joint charter before it is signed: can both sets of targets be met at once, and who has the final say. Separate the people who draft charters from the people who allocate resources. When co-leads raise a contradiction, treat it as information about the charter.