A team sinks a rival's project by withholding a supporting action, an input, or a critical requirement the project depends on, so the damage happens with no traceable act of interference.
An example
Over a rival's objection, a project executive at a general contractor had won the job of building a medical office complex for a hospital system. The electrical coordination lead, who reported to the rival, sat in the planning review in January. The lead had built three similar buildings and knew the power company needed eleven months to deliver a large transformer. The schedule assumed four. The lead said nothing about it. In March the project executive's team asked the lead's group for the final load calculations needed to place the order, and the request sat for seven weeks while the group answered other projects' questions within days. No service-level agreement covered the handoff. In August the transformer gap surfaced. Occupancy slipped five months, the hospital system invoked delay penalties, and the review asked why the project executive had missed a basic lead time.
Why it works
Routing the harm through inaction makes it easy and nearly free: there is no confrontation, no footprint, and no accusation of bad faith, because doing nothing carries a moral discount that doing something does not. For the actor, cooperating would mean actively working against their own interest, so it is the costlier path. It needs a dependency the actor controls without formally owning, no hard deadline or service level that turns omission into breach, a critical path tight enough that one missed input is fatal, a gap between planning and execution long enough for memories to fade, and a culture that blames the project owner.
The thinking behind it
Jonathan Baron Omission and Commission in Judgment and Choice (1991), by Spranca, Minsk, and Baron, found that people judge harm caused by failing to act as less bad than the same harm caused by acting, partly because they do not see omissions as causing outcomes. A coordination lead who says nothing about a transformer lead time, or lets a request sit for seven weeks, does harm that observers barely register as an act. Named owners, deadlines, and sign-offs by domain turn each omission into a visible failure to perform a recorded duty.
George A. Akerlof George Akerlof's The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism (1970) shows how decisions go wrong when one side holds information the other cannot check. In planning, the domain expert knows the requirement, and the project owner cannot tell what is missing. Asking each expert to sign off on their own specialty, and running a pre-mortem, moves that knowledge into the plan while it can still be used.
Warning signs
Requests to one team go unanswered only on the rival's project while its other queues clear. No hard deadline or service level covers the dependency. In the planning review, the recognized domain expert raised nothing about their own specialty, and the omission surfaces months later during execution. The team that withheld the input has a public position against the project.
How to defend yourself
Make every dependency explicit before the critical path tightens. List the inputs you need from other teams, with an owner, a named deadline, and an escalation path that triggers automatically if the date passes. Escalate fast, with the request trail in hand, before a missed input becomes fatal. In planning reviews, ask each domain expert to sign off on their own specialty by name, and record who was in the room. Hold a pre-mortem on the plan, asking each expert what would make it fail in their area. If something surfaces late, reconstruct who knew what and when, from the minutes.
How a leader shuts it down
Engineer the dependency environment so omission stops being invisible: explicit owners, named deadlines, automatic escalation, and risk registers that name critical dependencies. Require sign-offs by domain in planning. Run post-mortems that reconstruct who knew what and when, and treat an expert's silence in a planning review as a flag.