Leadership issues goals so vague or contradictory that no outcome was ever clearly promised, which lets it claim the wins as the plan and call the failures experiments.
An example
"Every audience, every platform" was the title of a media company's three-year strategy. It asked the business to grow print subscriptions and go digital first, to cut costs and invest heavily in video, and it set no targets. At the strategy offsite, the head of digital video asked what success would look like by the end of the first year. The chief executive said it was too early to box the company in, and a colleague told her afterward that the question had embarrassed him in front of his direct reports. Three years later the podcast unit had doubled its revenue and was described in the annual report as the center of the strategy from the start. Video had lost money and was described as an experiment outside the core plan. Its head was asked to explain why it had drifted from the strategy.
Why it works
Issuing direction costs leadership almost nothing: no hard trade-offs, no theory of the business to defend, no claim that results could disprove. Operators get room to frame pet projects as "in line with the strategy," which feels like a benefit. Pressing for specifics is costly for whoever asks, because it reads as questioning competence and puts the asker on the hook if the clarified plan fails. Slow results that let the document fade, no tracking of commitments through forecasts or pre-mortems, and a leader who can retell the plan to fit the results keep it going. Activist boards and disclosure rules make it fail quickly.
The thinking behind it
Jonathan Baron Baron and Hershey's Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation (1988) found that people rate a decision as better and its maker as more competent when the outcome happens to be good, even when the information available was identical. Vague or contradictory goals let a leader use that bias freely: whatever succeeds becomes the plan, and whatever fails becomes an experiment. Written forecasts and pre-mortems fix the standard before the outcome is known, so results can no longer rewrite it.
Warning signs
Strategy documents contain no targets that could be missed. Priorities contradict each other and are not ranked. Success criteria get named only after results come in. Past strategy documents are retold to fit what happened. Questions about targets are deflected as boxing the company in. Failed initiatives are reclassified as experiments, and successful ones become the core of the plan.
How to defend yourself
Build the record leadership is not keeping.
- Keep a dated file of what was promised: the strategy deck, the meeting notes, the emails that set your mandate.
- For your own unit, write down your success criteria and get them acknowledged by email.
- Ask for written forecasts, measurable targets, and pre-mortems when the strategy is set, in a form that is hard to punish, such as "How will we know by the fourth quarter whether this is working?"
- Find allies with the same need. Finance and investor relations usually want targets too.
- Bring the record back out when results land, for the wins as well as the losses.
How a leader shuts it down
Require written, testable commitments when a strategy is set: signed forecasts, pre-mortems, and red-team reviews. Review results against the original documents, never the retold version. Reward people who ask for targets. The cost of skipping this comes years later, when every unit has interpreted the direction differently and resources have gone to whoever negotiated best.