New plans are credited with wins that predate them or came from independent work, so their returns look larger and skeptics who point to the real causes look petty.
An example
Nine months into a new chief executive's value creation plan, a corrugated packaging maker's board deck showed gross margin up 210 basis points under the heading "Plan delivering." Most of that came from a freight surcharge a divisional general manager had negotiated with three large customers the year before the plan existed, and from a drop in containerboard prices. The deck gave no baseline and no breakdown. At the town hall the chief executive thanked everyone who had embraced the plan. Asked privately by a director whether the surcharge was part of the plan, the divisional general manager called it a team effort, since reclaiming it in the room would have looked disloyal. The account held until the company refinanced its term loan, when the lenders' diligence team asked for a bridge from the prior year's margin and found that the plan's own initiatives accounted for forty basis points.
Why it works
Absorbing wins the plan did not produce inflates its apparent return, so backing it looks better. Once the wins are bound to the plan in board decks and town halls, a skeptic pointing to legacy or outside causes is disputing visible evidence, which weakens the alternative account. Picking apart celebrated wins costs political capital and looks petty or disloyal. Interventions too diffuse to trace, operators reluctant to reclaim credit, a board that rewards recent wins over rigorous attribution, and old data too thin for a counter-narrative all help it. The borrowed wins blend in best when the plan has real ones too.
The thinking behind it
Daniel Kahneman Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk (1979) holds that people judge outcomes relative to a reference point, and that the reference point can be moved by how a choice is described. A progress deck with no baseline makes the plan's start the reference point, so every gain since then looks like the plan's. The defense supplies a bridge from the prior year, which restores the reference point the audience needs.
Jonathan Baron In Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation (1988), Baron and Hershey found that good outcomes make a decision look better thought out and its maker more competent, even when the outcome carries no such information. A margin gain that lands during the plan makes the plan look wise whatever caused it. Attribution against a baseline separates what the plan did from what happened around it.
Warning signs
Wins that began before the plan appear in its progress decks and town halls. No baseline is shown, and there is no breakdown of how much of an improvement came from the plan, from markets, or from work already under way. Operators who ran the original initiatives are thanked as members of the plan's team. Questions about attribution are answered with talk of momentum.
How to defend yourself
If the win is yours, attach your name to it publicly and with documentation before the plan absorbs it. Once it sits in a board deck under the plan's banner, reclaiming it looks like disloyalty.
- Keep dated records of the initiatives you ran: the start date, the decision memo, the results by month.
- Report your results with a baseline, every time, so a decomposition exists somewhere official.
- Credit the plan for what it did. A precise split between the plan's contribution and yours is easier to defend than a claim to the whole win.
Boards, lenders, auditors, and activist investors can ask for a margin or revenue bridge that separates the plan's initiatives from market effects and earlier work. One operator with documentation, or one outside party asking for the bridge, can collapse the whole account.
How a leader shuts it down
Ask for a baseline and an attribution breakdown before any result counts as the plan's progress. Name the people and units behind each win in progress reports, including work that predates the plan. Have finance own the bridge, so the plan's sponsor is not also its scorekeeper.