The Corporate Game That Everyone Plays But No One Acknowledges

In the time it takes you to read this edition of ITOLOGY™, your organization will lose approximately $42,000 in wasted management capacity.

This isn't hyperbole because it is a measurable cost in your approval processes.

While you're focused on quarterly forecasts and strategic initiatives, a shadow tax is being collected throughout your organization. It materializes in endless email threads, inconclusive meetings and initiatives trapped in approval loops that span months instead of days. Your most talented teams are spending 60% of their time navigating internal politics rather than creating customer value. Your most promising innovations are aging like milk, not wine.

I didn't set out to write this edition. The story emerged organically from a seemingly simple project: creating a Data-As-Service Platform with a catalog of APIs to reduce system interconnections. What should have taken one week stretched into an eight-month odyssey that exposed the hidden machinery crippling decision velocity in even the most sophisticated organizations.

What I discovered wasn't an isolated failure but a systematic pattern, one that's likely embedded in your governance structure right now. The ping-pong approval process I'll reveal operates beneath conventional organizational charts, determining which companies can execute with speed and which ones suffocate under their own governance weight.

You won't find this in management textbooks or leadership seminars. These are the unwritten rules of corporate decision-making, the shadow processes that explain why your competitors sometimes announce market-changing solutions while similar initiatives in your company remain trapped in approval pending status.

In what follows, you'll discover exactly how to identify these decision bottlenecks, neutralize territorial power struggles and implement frameworks that accelerate innovation while maintaining appropriate controls. You'll learn why "asking headquarters for permission" has become the most expensive phrase in your organizational vocabulary, and how to create systems that empower without sacrificing standards.

This chapter contains no platitudes or generic advice. Only battle-tested solutions and diagnostic tools you can deploy immediately to reclaim the thousands of management hours currently wasted in your approval processes.

The cost of the status quo is measured in time and money, market position and talent retention. The choice is simple: continue operating with invisible handcuffs, or transform how decisions flow through your organization. The transformation begins now.

Let me share how this hidden cost manifested in my own experience.

The Players and the Field

Before diving into our story, let me introduce some key characters. Our team had built something special in the Americas – a data team that bridged the technical-business divide. We had Eddy, an architect who had started on the business side and understood the operational realities of our systems. Unlike many purely technical architects, he had spent countless weekends fixing production issues and knew the business inside out. Then there was Dan, who brought infrastructure and cloud expertise to complement Eddy's application knowledge. Together with our security team, we had created an end-to-end review process that caught issues early and built trust across departments.

After delivering 50+ successful projects, we had refined our approach and developed best practices that became part of our standard documentation. What had started as a small initiative had grown into a center of excellence reviewing over 200 projects monthly. We were transforming how the organization leveraged data, through our technical work.

Our most ambitious initiative was the Data-as-Service platform – a solution to eliminate redundant connections to critical business systems by centralizing access through APIs. Each business application was being hammered by dozens of direct database connections, creating performance problems and synchronization nightmares. Our solution would pull data from the lake, then expose standardized APIs that any application could use. The potential savings in development time, system performance and reduced complexity were enormous.

Then we met Manuel – the HQ gatekeeper whose role you might recall from my previous article "The Prestige Trap" in ITOLOGY edition 5. Manuel embodied the headquarters' approach: control above collaboration, status above solutions. He explained that our proposal couldn't proceed because a similar solution was "in the roadmap" for 2-3 years later. When we explained that we needed it now, not in some distant future, he reluctantly suggested we meet with his team for "technical evaluation."

The Ordeal That Exposed It All

What should have been a straightforward project – creating the platform and the associated API catalog to reduce those maddening "spaghetti connections" between systems – turned into an eight-month nightmare. The technical solution was solid, local teams were energized and the software engineering manager (a 30-year veteran) declared "this is a very easy application to deliver." Translation: "I'll get it ready in less than a week."

Then came the fateful words that would haunt us for months: "Let's coordinate with HQ."

Eight excruciating months later, we were still seeking approval. In that time, I was ping-ponged between seven different stakeholders, each claiming they supported the project yet mysteriously unable to approve it. Each meeting ended the same way – "I don't have any concerns, but you should talk to Person X." And Person X would send me to Person Y, who would redirect me back to the first person. It was maddening.

This wasn't incompetence, despite what you may think. It was pure strategy.

The Hidden Game Revealed

I call this pattern "corporate ping-pong," where each stakeholder – aware of the hidden game they're playing but unwilling to reveal it – deliberately bounces you from one person to another until you're exhausted and drop the idea.

The genius of this approach? Nobody has to say "no" and risk confrontation. They simply wear you down until you give up, allowing them to avoid work they don't want, protect territory they covet or resurrect your idea years later as their own brilliant innovation.

As frustration mounted, I did something that would ultimately expose the entire charade: I created a one-page visualization tracking each meeting, referral, conclusion and delay. I titled it "The Approval Ordeal."

When our local VP asked why nothing had happened six months after initial approval, I simply shared this diagram. Three minutes of silence followed before he said, "I'll talk to the new director."

The resulting explosion was spectacular. The HQ Data Director – a woman who had mastered corporate politics through years in the lobbying industry – couldn't maintain her composure when confronted with such clear evidence. A graduate of one of France's elite "Grandes Écoles," she had methodically climbed the ladder through carefully cultivated networks and strategically-timed job changes. She presented herself as one of the "boys club," even adopting their dress code for official functions. But when confronted with our diagram, her carefully maintained facade cracked. Her face flushed red with anger, ears scarlet, as the document laid bare what everyone secretly knew but never documented: a deliberately broken decision process designed to maintain headquarters control while pretending to be collaborative.

The aftermath was both bitter and sweet. I lost my promotion after four years of hard work – the Data Director controlled those decisions and wasn't about to reward the person who had exposed the dysfunction. But the visualization sparked a larger conversation that reached the executive suite. Someone with even more political capital than our Director raised concerns about the systematic dysfunction hampering the Americas region, which generated 50% of company revenue. Within weeks, the Director was "pursuing her passion for teaching" (corporate-speak for "shown the door"), Manuel was replaced with someone more collaborative and the approval process was streamlined.

The project that should have taken a week but stretched to eight months was finally approved, built and deployed. The business impact was immediate – faster integration times, improved system performance and dramatically reduced complexity. But the organizational impact was even more profound.

What Strategy Gurus Never Tell You About Organizational Dysfunction

While battling through our eight-month ordeal, I found myself increasingly drawn to management literature, seeking explanations for the madness we were experiencing. The disconnect was striking – none of the glossy Harvard Business Review case studies seemed to capture the messy, political reality of our corporate ping-pong game.

It wasn't until I encountered some less mainstream organizational theorists that pieces started falling into place. Conway's Law – the principle that organizations design systems reflecting their communication structures – explained why our technical architecture mirrored our dysfunctional approval processes. Our "spaghetti connections" between systems were simply manifestations of our tangled decision pathways.

The most illuminating framework came from Jay Galbraith's Star Model, which identifies five interconnected points that must align for an organization to function effectively: strategy, structure, processes, rewards and people. Looking at our situation through this lens, our dysfunction that seemed to be related to bureaucracy revealed as a perfectly predictable outcome of fundamental misalignment:

Our corporate strategy emphasized regional growth and customer responsiveness, but the structure placed all meaningful decision authority with headquarters. The formal processes required extensive collaboration, but the rewards system incentivized headquarters leaders to maintain tight control and minimize risk. And caught in the middle were talented people increasingly frustrated by the contradiction between stated values and actual behaviors.

What most strategy books won't tell you is that this misalignment isn't accidental. It's often a deliberate choice to maintain power structures while appearing progressive on paper. When executives proudly announce "we're ONE global company" while simultaneously undermining regional autonomy, they're not confused. They're engaged in what organizational theorist Chris Argyris called the gap between "espoused theory" (what we say we believe) and "theory-in-use" (how we actually behave).

The most revealing exercise I developed was color-coding our approval schema based on which star point each stakeholder invoked. Europe consistently retreated to structural arguments ("this requires approval from X committee") while we emphasized strategic outcomes ("this delivers customer value"). We weren't even speaking the same organizational language.

What ultimately broke through wasn't management theory but brutal transparency. The visualization that exposed what everyone knew but nobody would say aloud. As Jack Welch might have observed, our culture was indeed eating our strategy for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner.

When Life Imitates Sabotage: The CIA and Catch-22 Connection

During our eight-month ordeal, Eddy and I found ourselves in an eerily familiar situation that we couldn't quite place. One evening, while doom-scrolling on LinkedIn, I stumbled upon a post by Roel Staes that stopped me mid-scroll. It was about a 1944 CIA handbook on how to sabotage enemy organizations from the inside. As I read through the list of recommended tactics, a chill ran down my spine.

"Eddy, you need to see this," I messaged him immediately, forwarding the post.

His response came back within minutes: "This isn't a manual... it's our company's operating procedures!"

The post detailed tactics straight from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the CIA's precursor – Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Point after point read like a playbook of what we were experiencing:

"Insist on doing everything through 'channels.' Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions."

"When possible, refer all matters to committees, for 'further study and consideration.' Attempt to make committees as large as possible."

"Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision."

Eddy was so fascinated that he downloaded the actual declassified manual. For the next week, as we navigated our seventh and eighth HQ stakeholder meetings, we would text each other the number of the specific sabotage technique being employed. It became our private coping mechanism – if we couldn't accelerate the process, we could at least categorize the dysfunction.

What struck us most profoundly was that a manual designed to help citizens undermine enemy operations during World War II was perfectly describing corporate behavior over 80 years later. The techniques weren't just similar – they were identical. And they were being deployed not by infiltrators trying to undermine the company but by teams ostensibly working toward the same goal.

Our situation also reminded us of Joseph Heller's classic novel Catch-22, where the main character Yossarian found himself trapped in an impossible situation: pilots could be grounded for insanity, but requesting a mental evaluation to prove insanity demonstrated sanity, making escape impossible. Our API catalog project was caught in its own bureaucratic paradox: it needed approval to proceed, but the process of seeking approval guaranteed it would never be approved.

In Heller's novel, the military bureaucracy uses circular logic to maintain control. In our corporate reality, HQ was doing exactly the same thing – creating an illusion of process while ensuring nothing would change.

The most unsettling realization wasn't just the similarity between our modern corporate experience and these references – it was understanding that in both cases, the systems were functioning exactly as designed. The military bureaucracy in Catch-22 wasn't broken; it was precisely calibrated to serve the interests of those in power while maintaining plausible deniability. The sabotage techniques weren't accidents of incompetence but strategic methods to maintain the status quo.

When I created my "Approval Ordeal" visualization, I wasn't just documenting a process – I was exposing what amounted to organizational sabotage. Just as the OSS manual's tactics were designed to be invisible, appearing as normal bureaucratic friction, our ping-pong game was designed to look like standard procedure while accomplishing nothing.

The corporate world may not wish to admit it, but many of its most entrenched practices are indistinguishable from techniques explicitly designed to undermine organizational effectiveness. Whether conscious or unconscious, these patterns serve to preserve power structures while creating the appearance of collaboration.

And like Yossarian in Catch-22, those who recognize the absurdity of the system are often considered the problem rather than the solution – as I discovered when my promotion disappeared after exposing the truth.

The greatest irony may be that in 1944, the CIA had to teach people how to deliberately slow down organizations. Today, many of us have to be taught how to avoid doing so unintentionally. Eddy and I still laugh about this whenever we encounter a particularly Byzantine approval process – we no longer need to ask "why is this so difficult?" We simply say, "Chapter 5, Paragraph 11" and know exactly what's happening.

The Five Warning Signals You're Being Ping-Ponged

Having now helped dozens of organizations overcome this dysfunction, I've identified five telltale signals that corporate ping-pong is killing your company:

1. The Eternal Handoff – "This looks promising, but Janet should review it first." Then Janet needs Tim's approval, who insists on Susan's input... Count the handoffs; anything above three means you're being played.
2. The Circular Reference Loop – The most insidious form occurs when you complete the entire approval circle only to be sent back to the first person who now has "new questions."
3. The Responsibility Mirage – Everyone appears engaged, but nobody owns the decision. Listen for phrases like "I'm not blocking this, but..." or "I support this, however..." These are the ping-pong player's favorite rackets.
4. The Calendar Weapon – Meetings scheduled weeks apart, emails that sit unanswered for days, key stakeholders mysteriously unavailable as decisions approach finality. Time becomes the ultimate weapon.
5. The Geographical Shield – "It's too late to call Europe today," "They're on holiday in August," "Let's wait until after Golden Week." Geography and cultural differences become convenient excuses for perpetual delay.

The Decision Rights Map That Changes Everything

What turned our situation around wasn't management theory – it was ruthless transparency. The visualization of our "Approval Ordeal" made the invisible visible. No executive could look at that diagram of circular referrals and still claim the system was working.

After seeing our diagram (and likely fielding calls from more powerful executives), headquarters leadership suddenly discovered remarkable urgency for our project. The same people who had stonewalled for months became surprisingly collaborative once their tactics were exposed to senior leadership.

For organizations serious about eliminating ping-pong, I've developed a powerful tool called the "Decision Rights Map." It's startlingly simple – a table with decision types as rows and authority levels as columns, using four codes:

• D – Decide (has final authority)
• R – Recommend (provides formal recommendation)
• C – Consult (must be consulted but has no veto)
• I – Inform (notified after the decision)

The magic isn't in the template but the uncomfortable conversations it forces. I've watched executive teams spend hours debating whether regional leaders should have "D" or "R" authority for technology selection. These heated discussions finally bring the unspoken power dynamics into the open.

The most revealing moment? When I ask: "For decisions where regional leaders have 'R' but headquarters has 'D', what percentage of recommendations get overturned?" When the answer exceeds 80%, the trust issues become impossible to ignore.

The 90-Day Intervention That Works

For companies ready to stop the madness, I recommend a focused 90-day intervention:

• Weeks 1-2: Conduct brutal "Decision Archeology" – document every meeting, email and delay from recent initiatives to expose the true approval path.
• Weeks 3-4: Hold a no-holds-barred Decision Rights Workshop where leaders must confront the gap between their imagined governance and the painful reality.
• Weeks 5-8: Implement a "Decision Velocity Dashboard" that publicly tracks time-to-decision for all approvals. Nothing motivates like measurement.
• Weeks 9-12: Redesign the most problematic processes, establishing clear decision owners and maximum timeframes before automatic escalation.

I've seen this approach cut decision cycles by 70% while simultaneously improving decision quality. The primary barrier isn't complexity – it's courage. Executives must be willing to see how decisions actually flow, not how their PowerPoint slides claim they flow.

The cost of ping-pong goes far beyond wasted time. While your innovative ideas die slow deaths in approval purgatory, competitors with streamlined decision processes are eating your lunch. Your most talented employees aren't leaving for higher salaries – they're escaping the soul-crushing experience of watching their best ideas suffocate in bureaucratic quicksand.

As one CEO told me after implementing these changes: "We've been complaining about execution for years. It turns out execution wasn't the problem. Our people couldn't execute what hadn't been decided."

The Way Forward

The fundamental solution lies in organizational design principles: creating clear standards that regional teams can follow without constant headquarters approval. This requires:

• Explicit decision rights for global vs. local authority
• Transparent approval frameworks with maximum timeframes
• Decision velocity metrics that expose bottlenecks
• Rewards tied to both decision quality AND speed

This isn't theoretical. It's the difference between market leadership and obsolescence. The choice is yours: continue operating with invisible handcuffs or transform how decisions flow through your organization.

And if you think this doesn't apply to your company – check the governance flowcharts, then ask the people three levels below you how decisions really happen. The gap between those realities is costing you millions.