Published cartoon ·
Can you socialize this with the stakeholders?
Please make the idea safe to support before I support it.
Why this one bites
An employee pushes an idea uphill toward a line of sceptical stakeholders. The manager stands behind a shield. Consultation becomes a way of delegating the effort and exposure of persuasion while retaining the option to endorse the result later.
The drawing gives political risk a physical weight. Support arrives only after somebody else has carried that weight through the organisation. The joke targets sponsorship that waits for consensus before taking any responsibility for creating it.
Accessible summary
- An employee rolls a large stone bearing a light bulb up a slope toward four doubtful colleagues. A smiling manager holds a shield behind them.
- The caption describes absorbing the effort and political damage of persuasion before receiving public support.
Reading notes
An idea can fail because the right people were never consulted. It can also fail because consultation has been made a prerequisite for receiving any visible support. In the second case, the employee has to persuade others that the proposal matters while the nominal sponsor remains carefully uncommitted. Stakeholders notice that absence. Why should they spend political capital on something its own sponsor will not defend?
The uphill stone turns this into a problem of effort and leverage. A sponsor can remove an obstacle, explain a priority, resolve a conflict or acknowledge a trade-off. Merely asking the proposer to make more rounds does none of those things. It adds conversations without necessarily adding authority. The employee may eventually return with agreement, but the cost includes compromises and promises that the manager never had to make personally.
Consultation works better when the invitation makes the open questions clear. Are stakeholders being asked for information, consent, resources or the right to veto? Those are different requests with different consequences. The shield in this drawing suggests another unstated objective: keep the sponsor away from the objections. The joke is about that selective distance, where leadership becomes available for the announcement after someone else has survived the negotiations.