The Business Cycle Of Weaponized Incompetence

Never have I ever seen so much weaponized incompetence deployed as during this agentic AI cycle. We all know the symptoms, but not everyone knows this is a game that people make lucrative careers out of playing. Consulting companies might as well make it a line item on their balance sheets. It’s not right, but weaponized incompetence is becoming the new normal.

I get called in to clean up the mess, so it is a line item on V Squared’s balance sheet too. I won’t throw stones without getting hit myself. I profit from business dysfunction, but I’d rather this get addressed internally. It is the one engagement category that frustrates me the most.

Weaponized incompetence should end an executive’s career and destroy the reputation of any consulting company that enables it. In reality, both often profit from it. Parts of my field are shady, but they don’t need to be. We should monetize frameworks that accelerate revenue, so every business gets the most efficient path to growth. But as I have said for over a decade, there’s just as much money in perpetuating problems, and it’s much easier to deliver.

In this article, I will reveal the business cycle of weaponized incompetence and explain how to defuse people and consultants who are trying to run the game on you.

The speech. “These AI initiatives and agentic spending are out of control. I’m stepping in to ensure we start seeing significant ROI for all the money we’re investing in these programs.”

OR

“The future of this company depends on agents and AI. I’m stepping in to ensure we get there.”

The speech is always given by a pseudo-technical executive leader with credentials that are typically bigger than the outcomes and expertise they promise. They say things that sound amazing and make promises to end the chaos or crisis that everyone is really tired of.

• Spending is up, but value hasn’t materialized, so margins are compressing.

• The core business is suffering from all the contradictory priorities, and revenue is flat.

• The business is tired of the endless pivots and new directives. People are leaving.

• Infighting has gotten out of hand, and business politics have halted progress.

Something happened that investors or the board got wind of. The CEO decided, or was convinced, that something must be done about the something happening. Enter the executive giving the speech. The root cause of the crisis is often manufactured to support a narrative. The speech is the version of the narrative that puts the executive in control of AI and its sizeable budget.

In just 12 short months, the business will be in a better place.

They spend the next few weeks pulling everyone who has ever said the letters ‘AI’ into a meeting to get their ideas. Thoughts are shared. Grievances are aired, and promises are made to address them. Many questions are asked. Someone takes a lot of notes.

Unless you have a C-level title, everything from that meeting is thrown out. The direction has already been decided, but the listening tour is critical so the executive can say, “We listened and incorporated what we heard into the tentative plan.” Except nothing you or your team asked for ends up in the plan. None of the risks you called out are identified and accounted for.

“Don’t worry. This is just the tentative plan, and we’re still making changes. Those things will be in the final version.”

Three months later, a consultant or small team shows up. The consultant is there to review everything and ensure nothing has been missed. Three months later, the plan gets their seal of approval. When you see the plan, it is exactly the same as the tentative plan, with more words and charts. There are also several case studies supporting it and multiple decks ready to be distributed to every part of the business.

Then you get to the end and read the first round of initiatives. To your horror, you realize that none of it can be built, and your name or your team’s name is in bold letters. You’re responsible for building it all.

The technology isn’t ready to support what they’ve outlined. Agents don’t work that way. The timelines are all too short. There’s no budget for infrastructure. Your people are all fully committed to other critical projects, and there’s no budget for hiring. This will fail for a dozen different reasons.

You go to the executive to raise your concerns, and they schedule a meeting to discuss it. Then they move the meeting because of a scheduling conflict. Then they move the meeting again due to someone critical being on vacation. They keep moving it until the day your team starts working on it is less than a quarter away. Then the meeting happens.

“Why didn’t you bring this up during our initial meeting 9 months ago?” Well, I didn’t realize you were incompetent.

“Why didn’t you bring this up sooner? The project is about to start!? How are we going to justify pushing it out?” What’s this ‘we’ thing you have suddenly added to your vocabulary?

“Don’t worry. I’ll figure out how to smooth this over. Thank you so much for bringing it all to our attention.” They push the timelines so more meetings can be held to discuss your concerns.

But at the C-level, they are saying something different. “This team had 9 months to prepare or raise these concerns and didn’t. I am worried that they might become a risk, but we will do everything we can to get them up to speed.”

The consultant comes back into the meetings. When you raise a risk, they respond with, “That hasn’t been an issue in any of our other deployments.”

When you ask for more people, they say, “None of our other deployments have required additional headcount.”

When you explain the technical limitations, they say, “Our technical teams were able to work around that.”

The executive stays out of the discussion and lets the consultant do the conflict management and deflection. The executive sides with the consultant, and the roadmap is finalized with minor changes.

At the C-level, they say, “We listened to and addressed every one of their concerns. It turned out to be nothing. I hope this is the end of this roadblock.”

Now, if you call out the roadmap as technically infeasible, you’re the problem. If you try to deliver what they asked for and it doesn’t work, even though you warned them it wouldn’t, you’re the problem. After they have figured out a way to make you the problem, the consultant recommends bringing in their team to clean things up.

CFO: “Where will we get the money to do that?”

Consultant: “If the external team is doing the work, we can do a RIF on your existing team to offset most of the cost.”

CEO, who believes your team is holding things up…”That sounds like a good plan. Draw it up.”

Executive: “I can tuck the smaller team into my org and manage the external team as well. That will save even more and speed things up to make up for lost time.”

CEO: “Great. Make it happen.”

Weaponized incompetence is focused on controlling the narrative, not delivering solutions. That’s why it is so effective. C-level leaders in mid-sized to large businesses don’t get enough direct feedback from the front line. They are disconnected from reality on the ground, and most surveys prove that their perception of what’s happening is often very different from what people on the ground see happening.

That’s the power of narrative control. Reality doesn’t matter when you control the narrative that reaches C-level leaders. Reality is whatever you want it to be when you control the context around the evidence that C-level leaders see.

Money and promotions. The consulting firm gets to widen its engagement by taking over projects that used to be done by internal teams. If they play the game right, the business will become dependent on the consulting firm. It will hand over its roadmap and most of its highest-value R&D initiatives along with it.

The executive takes on a critical mandate to deploy AI and agents…promotion and raise 1. They remove all the barriers and blockers, and streamline the organization to reduce the cost of delivering all those agents…promotion and raise 2. They need a larger mandate (read: promotion and raise 3) and more headcount to deliver what the business needs. They run a much bigger organization now, so they need a promotion and raise (4) to reflect it. That’s 4 significant promotions in less than 5 years.

Based on their rapid rise through the ranks, they receive an opportunity they cannot pass up at a new company. This becomes raise 5 when your company counteroffers because they have invested so much in this AI journey, and the executive is the only one who seems to be making any progress.

Or the executive realizes they can’t keep running the game much longer, and they take the promotion and raise at the new company. And you’ll never guess who goes with them…the consultant. I have heard of people running this game for multiple decades until someone gives them a C-level role and they get exposed.

And you’ll never guess where they end up after that…the consulting firm. “After a successful run as CxO of {Impressive Company}, we were able to poach them and bring their expertise in-house.”

I have been brought in to fix 3 of these in just the last 9 months. It makes me mad when I realize that all the people the business needs to turn this thing around were laid off by the executive. The budget the business needed to get back in the race went to the consulting firm. Here they are, having to pay twice to get the result they were promised last time.

This game does so much damage to careers and businesses. There are other ways to get ahead and land clients. So let me explain how to beat this racket. It all comes down to narrative control and avoiding ‘Superhero Syndrome’.

The game relies on really talented people seeing the problems coming and trying to prevent the worst from coming to pass. It depends on everyone being a team player who is willing to jump in and help out. That is ‘Superhero Syndrome’. You put on the red cape and fly in to save the day because that’s the right thing to do.

It’s not just happening to you or engineering teams in general. It’s happening to sales, marketing, operations, finance, HR, and most other parts of the business. Every organization has people who try to be good team players and be proactive about filling gaps in the plan.

That’s what the executive is counting on, so that’s where we begin to defuse their plan. Don’t save people who aren’t worth saving. Let incompetent people fail.

I teach narrative control in my course about executive presence and C-level influence. (Like I said, it’s a line item on my balance sheet too.) The executive and consultant depend on no one else understanding how narratives are built and how to disrupt them.

When you hear the speech, get with your executive or C-level leader and plant the seed. “It doesn’t look like {the executive} has ever done anything like this before. I hope they have the right people backing them up, not a consultant looking to make their quarter.”

Planting the seed will either tell your executive that you are also wise to the game and they can loop you into their response, or it might be the early warning your executive needs to get in front of this. They are going to try to paint you, your team, or your organization as the incompetent one at some point in the near future. Get there first. Control the flow of evidence to your executive or C-level leader and provide the context that diffuses the narrative they will try to run.

Step 2 starts during those early listening sessions. Ask for a list of questions and discussion points upfront. Prepare your response and deliver it to your executive before the meeting. Compare notes across your organization and align your messaging from the top down. Have everyone provide their responses to your executive or C-level leader, so there’s only one meeting necessary…the one with your C-level leader.

The narrative depends on you contradicting other teams or your executive/C-level leader. Even the smallest gaps will be used to show that your team isn’t on the same page as everyone else. Alignment and consensus give a capable executive or C-level leader everything they need to give you cover.

But not everyone has that type of executive or C-level leader. Be prepared to follow up if you don’t. Create an email chain where you reshare your written responses and ask the executive to confirm that each point and recommendation has been added to the plan.

“If these concerns are not addressed, we cannot guarantee delivery, but we are willing to revisit this and help you revise your plan at each phase of implementation. Please share the plan as soon as possible, even if it’s just a draft.”

They will probably go silent and not respond, but it doesn’t matter. When they spring the impossible plan with your name all over it, reply to the earlier email chain with extremely brief feedback.

“Why were our concerns not addressed in the plan prior to assigning us the deliverables? If you had scheduled a meeting with us early on, we could have avoided all this rework.”

Provide no detail on what the plan should be or how to fix things. Talk with other teams to see if the executive is playing the same game with multiple teams and orgs. Build a coalition of teams who are all in the same boat. 3 is good enough, but hopefully you can get 5+ teams to join.

If they try to schedule a meeting with you or any of the others, ask for the questions and agenda upfront. As soon as you get it, decline the meeting. Get everyone going through the same thing to create a document responding to the questions. Have everyone share it with their executive or C-level leader. One of them will know what to do, even if yours doesn’t.

If the executive tries to schedule a meeting…

”Since so many of us are going through the same challenges with your plan, it would be more efficient for you to aggregate the feedback we have shared with leadership and come back to us with an updated plan for review.”

This is where weaponized incompetence falls apart. When 5 teams are isolated, they are easy to dismiss individually. When 5 teams form a coalition, they are difficult to dismiss.

The executive doesn’t know what to do or how to fix the plan. They never expected to do anything other than narrative control, but the coalition has an equally credible narrative with a paper trail to back it up. The executive has promised big results, but the only path available is to “manage expectations in light of new information.” The executive must come to the table and negotiate a viable plan.

But resist the urge to give them the plan. Give them feedback about risks, gaps, and reality with 0 context about what to do about it. The second you make a prescription about what to do, they win. It either becomes their idea when it works, or it’s your fault when it doesn’t. If they press you for specifics, “We would be happy to take this over from you. That seems like the most efficient way forward.”

You’ll never get full control, but the executive will realize that the only way forward is to give you a seat at the table and a voice in the process. That’s the goal. Only after you get that seat do you save the day. You end up with a few new meetings each quarter, but you and your team keep your jobs. If you play your hand well, you might even get some credit for doing all this.

The coalition you build is the bigger win. You are no longer a tactical operator working anonymously in tech. The coalition proves you can operate across teams and have business-level impacts. That will open a lot of doors for you, and the higher visibility makes you harder to replace. Narrative building and control are C-level capabilities, and you’ll be seen in a new light. That’s when new opportunities begin to come to you, rather than you chasing every promotion and new role.