Do You Recognise the Alembic? / FR
Your initiative enters simple.
A to reach B.
It comes out differently.
Conditional. Deferred. Sent back to committee. Loaded with precautions no one ordered. Stripped of the speed that gave it meaning. Unrecognisable.
No one said no.
And yet nothing gets through.
This is not an accident. This is not a poor lawyer. This is not a bad relationship with your GC.
It is a system.
A system perfectly built to analyse, qualify, reserve, sequence.
Not to decide.
What I call the alembic: the structure into which a living decision enters and from which documented prudence emerges.
The alembic has not malfunctioned. It produced exactly what it was built for.
You were the one who wanted something else.
The three articles in this series described the three entry points of the mechanism.
The norm — and the confidential record that fixes what should have remained open.
The language — and the vocabulary of dilution that nationalises the decision without saying so.
The structure — and the market that sells the permanent insufficiency of the legal function.
Together, they produce the same result: an organisation where the decision is nominally yours and materially elsewhere.
You saw it at work in the Total 90 case. The bill is always paid in delayed or unfundable projects.
You recognise the alembic if:
A simple initiative takes three months to produce a response.
You asked a direction question and received a document.
The meeting ended without anyone ruling — but something was decided anyway.
Your GC advised against proceeding. You followed. You are not certain it was right.
You have the sense of arbitrating fragments while the whole drifts.
What the alembic cannot do in your place: set the trajectory before handing it over. Define the strategy. Decide what enters the process and in what condition it exits. Hold the course when collective prudence reformulates it.
It is not additional normative expertise that is needed.
It is an executive decision that wires the norm to the strategy.
Expertise, the structure has. A pilot, it has only one.
The phenomenon has a structure. → The Pattern
It has a response. → Lead or Follow
Dominique Owona-Atangana
Governance architect under normative pressure.
I work with executives whose decision-making is drifting off course — decisions endlessly reopened, excessive internal approvals, legal function operating beyond its mandate, strategy diluted by prudence, leadership losing the lead within its own organisation.
When complexity starts to cost,
I help leaders keep business decisions moving under pressure.
Confidential. Temporary. Executive level.
