I worked for a company that did the voting for American Idol for the first few seasons. Weird culture, a mix of bare metal and NIH that I thought didn’t quite function and some of us were trying to change that culture. Everyone resented working on that project and wanted to do other things, so at some point we disinvited ourselves (or so the story went, might have been sour grapes).

The problem was we killed the cash cow without any viable livestock lined up to replace it, and the layoffs started about a year later. Of course 4/5ths of the people trying to change the culture were in the first round. Get rid of the rabble rousers first.

While I think our proposed changes would have helped dramatically, I also think it might have been better if the company management had invested in making it more palatable to work on the project. Bribery if you have to. Conferences, toys… but they didn’t do either, and it flopped.

Edit: on rereading your comments I may have missed your angle, but I’ll leave this anyway, since we are talking dumb failure modes.