Not quite the same thing but I've heard of people putting "A Duck" in their designs, which is a superfluous design element that is included solely for the purpo

Not quite the same thing but I've heard of people putting "A Duck" in their designs, which is a superfluous design element that is included solely for the purpose of letting a micromanaging superior remove it so that they can feel like they contributed to the design. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ But whether it's a duck, anchor, strawman, whatever you call it -- the risk with proposing an obviously bad solution to make the good solutions look better is that every once in a while they'll pick the bad solution. I think it was a talk by Mike Monteiro where he explicitly cautioned against using this approach because it tends to backfire hilariously at the worst possible moment.