In case you missed it, political conspiracies are no longer hatched in clandestine one-on-one meetings but in large groups brainstorming at annual think-tank retreats. “Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum,” revealed the Huffington Post earlier this week. We are not to be fooled by panels with descriptions like “Paul Gigot interviews the U.S. trade representative” or “How should we think about income inequality?” In reality, according to The Huffington Post, there was just one main topic of conversation, the story noted: “How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.”

Sure, the efforts to stop Trump might look like off-the-record grousing and feckless infighting. But perhaps the rendezvous at A.E.I. is really the culmination of a series of ever-shrewder plots by the Republican Party’s anti-Trump contingent to regain control. With the attendance of tech C.E.O.s, like Napster co-founder Sean Parker and Google’s Larry Page, what we’re seeing is evidence of a winning formula that cashiers yesterday’s outdated waterfall model of conspiracy development for a lean-start-up-style version that strives for transparency and can be summed up as build, measure, learn—and sometimes pivot. Even the Dalai Lama, a pioneer of agile management, showed up, perhaps also to act as a bundler.

If you look back at the campaign timeline, it all makes sense, doesn’t it? While the original Republican conspiracy plot involved letting Trump fade out on his own, there was by February a deft pivot to Conspiracy B, which was to have Marco Rubio come in third in Iowa and then zoom on to victory. Rick Santorum duly endorsed Rubio and stumbled only in being unable to point to any of Rubio’s achievements. Meanwhile, former G.O.P. nominee Bob Dole had already indicated to The New York Times that he would prefer Donald Trump to Ted Cruz—part of a crafty plan, it was said, to knock out both Cruz and Trump. This approach stayed robust through a fifth-place Rubio finish in New Hampshire, a second-place finish in South Carolina, and a second-place finish in Nevada.

Thanks to nimble management, conservative conspirators met up again and agreed to iterate via a new approach: keep everyone in the race. “No one—not Cruz or Rubio or Kasich or Carson—should drop out if the goal is to stop Trump from getting to 1,237,” tweeted Sonny Bunch, executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon. “Keep splitting it.” Along those lines, Rubio campaign advisor Terry Sullivan gathered some top bundlers to tell them that Rubio could effectively win zero states yet still seize the nomination in a contested convention. “It was a presentation that defied reality,” one Rubio backer, told Politico, lulling us all into complacency.

The next day, on March 2, conservative pundit Bill Kristol let slip the Republican establishment’s next move to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. “They need to defer to Rubio in Florida and probably to Kasich in Ohio, and say, or imply, that if you are a Cruz voter in Ohio, and if you look up the day before the primary and it’s Trump 42 percent, Kasich 35 percent—vote for Kasich,” Kristol said, conveying a game plan that anyone could write on his hand. That same day, Republican business leaders got on a secret conference call with Meg Whitman, Todd Ricketts, Paul Singer, and several dozen more people in which funding was sought for an anti-Trump PAC called Our Principles—a 50-person plot somehow unearthed by The New York Times.