> Immediately, people started to express strong opinions in favor or against it. We had a full-company sitdown to talk about it, but it was really weird because it was all just hypotheticals. Ultimately, we burned a lot of time on it, and the deal was kind of dead in the water due to this approach.

This sounds like the sort of problem you solve with a policy, not by breaking the enabling technology. What about just telling your employees that nascent partnerships—like nascent microservices—start out "owned" by the people exploring them, and everyone can observe their development, but nobody has an implicit right to have input on them until they get to the "release-candidate" phase?