Why does problem-hiding occur?

Right from the start, every team on the program-of-work have been reporting green statuses.  We're now in the home stretch so it should all be good.

And then it starts... first one team reports that they may not make it... then another... then another... until the program is now a sea of red.

Does this experience seem familiar?

In every instance that I've seen this happen, the teams knew far in advance that there were problems and they may even have been trying to report this "up the chain" but inevitably, somewhere along the line, someone decides to modify the message before it reaches the steering committee.

As an example,

"In the worst case, it's a catastrophe. Most likely we won't make it.  Even in the best case, we'll barely scrape by.  I would strongly recommend we prioritise the work aggressively to ensure the core capabilities are delivered."

Turns into

"There is some risk that we won't make it but if we work hard we should be fine."

The issue is not that there are problems.  One would expect any complex socio-technical system to have problems.  The issue is that these problems are hidden from governance until it is too late to take any corrective action.

This is an example of what Jim Collins might describe as a systemic inability to confront brutal reality.

It would be easy enough to blame it all on the middle managers, given this is pretty much where the message modification occurs, but let's think more broadly.  This pattern of problem-hiding in program management is widespread, which suggests there is something more fundamentally broken.

So why might problem-hiding occur?

The Steering Committee, and really the overall organisation, has a general expectation that new projects start out with a status of green.  In other words, at the start of a large piece of work, when we have the maximum amount of ignorance of customer, business, and technical issues, we pretend that we have the most confidence that the effort will be successful...

Every new project should start of with a status of red and only gradually, over time, prove itself that it deserves a green status.  I might even claim that any new project that starts out with a status of green is either lying or not paying attention.

Martin Fowler calls this phenomenon Early Pain.

People are punished for raising problems and are rewarded when they don't raise problems.  In other words, problems are not seen as invaluable for learning. 

In Lean lingo, this phenomenon is described with phrases like "No problem is a problem" and "Problems are a gold mine"

The Steering Committee accepts excuses that "we tried our hardest" by doing lots of overtime, hiring more people,  hiring consultants, etc.  In other words, as long as we can show we did our best, this excuses that we were blatantly lying about our progress...

None of the excuses justify why problems were not raised earlier.

The criteria for reporting status to the Steering Committee are not concrete and are too open to interpretation.  In other words, what I think you mean by "green status" is not what you actually mean by "green status".

Concrete criteria would be things like using a burn-up chart based on running, tested features and showing projected completion dates.  It might also be things like using integration check-points with real demonstrations rather than presentations in a meeting room.

What would it take to eradicate problem-hiding?
Even if these are the reasons, it is still difficult to initiate changes to address them.  I still wonder about more effective ways to change the narrative and the expectations.

I wonder what it would take to eradicate problem-hiding from organisations.