Agile made a specific promise: you’ll know about problems early enough to do something about them. Not after the deadline passes, but early enough to make a difference. That promise starts with working, tested software on frequent intervals so you can see what’s actually done, not just what’s reported. It’s also why the agile community embraced probabilistic forecasting; rolling Monte Carlo simulations that tell you weeks or months in advance whether you’re on track.
The tools work, the math is sound, and yet projects often still fail in exactly the same way they always did. The deadline arrives and everyone acts surprised, even though the data was already there.
Why is that?
The Mum Effect: individuals don’t report problems
The Mum Effect1 is the well-documented tendency to avoid passing along bad news out of fear of the consequences to the person delivering it. In IT projects specifically, this has been identified as a primary driver of project failure. Although we had the information, we didn’t pass it along.
Deming saw it clearly: “Fear invites wrong figures. Bearers of bad news fare badly. To keep his job, anyone may present to his boss only good news.”2
The team member watching the forecast slip isn’t hiding it because they’re dishonest. They’re responding rationally to an environment where bad news has consequences.
The Deaf Effect: managers signal they don’t want to hear it
If that weren’t bad enough, on the other side we discover the Deaf Effect3, where decision-makers fail to heed or actively ignore warnings of risk or bad news.
The feedback loop this creates is vicious: bad news gets reported and then dismissed. The person reporting it then looks foolish or disloyal, and now the next person thinks twice before reporting anything. Over time the team learns, through direct experience, that the forecast being “in the red” is not something worth mentioning.
The Mum Effect isn’t just a property of the team. It’s often a response to the Deaf Effect in management.
The other biases piling on
Even without the social dynamics, several cognitive biases push in the same direction:
- Sunk cost fallacy: we’ve invested too much to admit this isn’t working
- Escalation of commitment: related but distinct: the more invested, the more motivated to keep the story positive and prove the original decision was right4
- Optimism bias: genuinely believing it will come together
- Attribution bias: the slippage is someone else’s fault, so it feels premature to escalate until that’s resolved
- Normalcy bias: we’ve recovered from bad forecasts before and this will probably resolve itself
None of these require bad intentions. They’re the predictable output of normal human cognition under pressure.
Organizational Silence: the long-term result
Morrison and Milliken’s model of Organizational Silence5 describes what happens when the Mum Effect and the Deaf Effect operate together over time. Now this is just an attribute of the system, not a matter of individual reluctance. People stop trying, and the organization collectively learns not to surface problems.
At this point the probabilistic forecast is almost beside the point. It can show 5% probability of hitting the date and nobody will say anything.
What to do about it?
This is a systems thinking problem so there is no single right answer. We’ll need to try a bunch of things to see what works. There are two places I’d be inclined to start with, however:
- My first step towards fixing almost any problem is to make it visible so I’d find a way to put the forecast on an information radiator. Make it difficult to avoid.
- I’d run a retrospective specifically designed to surface what we knew but didn’t say. As with any retrospective, this needs to be blameless.
If you’d like help with either of those then let’s talk.
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Tesser, A., & Rosen, S. (1975). The Reluctance to Transmit Bad News. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Volume 8, 193–232. doi:10.1016/s0065-2601(08)60251-8 ↩
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The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education – 3rd Edition. Kindle Edition. MIT Press. ↩
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Cuellar, Michael. The Deaf Effect Response to Bad News Reporting in Information Systems Projects. ↩
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Arpan Jani (2011), Escalation of commitment in troubled IT projects: Influence of project risk factors and self-efficacy on the perception of risk and the commitment to a failing project, International Journal of Project Management ↩
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Park, Chongwoo & Keil, Mark. (2009). Organizational Silence and Whistle‐Blowing on IT Projects: An Integrated Model*. Decision Sciences. 40. 901 - 918. 10.1111/j.1540-5915.2009.00255.x. ↩