The Garden of the Blind

The most pervasive culture issue that I have seen in hierarchal organizations is the tendency to discourage bad news from being reported upward. This is driven by the fact that managers will either blame the bearers of the bad news for the problems that they are reporting, or else they will require them to go fix the problems. This type of problem has been responsible for a wide variety of major failures (disasters?) that could have been prevented or at least minimized if senior management had been made aware of the problems earlier.

A classic example of this was the Challenger disaster, which happened largely because management wanted to have the launch go forward, and therefore the voices of caution among the (relatively low-ranking) technical staff were not heeded by management and their concerns were not elevated to the necessary levels to stop the launch.

Another, more recent, example would be the Coast Guard’s Deepwater acquisition program. Again, some workers identified problems fairly early in the acquisition, but those concerns were not passed up to the top until ships with unsound hulls had already been produced, which would have to be modified at great expense in order to make the fleet seaworthy. (Note that there is also some evidence of more criminal activity in this case, but even that could have been curtailed by better communication from those in a position to see problems early.)

I’m not sure how to fix this kind of culture. There is a strong and justifiable desire to hold workers accountable for problems that occur on their watch. Perhaps there needs to be a better distinction made between problems that happen under someone’s watch and problems that a person creates. Of course, that isn’t likely to happen. If your project fails, it’s because you are a bad person, not because I failed to give it sufficient support to succeed.