The more senior you get, the better the news can get. Ask anyone who's sat at the top of a major program — or rather, don't bother asking, because that's the point; the hierarchy machine is built by incentives to tell you, dearest senior leader of complex change...that things are fine!
I've been thinking about where that machine came from (read on for the answer), and what it costs. And then, of all things, a phone launch (as arguably the defining technology of our time) helped me reminisce and go deeper on a fabled downfall...
In case you've been living under a rock, Apple's iPhone Duo landed last week. The first folding iPhone, titanium, a whopping A$3,499 (!!! And then there's A$5,899 for the 2TB version) and genuinely intriguing — even to one of the millennial kids who stuck with a trusted Nokia 'brick' while the 'clam phones' took over the back of the bus to the food court on a Friday night.
My first phone was a Nokia 3310 in the classic navy blue. A week of battery, Snake II, and a build quality somewhere between 'phone' and 'cement slab'. The Motorola Razr crowd had the clam phones and the flourish of snapping them shut; but we had certainty.
So part of me looked at the Duo this week and asked the obvious question…where's the Nokia Fold-a-Brick?
The real answer has nothing to do with hinges or handsets. Nokia's leaders sat at the top of the same machine you might be sitting on — and it told them things were fine, right up until they weren't. Two researchers spent 76 interviews documenting exactly how the Execs weren't dialled in to the problems.
Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies.
Timo Vuori and Quy Huy interviewed 76 Nokia executives and engineers about the 2005–2010 period — poignantly the years the iPhone arrived and Nokia's mobile phone dominance evaporated — then published the findings in one of management's top journals.
The answer is as old as time; asymmetric fear.
Top managers feared competitors and shareholders.
Middle managers feared their own bosses and peers.
And fear pointing inward stopped negative information travelling up. Leadership formed what the authors describe as an "overly optimistic perception" of the company's technological capabilities, and made decisions accordingly. The researchers gave the result a name: temporal myopia.
Nobody lied, exactly. Thousands of capable people just kept quiet, at scale, and the company that built my indestructible navy brick became powder dust in the market. And a case study business schools now teach.
You're sitting at the top of the same machine.
If you're the most senior person on a major change program, some of that mechanism should feel uncomfortably familiar.
The papers arrive pre-aligned. The risks arrive rated amber, at worst. The traffic lights turn green somewhere between the working group and your agenda, and reds surface only when they can no longer be contained — which is to say, late.
You are the best-briefed person in the building and the worst-informed person on your own change. You can feel the sanitisation even when you can't see it. And the standard response is to blame culture, the consultants (it's fine, we're used to it...) or a lack of courage — why won't people just tell me the truth?
Most leaders fail to see that the machine is working exactly as designed; it's just that it was originally designed in 1911.
Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911) scaled one assumption to organisational practice: managers think, workers do. Knowledge flows down.
In Taylor's world that was defensible; the person at the top was far more likely to understand the work, or at least the industry, the best. So filtering information upward cost almost nothing.
Complex change in 2026 inverts it completely. On a major program, the steering committee knows the terrain least; the people doing the work are discovering, daily, where the plan and reality disagree. But the machinery survived the inversion. The 2005 playbook is Taylor's intellectual grandchild, and it builds reporting systems that reward compliance with the original plan over adaptation to discovered reality.
(Chapter 4 of my book traces this whole 115-year argument properly, Taylor to Toyota to the program you're running now…Pragmatic Change is out now at markwinter.com.au/book.)
"Keeping mum" is the human baseline
Psychologists Sidney Rosen and Abraham Tesser named it in 1970: the MUM effect — keeping Mum about Undesirable Messages. People stay quiet even when the bad news isn't their fault and delivering it costs them nothing. Keeping mum is the human baseline; hierarchy just stacks extra reasons on top of one that was already there.
(A side note for fellow word nerds, because this always confused me: 'mum' has nothing to do with your mother. It's the Middle English imitation of a closed-lip hum — the same 'mum' as 'mum's the word'. Shakespeare, four centuries ago: "give no words but mum".)
In project settings the instinct compounds. Mark Keil's research on troubled IT projects found a majority of project managers admit to biasing status reports on their way up the line. Practitioners have a word for this standard operating procedure, I mean...occasional bad habit: 'watermelon reporting', green on the outside, red on the inside.
And compounded across a whole company, it's why Nokia have retreated back to IT network gear and I'm instead considering paying the price of a small car, to finally be cool.
The machine has been re-engineered before
Toyota's Andon Cord lets any worker stop the entire production line when they spot a problem or a potential improvement. It's a management-encouraged design feature, not a failure of the system. (Side note for fellow Lean Six Sigma buffs — you have to admire a culture that truly permits 'pulling the Andon Cord' at the 'operator' level.)
I saw an offshoot at Carl Zeiss Vision in 2007, across manufacturing plants in China, Brazil, Mexico, Hungary and Australia: continuous improvement teams on the floor, drawing the day's problem on a whiteboard next to the line and fixing it by the end of the week — though often by the next shift. And I lived it at Campbell Page, watching regional managers fold the corporate strategy to fit the region they actually lived in, across 56 offices.
Each is the same move at a different scale: trust the people doing the work to see what needs to be adjusted. And notice what this does for the senior leader at the top — bad news travels upward faster than failure can compound. That senior leader now has a chance to use their experience and nous.
(Want to soundboard up some "crazy" continual improvement or culture-changing ideas? That's exactly what Pragma was built for…all my knowledge base and insights, in the comfort of your own screen.)
Charisma and inspiration don't get you the bad news you desperately seek.
Jim Detert and Ethan Burris studied 3,149 employees and 223 managers, and found that specific, observable openness behaviours predict whether people speak up. Interestingly, 'transformational leadership' does not. Inspiration is lovely; but it does not open the door. And it certainly doesn't compel me to walk through it with an honest update.
One more twist from the research: the openness effect is strongest on your best performers. So conversely...when there isn't an open understanding...your best people go quiet first, and silently.
And consider this: do firms promote people for individual performance, or for the ability to solicit (potentially company-saving) dissent?
One question, if the machine beneath you seems to be creaking:
When did someone, either doing the work or impacted by the change, last successfully adjust a complex plan?
If the honest answer is "that one time...", your reporting system is performing certainty at you.
In Pragmatic Change, I suggest you make 'is the plan performing certainty?' a standing governance item for exactly this reason. The fuller fix runs through decision architecture aka: who decides what and when.
Part of Further pragmatic thoughts: a series of ideas that didn't make the cut, or that I've riffed on since writing the book. The full system is at What is Pragmatic Change? and the book, Pragmatic Change: A modern pragmatist's guide for leading complex change, is out now.
Sources: Vuori & Huy (2016), Administrative Science Quarterly. Rosen & Tesser (1970), Sociometry. Smith & Keil (2003), Information Systems Journal. Detert & Burris (2007), Academy of Management Journal. Benson, Li & Shue (2019), Quarterly Journal of Economics. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (1911).