[JPKab]

I don't disagree, but at my last company, I was always very explicit about these things in business terms.

The real enemy I ran into was the SVPs desire to please the CEO who wanted to please the board who wanted to please the investment PR racket and make sure we could tell Gartner that X feature is ready by Y date to ensure we were included in their Magic Quadrant. The answer to the bosses had to be "yes it will be released by Y date". Saw that pattern repeated, realized "Agile" was just a word for waterfall, quit for a startup.

[pdkl95]

"How a plan becomes policy"

http://web.mnstate.edu/alm/humor/ThePlan.htm

This poem is my favorite description of this pattern, because it focuses on the the bad communication that creates the problem. Regardless of the intent of the people involved, gradually filtering out important information at each level as people try to please their superior guarantees a GIGO mess for the that the people at the top. As the poem says, "this ... is how shit happens",

Adopting something like the airline industry's "no-blame" culture that focuses on getting accurate reports by explicitly not focusing on blame might help avoid the natural tendency to eventually fall into this pattern.

[35fbe7d3d5b9]

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassi...

> I wrote a note in sgi.bad-attitude about the "optimist effect", which I believe is mostly true. In condensed form:

> Optimists tend to be promoted, so the higher up in the organization you are, the more optimistic you tend to be. If one manager says "I can do that in 4 months", and another only promises it in 6 months, the 4 month guy gets the job. When the software is 4 months late, the overall system complexity makes it easy to assign blame elsewhere, so there's no way to judge mis-management when it's time for promotions.

> To look good to their boss, most people tend to put a positive spin on their reports. With many levels of management and increasing optimism all the way up, the information reaching the VPs is very filtered, and always filtered positively.