Have you ever wondered why bosses don’t listen when you tell them there is a problem in the business? I used to think the problem was visibility — the distance between operations and my boss, and by extension, the Board — or that I wasn’t explaining the problem well enough to be understood. These are all reasonable explanations, so I pushed myself harder to close that visibility gap and spent weeks putting evidence into a report. It didn’t matter in the end. And that had always bothered me. Why wouldn’t you consider the problems being reported seriously? Why ignore the solution to fix it too?

I was perfectly capable of conjuring answers to these questions myself, from the self-loathing depths of I wasn’t good enough, to man-made barriers that tried to deny me because of my gender and skin colour. And of course, there was the old-fashioned answer: I was simply dealing with a level of incompetence where people were more comfortable burying their heads in the sand than dealing with the problem.

More recently though, I discovered a better answer. It is better because it explains the phenomenon more consistently across the industry. I think it boils down to two considerations:

  • How much of a credibility hit would the boss need to absorb in order to accept this new information?
  • Can the boss tolerate looking bad early enough to avoid a bigger problem in the future?

So, if your boss thinks he cannot survive looking bad in front of the Board and investors by changing his mind or his plans, he is going to be less receptive to contradictory information. Think about it. A CEO hired to fix an urgent problem has already packaged the solution and sold the story of how to fix it. Then a new problem comes along. Even if it arrives with a solution attached, accepting it could still be problematic, because now the CEO has to go back to the Board and say:

“Hey, remember I told you I identified the problem and already knew how to fix it? Turns out it’s the wrong problem; the actual problem is something else… Oh, and the timeframe I told you I would fix the problem? Turns out it’s going to take twice as long and be more expensive too…”

Now, if you combine that with confidence (false confidence?) that the new problem is not going to blow up too quickly, there is that tendency to kick the can down the road.

So sometimes, it doesn’t matter how real the problem is, how visible you make it, or how well you communicate it. The real obstacle is the implied cost of changing the existing story.

C-suite leaders are often under pressure to prove they are up to the task, especially when stepping into a company already in trouble. They need to diagnose the problem quickly, commit to a plan, demonstrate progress and throw in some quick wins early to secure their credibility.

So perhaps this explains why you sometimes get no meaningful response to your well-researched report and proposal. Or if you are hard to ignore, you get this alternative treatment: “This sounds really interesting, could you go back and get me more proof/data on this?” Sounds familiar?

When the number becomes the business

Often, a dashboard is the tool of choice to demonstrate progress against that narrative. Businesspeople are obsessed with dashboards. What is meant to be an indicator of business health and progress against set targets can sometimes become the only thing people care about: hitting a number. What is worse is when hitting the number becomes disconnected from what the business is actually trying to achieve. Once you have a Board to report to, the dashboard can become a reality-warping tool too.

People start to change their behaviour and the business to make the dashboard say what it needs to say. This is especially true when you penalise behaviours that drag the numbers down and incentivise behaviours that prop them up.

For example, in another life, I was at a software company where someone thought it was a good idea to measure engineers’ productivity by how quickly they opened and closed issues. The problem was that if the closure rate looked too low, the engineers were forced to write a report explaining why and what they were going to do about it.

So, wanting to avoid being penalised, the engineers started to bury issues that were hard to fix and instead reported those they could resolve within the working day. As a result, the dashboard chirped happily green while harder, more critical issues remained unresolved in the system.

Measuring productivity is important, but when the process and system teach people which behaviours get rewarded and which ones get punished, we are inadvertently communicating what the organisation values. And if there is no safety in reporting the truth, then people will naturally bury it.

What if the system expects bad news?

Contrast this with the famous Andon Cord used in Toyota’s car assembly factories as part of the Toyota Production System. Workers were expected to pull the cord when they discovered an abnormality, which would summon their team leader. If the problem could be resolved within the work cycle, production continued. If not, the line would stop at a defined position.

The thinking behind the system recognises that people who are close to the work may possess information the system needs. Crucially, it gives workers a safe mechanism to surface that information so it can be investigated.

The common thread between the Toyota and new C-suite examples is that new information creates an inconvenience. One has the power to stop a production line, while the other can derail a perfectly packaged story to the Board and investors. But how that inconvenience is treated tells you a lot about the system you are in.

If you recognise yourself as a leader in the system:

Telling your employees that your door is open does nothing. Ask yourself if your organisation has a mechanism that allows information to contradict the prevailing story. If so, how is it handled? Who is empowered to investigate it, and what protects the messenger? And if the information turns out to be wrong, what happens to the messenger?

Toyota’s answer is the Andon Cord. The cord gets pulled, a team leader arrives to help investigate whether the part or process is actually outside the standard, and they respond accordingly. Workers are encouraged to signal when they are uncertain, because each signal can also become an opportunity to learn.

If you recognise yourself as an employee in the system:

Treat the organisation’s response to your signal as a signal itself. Stop treating an endlessly rising demand for evidence as evidence that you simply haven’t worked hard enough yet.

Does the organisation investigate inconvenient information? Can plans change when evidence changes? Are people rewarded for surfacing problems, or more for making dashboards look healthy?

If you have done your part to communicate, provide evidence and offer a solution, then the organisation’s ability to respond becomes evidence too — and a basis for your own decision-making.

Further reading

  • Donald T. Campbell, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change” (1979) — for a deeper look at why measures can become distorted when too much consequence is attached to them. This is the thinking behind what became known as Campbell’s Law.
  • Sherf, Tangirala & Venkataramani, “Why Managers Do Not Seek Voice from Employees” (Organization Science, 2019) — for the other side of the employee-boss interaction: research into why managers may be reluctant to seek challenging information from employees, particularly when acting on it is difficult or disruptive.
  • Toyota Motor Corporation, “Toyota Production System” — for more on the thinking behind Jidoka and Andon, and how Toyota designed its production system to surface abnormalities rather than allow them to travel unnoticed.