Reports reaching a sponsor magnify every small mistake by a change program's opponents and shrink major failures by its allies, so the skewed record reads as the natural one.
An example
During a network modernization at a wireless carrier, the program's chief of staff compiled the weekly status deck for the chief technology officer. The director of network operations had argued against the vendor the program chose. Over two quarters the deck listed each of her team's errors by name: a missed maintenance window, a misrouted ticket, a site visit logged a day late. When the vendor's integration team caused a nine-hour outage in two metro areas, the deck filed it under "Learnings" as a "cutover sequencing event" with no owner. The chief technology officer, who rarely saw operations directly, began asking in staff meetings why network operations kept making mistakes, and the director's year-end rating dropped a level. A board member who had heard about the outage from a large customer then asked to see the full incident log.
Why it works
Shrinking the allies' failures makes their record look cleaner than it is, so continued backing looks like a choice the record supports, and it costs the decision-maker nothing because no embarrassing bill ever arrives. Magnifying every small error by opponents makes them look worse, turning colleagues with mixed records into the people who keep making mistakes. Each magnified error is a separate cost they must answer for, and siding with them ties the decision-maker to a troubled camp. Control of the channel to the decision-maker is the precondition, along with a decision-maker who sees little directly, no independent auditor keeping an even log, and opponents without comparable reach.
The thinking behind it
Daniel Kahneman Availability, as Tversky and Kahneman describe it in Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974), means judging how frequent something is by how easily instances come to mind. A status deck that names every small error by one camp and files the other camp's outage under "learnings" decides which instances come to mind. A single error log kept the same way for both camps gives the decision-maker an even set to recall.
Herbert A. Simon In Administrative Behavior (1947), Simon analyzes organizations as systems of decisions shaped by premises the organization supplies, including information, so whoever controls those premises influences the decisions. The person who compiles the status deck controls the decision-maker's premises about which camp is competent. An independent channel, or a board member who asks to see both ledgers, supplies a second set of premises.
Warning signs
Status decks name opponents' errors individually and describe allies' errors as unattributed "learnings" or "events." One person or office controls what reaches the decision-maker, who sees little of operations firsthand. The decision-maker starts repeating the curated picture as their own view. Small mistakes by one camp come up in performance reviews and skip-levels, while large failures by the other never do.
How to defend yourself
Change the record itself, since rebutting items one at a time means arguing on ground the curator chose.
- Keep your own complete incident log across both camps, with dates, severity, and owners, drawn from the source systems.
- Ask for a single error log kept the same way for every workstream and maintained by an independent channel, such as a chief of staff outside the program or an internal auditor.
- Find a credible third party, a respected operating executive or a board member, who will ask to see both ledgers.
- When an ally's failure is large enough to show, make sure it reaches the decision-maker with an owner attached.
How a leader shuts it down
Incident and error reports should come from source systems, with the same format and attribution rules for every team. Keep more than one channel open to you about how a program is going. Before you hear one camp's list of problems, ask what went wrong in the other camp's work this quarter.