The report was true when it left. It aged on the climb.
The light from our nearest star left it more than four years before it reaches your eye. Astronomers are relaxed about this. They know precisely how old their data is, and they correct for it.
Most leadership teams I have sat with have no equivalent correction. The reporting that reaches the top of a large organisation is rarely false. It is old. It was accurate when it left the front line, then it climbed, and every layer it passed through added a little polish and a little delay. By the time it lands in your steering pack, you are reading history, formatted as the present.
The research on why this happens is remarkably consistent, and I unpack it in the full article. People withhold unwelcome news even when sharing it costs them nothing (psychologists gave that one a name back in 1970). Project status reports drift optimistic as they travel upward. And the filtering gets stronger with every rung, because the stakes of disappointing you grow with your title. 'Good' cultures are not immune... they are often just politer about it.
Here is the part that matters if you are sponsoring a change program right now. Your program is the fastest-moving thing in the organisation, so it is where stale information does its worst damage. A plan approved eight weeks ago was built on information that was already ageing then. If governance only ever asks 'are we on plan?', you are steering by starlight.
There is a better standing question: is the plan reporting reality, or performing certainty? It is one of the questions I built Pragma to pressure-test with you, in my tone, before the next steering committee does it the hard way. You can start a conversation at app.pragmaticchange.com.au, and the FAQ covers how leaders are using it.
None of this makes you a bad leader, by the way. It makes you the operator of machinery designed 115 years ago to move instructions down, not truth up. The full story, including the study of 76 Nokia executives that ought to be required reading for every transformation sponsor, is in my latest article: It's tough at the top of a 115 year old machine.