Why Bad News Travels Sideways Before it Travels Upward
- Andrew Pigott
- May 12
- 5 min read
Updated: May 16
The performance dashboard has been green for months. The board paper has been calm. The steering group has repeatedly reported that issues are being managed. Then, quite suddenly, the situation becomes urgent, expensive and reputationally difficult, and when leaders look more closely, they discover the problem was already known locally. Not as a finished, packaged concern ready for formal escalation. Known in the way things are known before they are nameable: discussed in handovers, worried about in private messages, raised quietly with trusted colleagues, and circulating widely at working level for weeks before it reached the people with the authority to act.
The instinctive question is: why did nobody tell us?
It is the wrong question.
The news did travel. Just not upward.
The problem was rarely invisible. It was simply moving in a different direction. Difficult information was alive in corridor conversations, informal debriefs, peer calls and the meeting that happens after the formal meeting ends. Bad news was travelling sideways. It just was not travelling upward in a useful form.
This is not simply dysfunction. Lateral conversations serve a real function in complex organisations. People use them to test whether they are overreacting, to make sense of what they are seeing, and to work out whether something is genuinely a problem or just noise. The peer space is where uncertainty gets processed before it becomes a formal concern. The meeting after the meeting is not just a cultural irritation. It is often a signal that the formal room is not yet safe or useful enough for the real conversation.
The better question is not "why did no one tell us?" It is: where was this already being discussed, and what stopped it becoming discussable in the formal system?
What the formal system has taught people
When delayed escalation is a repeated pattern, it is often not best understood as a courage deficit. If the same people are candid in peer spaces but cautious in formal forums, the issue is not their confidence. It is what the formal system has taught them.
People learn, through repeated experience, what kinds of candour are welcomed, ignored or made burdensome. They notice what happens when someone raises a concern that implicates a powerful stakeholder. They notice whether a leader gets curious or defensive when presented with incomplete news. They notice whether the person who escalated something difficult got helped, blamed or left holding the problem. They notice whether anything changed afterwards. Over time, these observations accumulate into a shared, largely unspoken understanding of what the formal system can hold and what it cannot.
This is the ground that Morrison and Milliken's research on organisational silence was describing: silence becomes a collective pattern, shaped not by individual fear alone but by shared beliefs about whether speaking up is safe, useful or worth the personal cost. Alongside that, Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety showed that people take interpersonal risks when they believe they will not be humiliated for doing so. Both matter. But the question people are actually weighing is usually two-part: is it safe to say this here, and will anything useful happen if I do? When the honest answer to the second question is "probably not," safety alone is not enough to change the flow of information.
When information exists but cannot travel
A well-documented example comes from a large UK rail infrastructure programme whose delayed opening, announced publicly some years ago, was subsequently examined in detail by independent reviewers. The reviews pointed not simply to a lack of data. Warning signs had been visible in parts of the system for some time. What the governance structure had struggled to do was surface a realistic interpretation of those signals early enough for sponsors to understand what they actually meant for delivery. Slippage was being managed and worked around rather than plainly owned and escalated. The organisation had information. What it lacked were the conditions for honest sense-making to travel upward in a form that could be held and acted upon.
Dashboards can be green while the work is already telling a different story. That gap, between having information and making the truth discussable, is where significant risk tends to accumulate.
Where speak-up initiatives fall short
Many organisations have invested in speak-up campaigns, confidential reporting routes and formal freedom-to-speak-up infrastructure. These things have value and should exist. But they help less than leaders hope when the leadership response, the follow-through and the governance routines do not change alongside them.
The persistent issue is what research on voice in regulated sectors describes as the action gap. People may feel technically able to raise a concern and still doubt whether the organisation will act on it in any meaningful way. Nothing teaches silence faster than a concern that is welcomed warmly and then quietly disappears.
Five moves that change the pattern
Decouple escalation from solution ownership
The expectation that concerns should arrive packaged with a proposed fix is one of the more reliable ways to delay the flow of honest information. The familiar phrase "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" creates a dangerous bottleneck. It teaches people to wait until they have enough certainty, authority and time to package the problem. By that point, the signal is often late. An early warning should not need a finished answer attached to it.
Change your first response to incomplete news
The first response to bad news often becomes the next rule of the room. If a leader reacts with irritation, interrogation or defensiveness, the room learns quickly. If the response is curiosity and practical support, the room learns the opposite. The way incomplete news is received matters more than most leaders recognise, and it shapes what people feel able to bring forward for months afterwards.
Create a forum for sense-making, not just assurance
Many senior forums are designed entirely around performance management and reporting. They are built to confirm that work is on track, not to explore where it might not be. If every forum is an assurance forum, the organisation has nowhere legitimate to think out loud. A regular, lower-stakes space for exploring what is harder than expected, what is being worked around and where pressure is building can surface signals that would otherwise stay sideways.
Ask questions that invite reality
Questions like "is everything on track?" invite a defensive yes. Questions that assume some difficulty is always present invite more honest responses. What are people working around right now? What looks manageable in the report but is harder in practice? Where is the team relying on individual effort to hold things together? What are we talking about informally that has not yet reached any dashboard?
Close the loop visibly
For concerns that have been raised, name what was heard, what was tested and what changed as a result. People do not only need to feel safe raising concerns. They need evidence, accumulated through experience, that doing so makes a practical difference. Visible follow-through is part of how a speak-up culture actually forms.
What the pattern is telling you
Bad news travelling sideways before it travels upward is not simply a communication failure or a problem with individual confidence. It is a design signal. It tells you something about how your organisation handles uncertainty, authority and risk, about your meeting architecture, your escalation habits, your governance routines and the conditions under which difficult truths are currently able to travel.
Leaders can change the pattern, not by asking people to be braver, but by changing the rooms, the routines and the responses through which information has to move. When that changes, the sideways conversation becomes a source of early intelligence rather than a place where risk quietly accumulates.
At Common Path Connection, we help leadership teams look beneath the surface of how information, ownership and decisions really move.
If this pattern is recognisable in your organisation, a good starting point is our Culture Health Check, which identifies where silence is concentrated, what is driving it, and what needs to change in the design of your forums, not just the message about speaking up.
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