Drift Hides Behind Deflection
Most projects do not fail in a single moment. They drift.
And drift rarely announces itself. It does not arrive as a crisis or a red status report. It arrives as a series of small, reasonable explanations. Each one makes sense on its own. Together, they hide the fact that nothing is really moving.
The signs are familiar
If you have sat through enough project updates, you will recognise these.
Different excuses, but the conditions remain the same. Last month it was resourcing. This month it is the vendor. Next month it will be something else. The situation underneath does not change.
Positive narratives over bad news. The update is full of progress stories, momentum and confidence. The difficult conversation never quite makes it onto the agenda.
Budget, resources and time are spent, but percentage completion does not match the effort spent. The money is going out. The people are busy. Yet the work done does not add up to what was paid for.
And the explanations follow a pattern
When these signs are questioned, the answers tend to sound alike.
It is someone else’s fault, and the information needed is with someone else.
Simple things turn into complex things. A task that should take a week becomes a workstream with its own risks and assumptions.
Problems and issues are raised against third parties, the environment and other factors. Always outside the room.
Arbitrary dependencies appear for tasks that are already in progress. Work that was underway is suddenly waiting on something else.
The theme is deflection
Look at these together and one theme runs through all of them. Deflection.
It just comes in so many features and colours that it becomes difficult to understand, assess and judge.
That is what makes drift so hard to catch. Each explanation is plausible. Some are even true. A vendor really can be late. A dependency really can exist. So we accept each one on its own merits, and never step back to see the pattern they form.
The problem is not any single excuse. It is that the excuses keep changing while the outcome stays the same.
Why judgement is the hard part
Our instinct is to trust the people closest to the work. That instinct is usually right. But it also means that whoever controls the narrative controls what leaders see.
Judging drift is not about catching people out. Most deflection is not deliberate. It is what people naturally do when they are under pressure, unsure of the way forward, or reluctant to deliver bad news to people who may not want to hear it.
Which means the responsibility to see it sits with those who receive the updates, not only those who give them.
The questions that remain
Here are some questions to ponder.
When you think about your current projects, are the reasons for delay changing while the delay itself stays the same?
Does the effort being spent match the progress being reported, or have you stopped comparing the two?
And if every problem is someone else’s, whose job is it to notice that nothing is moving?
