`I would say if you have a project with a deadline today, quite often, that goes badly. That is, you’ll have reviews of the project, and people will say, “Yes, of course we’re going to make the deadline.” Then finally the deadline comes, and you don’t make the deadline, and you’ve failed.

This happens a lot, and if you ask people, “Why does that happen?” they often say, “It was because they wouldn’t listen to us about the problems with the project and all the things going wrong, and they kept saying it would work.”

If you turn it around and look at it from the guy running the project’s point of view, they’re thinking, “I might fail on this project. It might not make the deadline. What will my excuse be? I need a good excuse.”

Their favorite excuse is usually, “Everything was going fine until all of the sudden, something came out of left field. No one could have seen it coming. It’ll never happen again. It knocked us flat, but you don’t need to hold anybody accountable or prepare or change it in any way because this was a one-time event.”

In order to make that excuse work, you need everybody to say “It’s going fine” until all of a sudden, it doesn’t.`