When someone has to say it

Recognising the signs is the first move. It is not the hard one.

The harder thing is what happens in the hour after the steering committee, when you have just watched the programme director present a revised timeline that everyone in the room knows is not realistic, and you are the person who has to decide whether to say so.

It is tempting to let it pass. Naming the problem formally changes your relationship with everyone in the room, and the evidence does not yet feel airtight enough to justify that cost. So the moment goes by.

But the evidence rarely becomes airtight on its own. It becomes airtight when the programme fails visibly — and by then, saying so costs nothing and changes nothing. Everyone can see it too.

The truth is already visible

The difficulty is not usually that the evidence does not exist. It is that it is not where anyone is looking.

Before you commission a formal review, find the person who has been on the programme since the beginning and is not senior enough to have a stake in how it is presented upward. An engineer, an analyst, a delivery coordinator. Tell the programme director you are doing it — frame it as reconnaissance on the programme, not an audit of them.

Then listen for consistency. What one person tells you is their experience. What three people independently tell you about the same thing is a finding.

Ask for a list of everything the programme has completed and accepted in the last four weeks. Not planned. Not in progress. Done. A status report in a troubled programme tends not to show the trouble — the RAG format was built to aggregate status, not to surface the specific failure that will matter to you. The output list will.

Nike’s $400 million supply-chain overhaul is the cautionary version. When the demand-planning system at its centre went live, it began ordering the wrong things — popular lines ran out of stock while slow sellers piled up — and the company lost a reported $100 million in sales before the problem was named publicly. The state of that programme was legible in what it was doing to inventory long before it reached an earnings call. The verdict from Nike’s chairman Phil Knight became famous: “This is what you get for $400 million, huh?” The delivery output had been visible to anyone who looked. Nobody had asked.

Who has to say it

The programme director cannot name this problem without putting themselves at risk. The delivery team will not, because the consequences land on them. External suppliers have a contract to protect. Everyone inside the room has something to lose by being the person who says it.

You do not. That is not a coincidence — it is the specific value of your position. The CEO is the only person in the conversation without a stake in the programme continuing on its current terms.

That is the case for saying it early: not that it is easy, but that the cost of saying it now — the relationship friction, the awkward meeting — is always lower than the cost of saying it once the evidence has made itself undeniable. By then the decisions that were available six months ago are gone. The people who might have turned it around have already started looking elsewhere.

Someone has to say it. The room is waiting to find out if that person is you.