Delivering bad news is something that most people are not good at. Either we're trying to ease the pain of the message for the recipient or trying to protect ourselves from that person's wrath. It's a human impulse to shield those we care about from distressing information and it's equally human to avoid being the bearer of unpleasant news.

 

This same behavior can be observed in the business and IT worlds. Research conducted by Jaclyn Jensen of George Washington University found that as projects get closer to completion, decision makers are more likely to conceal negative information. In this study, groups of undergraduates were confronted with a significant problem in the fictional business projects they were working on. If a project was 90% completed, 81% failed to mention anything negative. However, if the project was only 10% complete, 37.5% avoided mention of the problem.