Nobody Ever Gets Bad News On Time

People are always annoyed at getting bad news too late. And it's always too late. There is this outraged “Why wasn’t I told sooner?” tone. Whenever I hear this I think, “So, you want to be constantly deluged with false warnings?”

Think about the chain of events that leads to bad news being disclosed. Something bad might or might not have happened. Initially the problem is discovered by some low-level worker bee, perhaps someone not competent to judge the scope or scale of the problem. They have to disclose it to someone else, who must prioritize the issue. Some due diligence must be done to determine the extent of the problem, or whether it’s a real problem at all. Perhaps there are several rounds of this before the bad news makes its way up the chain to an important decision-maker. Someone with authority has to assemble the facts and craft the narrative: what happened, what are the implications, what are we doing to solve it, whose fault was it, etc. Disclosing too early means some part of this narrative-crafting is not done, and thus the disclosure elicits even more outrage and confusion than if you’d gathered all the answers first. 

So what does this mean? What are you doing about it? Then why even tell us?

If all potentially bad news were disclosed extremely early, we’d end up with a lot needless panic. Maybe some important items would be disclosed earlier, but then someone would have to mop up after all the wrongful disclosures, too. “No, that wasn’t actually a problem. No, that’s working fine. No, that was also a false alarm.”

How should you announce that you’ve put an unsafe product on the market? Announce right away, before the extent of the problem is known, sowing confusion and chaos? Or announce when you understand the extent of the problem, which units are damaged goods and which ones are fine and which ones you’re going to replace just to be safe even though they’re almost certainly fine?

 How do you announce layoffs at a company? Tell everyone, “Some of you won’t be here in a few months. We’re just not sure who yet.”? Or carefully, deliberately sort out who will keep their job and who will be let go, and announce it all at once? Do you give everyone updates on their layoff likelihood? “Matt, you’re at 10%... Oops, looks like you’re up to 50% today.”

I think this full-disclosure world would be needlessly stressful and costly. Prices would be high because unnecessary product recalls would be happening at the drop of a hat, and work would be stressful because you’d always have this executioner’s ax connected to a roulette wheel over your head.

Most people don’t actually want to live in that world. But people do want to preserve their right to be sanctimonious. People love having legitimate-seeming reasons (actual reasons!) to despise their enemies. And of course lawyers love having plausible rationales to sue. So I suspect “Why didn’t you tell us sooner!?” is here to stay.

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 Sometimes a delayed disclosure really is motivated by cynicism or moral cowardice or simple poor decision-making. If you were looking for it, there’s my hedge. I just think it’s hard to separate the wrongfully delayed disclosures from the prompt disclosures in real time, even though it often seems so easy in retrospect. 

"On Time"? "In Time"? Couldn't decide which sounded right. Interesting discussion of uses here.