๐๐ผ๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป๐ดโ๐ ๐๐๐ข ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐น๐ฎ๐๐ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ผ๐ป ๐๐ผ ๐ธ๐ป๐ผ๐.
In June 2018, a senior production manager, Ed Pierson, sent an email to the head of the 737 program. He described chaos on the factory floor. Workers racing to meet impossible schedules. Defects slipping through. His words: โFrankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off. And for the first time in my life, Iโm sorry to say that Iโm hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.โ
That email landed five months before Lion Air Flight 610 plunged into the Java Sea. 346 people would die across two crashes.
Management didnโt stop production. The board wasnโt notified of the Lion Air crash for ten days. When the CEO finally reported to the board, he told them the 737 was safe, told them press reports identifying MCAS as the cause were false, and blamed the flight crew. A separate ethics complaint filed by engineer Curtis Ewbank was buried beneath the cost-and-schedule logic that had come to define how Boeing operated. A group of engineers who pushed for a required safety analysis were given identical negative performance reviews in their next cycle.
Ed Piersonโs warning existed. It traveled through the filter chain. Somewhere between the factory floor and the boardroom, the signal got lost.
This pattern shows up in organizations of every size, though rarely with consequences this severe.
The person closest to the work knows the real problem. Their supervisor knows a softened version. The director knows the version that wonโt derail the quarterly review. By the time anything reaches the top, itโs been processed through enough filters that itโs barely recognizable.
What drives the distortion isnโt usually malice. Itโs something more ordinary: fear of the messenger getting shot, bonuses tied to metrics that reward good news, a culture where raising a hard problem marks you as the problem. Each person in the chain makes a small, rational decision. Round the edges. Wait and see. The Boeing engineers who filed ethics complaints didnโt stop the production schedule. The manager who emailed his concerns didnโt stop the production schedule. The incentive system running that company had one clear message: deliver on time.
Peter Drucker spent sixty years studying how organizations actually work. One of the things he kept returning to: executives are systematically cut off from reality. Why? Because information deteriorates as it climbs.
In The Effective Executive, Drucker argued that senior executives needed to regularly sit down with workers at every level and ask directly: โWhere do you see dangers to which we are still blind?โ He was diagnosing an information problem, not prescribing a people-management philosophy.
Iโd add my own favorite version: โWhat is the dumbest thing we make you do?โ You would be surprised by some of the answers your team gives you.
But neither question works without trust. And trust at that level is rarer than most leaders want to admit. The person across from you has watched what happens to people who tell the boss hard things. Theyโve calibrated accordingly.
So before you ask, give them something real. Criticize a decision you made. Name something you got wrong. Make it specific, make it genuine, and donโt dress it up as a lesson. The moment you do that, the conversation changes. Youโve just signaled that honesty in this room doesnโt get punished. That signal travels further than any open-door policy ever will.
He also put it this way: โAll military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. He never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.โ
That is MBWA before anyone called it MBWA.
Tom Peters gave it the name in 1982. The practice is older. When you talk directly to the person doing the job, not their manager, not the summary report, you get signal that doesnโt exist anywhere in the official data. You bypass the filter chain entirely.
Boeing had dashboards, management reviews, and official data in abundance. What it didnโt have was a CEO who sat down with Ed Pierson and asked: what are you afraid to tell me?
The other half of this is what happens when someone does bring you bad news.
If you punish it, even subtly, even with a look of disappointment or a sharp question about why they didnโt flag it sooner, youโve just trained every person in that room. They will remember. They will not bring you the next problem while itโs still manageable. Theyโll bring it when itโs already a crisis, because by then, they have no choice.
I once worked for a CEO who screamed and broke things when bad news landed on his desk. Nobody wanted that job. So nobody did it. Problems didnโt disappear; they just went underground, grew quietly, and surfaced later as emergencies with few good options left.
Reward the early warning. Say it out loud: โIโm glad you told me this before it became something worse.โ Then do something visible with it. Promote the person who stopped the line, and reference it later in a room full of people. The culture doesnโt change from the speech. It changes from what people watch you do.
Boeing had an internal ethics reporting system. Engineers used it. The system existed. What didnโt exist was a culture that treated bad news as intelligence rather than a threat to the schedule.
Toyota built the opposite. The cord lets any worker on the floor stop the entire production line the moment they see a defect. Management built the system, trained the response, and, over the decades, turned early problem-surfacing into a competitive advantage. Same industry. Very different result.
Drucker also wrote that the only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and underperformance. Everything else requires intention.
Every organization with layers has a version of this problem. The severity depends on how many filters sit between the CEO and the floor, and what those filters are incentivized to pass up or hold back. Companies that navigate hard stretches arenโt the ones with fewer problems. Theyโre the ones where problems surfaced fast enough that someone could still do something about them.
Youโre getting bad news. The real question: Is what youโre hearing as bad as whatโs actually happening? Because somewhere between the floor and your desk, bad became manageable, manageable became contained, and contained became a footnote. The distance between those words is where companies get into real trouble.