We told them everything except how bad it was going to be

A few years ago I landed a messaging project for a big company that had committed to a pivot. A company-wide shift, with a major public campaign behind it. What they wanted from us was help explaining that pivot to the public – what was changing, what wasn’t, and why it was all good thing for the people who use their products.

The research results were not pretty. I’m being intentionally vague here, but safe to say that consumers assumed the new product would reproduce everything they already disliked about the old product. And by the way, all the great benefits the company was excited about internally struck people as pointless. To put it bluntly, there was no clear market for what this company was going to offer.

We could have written one sentence: don't do it. It would have been the most accurate summary of what we found.

Of course we didn’t do that. What consultant would burn that bridge, especially when the decision was already made?

But what I actually want to talk about is what we did instead, and why. We took each objection and turned it into something the company could actually answer. People are afraid this becomes what your other products became, so lead with what you've learned about addressing those concerns. People can't see the point of the uses you're showing them, so foreground the ones with an obvious reason to exist. Every finding made it into the deck. All of it was true, and most of it was good counsel.

But we never pointed out just how big the problem was going to be.

It took me a long time to see this in my own work rather than in other people's.

Findings survive the trip to a decision-maker. Magnitude usually doesn't. An individual objection can be raised without anyone's judgment being on trial, so it lands intact. But telling someone how bad it's going to be reads as a verdict on the decision itself, and the person delivering it is the one holding the relationship. So it gets rounded. Not falsified. Rounded, in the direction of manageable, by someone who could defend every word of the softened version if asked.

The rounding only ever runs one way. I have never once softened a finding in the direction of making something sound worse.

By the way, I’m not making any judgment here about why things turn out this way. There are all sorts of reasons people don’t feel comfortable delivering the news. But the result is the same: decision-makers reliably receive an accurate inventory of the problems, but a structurally hopeful sense of how bad they are. Which is exactly backwards, because the inventory is rarely the part that really matters. Everyone already knows the list. What they're actually deciding is whether the problems are the manageable kind or the fatal kind, and that's the number nobody hands them.

And yes, the company did it anyway. It only cost them a few billion dollars.

I'm the volunteer treasurer of a church that runs a PreK-8th grade school. We're in the middle of an expansion project, and I want it to happen. That matters, because it's the same position my client was in, and this time there's no consultant to blame for the framing. I'm building the numbers and I'm presenting them.

The project depends on a bank loan of roughly three times our annual combined operating budget. To qualify, we'd need to show a surplus close to the size of the entire church budget. Oh, and we finished the last fiscal year with a deficit.

I have presented that gap as bridgeable. I still think it is. But my confidence in the loan has dropped a lot in the last year, and when I look honestly at why, the facts didn't move. The plan was always built on a projection of where we might be in 2029, and I knew that when I made it. What changed is that a year went by and the gap didn't close, which was always the risk and was always visible in the model. I presented a 2029 number with present-tense confidence, and nothing about the world had to change for me to do that.

The verb tells on me more than the numbers do. For a year, the way I framed the path was that we needed to stabilize the church budget and grow the school. Both words were defensible. Neither was false. And together they told everyone in the room that one side of the operation was maintenance and the other side was the project. It turns out both have to grow. Most of it still comes from the school, but a real portion has to be church money, and I've known the arithmetic long enough that I can't claim it surprised me.

I didn't misstate a figure. I picked a verb that took maybe forty percent off the perceived difficulty of half the problem, and it held up right until reality asked it to.

I've been told, more than once, that I'm moving the goalposts. In a council conversation and once in a voters' meeting. My first instinct was that this was unfair, because the facts on the ground genuinely have changed and my analysis changed with them.

Some of that's true. But it's not the whole thing, and the part I missed is mechanical.

You can't soften a number once. Reality keeps arriving, and each time it does, the softened version has to be softened again from a slightly worse starting point. The revisions come in waves, and they all point the same direction. From the outside, that looks an awful lot like someone who keeps adjusting the target to stay ahead of the results. The goalpost-moving isn't a separate failure of mine. It's what the first optimistic framing looks like from the audience's point of view, six months later.

So here’s a test that doesn't require anyone to read your mind: If your last three revisions to a forecast all moved the same way, something other than new information is driving them. New information is just that, but one-directional revisions point to a starting plan that was wrong. The direction tells you which way you were leaning when you set it.

That test is what got me; I kept moving the numbers the same way.

The obvious correction is to start presenting the pessimistic case. Lead with the downside, show the council the version where the loan doesn't happen, let them sit with it.

I don't think that works, and not because it's uncomfortable. A treasurer who always brings the dire version gets discounted the same way the optimistic one does, just on a delay. Once the council learns to apply a mental haircut to whatever I say, I stop looking like Pollyanna and start looking like Chicken Little. Overcorrecting doesn't restore my credibility. It just moves the bias and costs me the alarm.

So I'm using a different instrument, one that doesn't depend on me being emotionally neutral about a project I want to succeed. Every projection now gets presented with the date of the world it assumes, stated out loud, in the same breath as the number. Not 2029 dollars quoted in a 2026 room. And I'm separating two things I'd been letting move together: what we need in order to qualify, and what I think we'll actually have. Those were one slide. They're two now, and the gap is the real decision.

That's a smaller fix than it sounds like, and I'd rather have it than a promise to be more honest, because I was already being honest. Every number I gave that council was one I could defend. The problem was never a number I couldn't defend.

Not whether the analysis you gave your board was accurate. It probably was.

Ask whether you told them how bad it was. Ask whether the verbs you chose to describe each half of the problem were doing work you'd be comfortable defending out loud. Ask what happens to the person in your organization who says the committed plan won't work, and whether anybody has ever done it and been thanked.

And go look at your last three revisions of the same forecast. If they all moved in one direction, the first one was a hope you were willing to sign your name to, and the people who called it moving the goalposts were describing what they actually saw.