On how corporate language became the primary risk management tool on most projects.
I've been thinking about the colour green this week.
In project management, green means good. On track. No action required. Green is what gets nodded at in a steering committee before everyone moves to the next agenda item. Green is what most dashboards show, most of the time, on most projects — right up until the moment they don't.
Here's what I've spent twenty-five years noticing: the projects that blow up were almost never surprises. Not really. There was a risk register. There were status reports. There was, usually, a very thorough-looking document with a lot of carefully formatted rows and a lot of things rated medium. And somewhere in the building — often in multiple people's heads simultaneously — was the actual picture. The one that never made it onto the register.
Research consistently backs this up, which makes it worse. PMI's Pulse of the Profession found that organisations waste an average of eleven cents in every dollar invested due to poor project performance. A KPMG survey found that seventy percent of organisations experienced at least one significant project failure in a twelve-month period. These numbers are not new. They are not improving. And they generate, every year, the same round of recommendations: better governance, clearer accountability, more rigorous risk identification. More columns in the register. Earlier escalation. A better template.
What nobody studies — because you cannot survey for it — is the moment the risk didn't get written down.
Here's what the data doesn't say. It doesn't say anything about the meeting where the program director looked at the vendor relationship and decided not to document what everyone in the room already knew: that the relationship was too close, the contract too tangled, the dependency too total for anyone to say plainly that the vendor was underperforming. It doesn't track the number of times a delivery professional typed "timeline pressure — medium" into a register when what they actually meant was: this date is fiction and we all know it. It doesn't count the risk entries written in language so carefully neutral they communicated nothing — because the honest version would have named someone, and naming someone has consequences that land on you, not on the project.
The unsayable risk is the one that requires you to tell a powerful person an uncomfortable truth. That the go-live date they announced to the board is not achievable. That the executive sponsor is the actual risk — not the technology, not the vendor, not the market, but the person at the top of the project who makes decisions without information and has made clear, in ways that don't get minuted, that they don't want to be told otherwise. That the team is exhausted and two key people are already looking. None of these things make it onto the register. They live instead in corridor conversations, in the thirty seconds after the lift doors close, in the Slack message sent at 10pm that says what the status report didn't.
I once sat in a program steering committee and watched a status report presented as amber-trending-green. The room received it. The exec nodded. The action log was updated. And then I walked out with a colleague and we spent four minutes in the stairwell listing the seven things that were actually wrong — none of which had appeared in any formal reporting. The program ran into serious difficulty eight weeks later. The post-mortem described it as risks that weren't foreseen.
They were foreseen. They just weren't sayable.
This is not about bad project managers. The people I've worked with who did this — who softened the language, who rated the real risk medium and moved on — were not incompetent or cowardly in any straightforward sense. They were operating in environments where the cost of saying the unsayable was immediate and personal, and the cost of not saying it was abstract and future. That is not a project management problem. That is a human problem, and no register template has ever solved it.
What does help — the only thing I've consistently seen help — is one person in the room with enough standing and enough safety to say the actual thing. Not diplomatically. Not in the language of "we may want to consider whether." Plainly: this is the risk, this is what happens if it lands, this is what we'd need to do about it. It changes the texture of the room. It gives everyone else permission to stop performing. And it almost always surfaces three more risks nobody had written down either.
The register isn't the problem. The register is a record of what was safe to say. That's a much harder thing to fix than a template.
So here's what I want to sit with you on this week:
What's the risk you already know about — on your current project, or the last one — that you wrote in careful language because the honest version wasn't safe to say? You don't have to name anyone. But I'd be willing to bet it looked remarkably similar to the ones in every other organisation, in every other industry, that the women I know in delivery have been quietly carrying.
I'm building a set of project management tools for exactly this — resources that make the real conversation easier to have, whether you're in a steering committee or a site meeting with your builder.
The first one drops tomorrow. It's called The Home Renovation Project Manager — a complete system for running your renovation like the delivery professional you actually are. A done-for-you spreadsheet template covering everything from budget and timeline to variations, snag lists, and contractor records, plus a companion guide that tells you what to do and when. Same skills. Different room. I'll link it here the moment it's live.
Start steady. Then decide.
— Gill
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