The Unspoken Barrier to Project Success

The programme board meeting looks reassuringly familiar.  The slides are showing green across most work streams. The leadership are presenting with confidence about this quarter's challenges. The governance structure is functioning as designed. There is unanimous agreement that whilst some risks exist, they're within appetite and well-controlled. The meeting concludes with the satisfaction of a team aligned and a project on track.

Then the corridor conversations afterwards tell a different story. Suppliers are privately concerned about capacity constraints they didn't want to raise in formal meetings. Client team members are noting that the schedule optimism isn't quite matching what they're hearing on the ground. Technical leads are seeing integration risks that nobody wanted to name when the programme director was presenting progress to the board. Everyone leaves with thoughts they didn't share, concerns they kept private, questions they chose not to ask.

The problem isn't that people are lying. The problem is that organisational dynamics make certain truths difficult to speak in certain contexts. Every major project has two parallel conversations running: the official narrative presented in governance, and the private reality discussed in corridors, over coffee, in one-to-ones. That gap between what people say publicly and what they think privately often determines project success more than any methodology, tool, or technology.

The gap between public performance and private conversation exists everywhere humans work together. But in major projects - where complexity is high, stakes are significant, and multiple organisations are involved - this gap becomes toxic. What you can't discuss openly, you can't address systematically. What you can't address metastasises quietly until it becomes the crisis nobody saw coming, except everyone did.

Everyone in that programme board meeting has a silent internal discussion happening - thoughts they're processing, concerns they're weighing, judgements they're forming about what they're hearing. Sometimes these thoughts surface as questions, challenges, or alternative views. Often they don't. The reasons why not are predictable. Don't want to slow momentum when everyone else seems confident. Might damage relationships by appearing negative. Could expose gaps in own understanding. Risk looking obstructive when the message is "we're on track". Easier to stay quiet, note the concern privately, hope someone else raises it.

These small silences compound. The procurement concern not raised in month two becomes the contract dispute in month eight. The integration worry dismissed as "we'll figure it out" becomes the six-month delay that somehow nobody saw coming. The capability gap nobody wanted to name becomes the quality failure that damages the client relationship. The pattern is so common it's almost predictable - yet we repeat it because the organisational dynamics encouraging silence are stronger than individual courage to speak.

Research on major projects reveals a particularly destructive cognitive pattern that reinforces this silence. Teams believe their project is uniquely complex. This "uniqueness bias", as the Major Projects Association terms it, causes teams to discount lessons from similar contexts. "Our situation is different" becomes the reason to ignore warnings that have proven accurate elsewhere. The bias reinforces silence - if our project is truly unique, there's no precedent to learn from, so why raise concerns that might not apply? The belief in uniqueness paradoxically prevents the honest conversations that might reveal the project is following a familiar pattern.

Consider offshore wind development as a contemporary example. Dogger Bank represents transformative UK capability - the kind of mega-project where technical excellence is assumed. Engineering isn't the risk. Economic impact studies project £6.1 billion of potential value. That potential depends entirely on mobilisation creating conditions for honest conversation about what's actually happening versus what governance wants to hear. The technical challenges are well understood. The human and organisational dynamics determining whether those challenges get surfaced early or suppressed until crisis - that's where mega-projects typically fail.

Creating conditions where the unspoken becomes speakable isn't about encouraging people to "speak up". Organisations have been running psychological safety workshops and telling people to be brave for years. The pattern persists because we're treating it as an individual courage problem when it's an organisational design problem. People stay quiet for rational reasons embedded in how we structure governance, measure performance, reward behaviour, and respond to challenge.

Sometimes the barrier is psychological - can I raise concerns without penalty, without being seen as negative, without damaging my reputation? Sometimes it's capability - do I have the skills to frame concerns constructively rather than just complaining? Sometimes it's structural - does our governance create space for difficult conversations, or does the meeting format encourage performance over honesty? Usually it's all three, interacting in ways that make silence the rational choice even when everyone knows silence is dangerous.

The organisations that succeed in complex delivery don't have fewer problems. They have more honest conversations about the problems they have. That honesty doesn't emerge from telling people to be braver. It requires deliberate design - creating forums where challenge is expected not tolerated, ensuring senior leadership models receptivity to bad news, building capability to surface issues constructively, addressing structural barriers that make silence feel safer than speech.

Most transformation programmes focus on methodology, technology, process improvement. All necessary. All insufficient if the gap between what people say in meetings and what they think in corridors remains wide. Because that gap - between public narrative and private reality, between the conversations we have and the conversations we need - that's often the real barrier to project success.

What conversations aren't happening on your project?

Al Simmonite

Managing Director, Advance Consultancy