The doom loop — why your projects keep delivering less than they promised

Blog post — Skin in the Game

There is a pattern in complex project and programme delivery that the people who live inside it know intimately, and that the people who govern it from the outside rarely see clearly enough to name. I have spent more than forty years operating at the intersection of these two worlds. The pattern repeats across industries, organisational types, and decades of changing technology and methodology with a consistency that is, once you have seen it enough times, almost mechanical.

I call it the doom loop. It is not a metaphor. It is a structural description of how the governance gap between senior leadership and project delivery perpetuates itself, cycle after cycle.

How the loop begins

An organisation identifies a genuine need for significant change. The strategic logic is sound. A business case is developed — usually by people who understand the problem clearly and the solution somewhat less clearly — and it enters the approval process with a set of assumptions baked in that nobody has tested with sufficient rigour, and a budget and timeline that reflect what the organisation is prepared to commit rather than what the delivery will actually require.

In the approval meetings and budget negotiations that precede formal sign-off, the resource estimates produced by project professionals encounter something predictable. They encounter challenge. Not always from the most senior leaders in the room. Often from leaders who are senior enough to influence the outcome but distant enough from delivery accountability to bear no consequences for being wrong. The estimates are characterised as conservative. As gold-plating. As evidence of a project team that has not been pushed hard enough to find efficiencies.

The budget is reduced. The timeline is compressed. The resource model is thinned.

The initiative is approved. The project team — who knew, and said so, in whatever language was politically survivable — begins delivery against a foundation that was compromised before the first plan was written.

How the loop continues

What follows is not failure in the dramatic sense. It is something slower and more damaging.

The project team begins managing upward: producing status reports that convey progress without conveying the full picture of the pressure they are operating under. This is not conspiracy. It is the entirely predictable behaviour of people operating in an environment where delivering bad news carries career risk, where executives have demonstrated that red status reports trigger interrogation rather than support, and where the cultural norm of every governance meeting is to convey competence and control.

The steering committee receives the filtered version. They ask the questions that governance experience has taught them to ask. The project manager answers carefully, in the language the governance layer expects. The exercise functions as governance theatre — everyone playing the role assigned to them, nobody saying the thing that most needs to be said.

Eventually, at a milestone or in a crisis, the gap between what was promised and what is achievable becomes impossible to fully conceal. Scope is reduced. Timeline is extended. Budget is supplemented. The definition of what constitutes success is renegotiated. The initiative completes in some form and is declared successful — a phased success, a success in a challenging environment. The post-implementation review notes the learnings. The organisation moves on.

How the loop closes

And the people whose decisions in the approval process contributed most to the difficult journey have no clear line of sight to the connection between those decisions and those outcomes. Because the connection was never made explicit. Because the outcome was declared successful. Because the governance gap that kept the critical information from reaching the governance layer also kept the learning from reaching the people who most needed it.

The doom loop is self-reinforcing because its costs are distributed and delayed. The consequences of a compromised business case land eighteen months later on people who did not make the compromising decision. The person who challenged the resource estimates in the approval meeting has moved on. The institutional memory that would connect that decision to the downstream variance has been laundered through the language of success. The next initiative begins in exactly the same conditions.

Breaking it

The doom loop does not break from the outside. It breaks when the people inside it — and senior leaders are inside it, whether they claim it or not — decide to see it clearly.

That means asking better questions before approval: what does the bottom-up estimate actually total, and what was removed to close the gap between that and what we are approving? What assumptions in this business case have been independently validated, and which are carrying more weight than the evidence can support?

It means creating the conditions where honest information can travel upward: explicitly naming, in the first governance meeting, the kind of information you want to receive — early warnings over late surprises, honest assessments over polished presentations.

And it means being willing to pull the handbrake when the conditions that justified the investment have changed — rather than continuing to fund an initiative whose original business case no longer reflects operational reality, because the sunk cost feels too large to abandon.

None of this requires becoming a project manager. It requires the willingness to be a more honest, more specific, and more consequential participant in the governance of the initiatives you already touch.

Want to go deeper?

This post draws on ideas developed at length in Skin in the Game. If what you found here was useful, a free core summary is available to download at ghostquantumco.com/books/skin-in-the-game.

Richard Cantlon offers one-to-one consultations for executives who want to apply these frameworks to a specific initiative. Schedule a session at ghostquantumco.com.