Keeping staff in the dark and periodically covered in manure.
Management folklore. It is the standard description of an information regime that treats staff as an execution layer, and it produces exactly the watermelon reporting that leaves management blind.
In practice
- A team learns of a reorganisation from a customer, and the information regime is now the story rather than the reorganisation.
- A staff survey asking for candour from people who have never been told the results produces candour once.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life