Executive committees often
lack visibility

Most executive committees steer with the best of intentions — and with a picture of reality that's already been rearranged before it ever reaches the table. The problem is almost never a lack of data. It's what happens to that data between the field and the top floor.

The price of unreliable data

A 2025 Gartner survey produced a number that should concern any executive committee: 75% of executives say they don't trust the data they rely on to make their decisions. A year earlier, another Gartner survey found that fewer than 30% of executives said their organisation made decisions systematically grounded in data.

According to Deloitte's 2026 Human Capital Trends, 72% of executives say the volume of data and their lack of trust in it has already stopped them from making a decision at least once. The paradox is stark: organisations have never produced more indicators, dashboards, and reports — and executives have never doubted what they're looking at more.

What reaches the top isn't what's actually happening

A well-documented phenomenon in organisational behaviour has a name: the "mum effect" — the systematic tendency to soften, summarise, or delay bad news at every hierarchical level it passes through. As Benjamin Laker summarised in Forbes in 2026, every layer makes a real-time calculation about what to share, how to frame it, and how much context to include — calculations shaped by self-preservation and by a read, often flawed, of what the level above wants to hear.

The result: by the time information reaches the executive committee, it has passed through the field, a manager, a middle director — and at every step, it's been filtered, condensed, reshaped. This isn't individual dishonesty. It's a structural gap between what's actually happening and what's judged presentable in committee.

It's the same mechanism described in our article on meetings and steering: a well-run ritual (the monthly report, the weekly committee) guarantees nothing about how faithfully what's presented there reflects what's actually happening on the ground.

4 signals of an executive committee steering blind

1. Bad news always arrives softened

Every hierarchical level passes along an arranged version of the situation — never the raw data, never the weak signal in its full rawness.

2. Dashboards display outdated figures

What the executive committee looks at in the meeting room is often already several weeks old — the time it took to consolidate, validate, and format the numbers.

3. The field and leadership no longer describe the same reality

One lives the facts every day; the other reads summaries once a month. Two versions of the same subject end up coexisting without ever being directly reconciled.

4. Problems only become visible once they're impossible to hide

The signal systematically arrives late — never early enough to act while it would still be cheap to do so.

The question executive committees should be asking

Not just: "Do we have the right indicators?"

But rather: "If a field manager left their role tomorrow, would we lose a piece of information we thought we already had?"