Story: “It would be career limiting..."

This has to be a project for the government

I agree, I think the author misread what their role was. It wasn't to "tell it to them straight" as much as it was to solve a problem. Acknowledging the issue is only the first step.

I once worked as an energy manager for a large financial institution. They had invested a lot of money into a complicated software system that promised to optimize all of their HVAC costs related to their data centers. The problem was the system didn't work well. At all. It used a complicated computational fluid dynamics model that took forever to build and any hiccup in the data would cause the system to start again from scratch. The engineers hated it so much they would just unplug it on the sly. It wasn't delivering on its promise to meet the sustainability goals as everyone thought it would.

I didn't feel comfortable wasting the company's money on this system, but they thought it was great. There were plenty of vice presidents and managers up the line who vouched for it and it would make them look bad to say the system didn't work. We had to figure out a way to break it to them while allowing them to save face.

So we went to work on their building automation system, reprogramming everything to be as efficient as possible. Part of the plan was to create an "experiment" where we had to remove the computational fluid dynamics model for a time. You know, so we gauge the true impact of our reprogramming efforts ;-) The effort worked wonders, exceeding their energy and sustainability goals set by the shareholders. We reframed it as "this worked so well that we think we can continue to meet sustainability targets without the computational fluid dynamics software contract."

They were thrilled. Not only did they meet the goals, they saved money by getting out of the contract. It turned a bitter pill into a sweet one.

Yes, I felt a duty to get them out of the contract that wasn't working. But getting them to accept that is a lot easier if you offer up a solution instead of just underscoring the problem.

It sounds paternalistic but yeah, that can happen. I've been in this sort of office politics situation where that was an issue.

The problem in that case was that the projects were quite long and touched many different people inside the customer companies, many of whom had differing agendas. In particular the customers were banks and their security people had a habit of demanding very specific changes that would clearly sink the entire project a couple of years down the line, and even contradict the original justifications for it.

Unfortunately the company I worked for at the time had a lot of difficulty with this concept. The upper management tended to abstract the political complexity inside these banks as "the customer wants X so why aren't we giving them X" where in reality there was no "the customer", just lots of people inside big orgs who weren't really talking to each other. The notion that "the customer" could be incoherent and we needed to manage that somehow just wasn't there at all, they just saw it as anti-social arguing. So it was in fact career limiting for me to point out these issues.

There could be dozens of other reasons beyond just these two...

The single most common fault that I see is perspective. Individual sections have limited context or visibility of the whole picture to assess the importance of their section's dysfunction. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- in a highly-fluid environment, it's often important for sections to achieve their own objectives without N^2 comms overhead (e.g. military command & control). Firefighting provides a useful analogy. One section's 4-alarm fire might actually be a 1-alarm or 2-alarm fire for the broader organization -- which means that other sections might get top exec billing.

For example: If this $60M contract was at Boeing during the last few years, it will rightfully be deemphasized while executives deal with the existential threat of 737 Max matters.