How Power Distorts Information Flow
A CEO I coach recently described being blindsided by a significant operational problem – one that, when they dug into it, had been visible to several people in the business for weeks. Warning signs had existed. Informal conversations had already happened. The information simply hadn’t made it upward.
When he asked why nobody had raised it sooner, the answers were uncomfortable. People had assumed someone else would flag it. They didn’t want to bring bad news without a solution, and weren’t sure how he’d respond.
“The worst part,” he said, “is that I thought I had an open-door culture. I thought people felt safe to speak up.” They did. But safe and willing aren’t the same thing. And in that gap, a great deal of important information had quietly disappeared.
This is one of the more disorienting realities of senior leadership. You’ve worked to build trust, to be approachable, to create the conditions for honest conversation. And yet you often hear the truth last.
The questions that follow can be quietly corrosive: Am I missing something? Why did nobody tell me sooner? What conversations are happening when I’m not in the room? Have I become harder to challenge than I realise? Most senior leaders don’t ask these out loud. But many carry them.
What makes this particularly difficult is that the cause is rarely a broken culture or dishonest people. It’s something more structural. Power changes the way information moves through an organisation – not because people decide to hide things, but because humans adapt to hierarchy, often without realising they’re doing it. Information gets smoothed on the way up. Problems arrive with solutions already attached. By the time something reaches the senior team, much of the ambiguity – the early signals, the doubt, the nuance – has been quietly edited out.
Three reasons it’s hard to see from the top:
The gap between intent and impact. A leader may genuinely believe they welcome challenge. Their team may experience something different: impatience when problems arrive without solutions, quick rebuttals, visible frustration in the moments that matter or a drive to dig in to the weeds and fix it themselves. The leader’s intent is openness. The impact is caution. Once that gap exists, people stop informing and start managing.
The optimism filter. As information moves upwards it tends to become shorter, cleaner, more positive. Not because people are dishonest, but because they want to be seen as competent and on top of things. By the time a concern reaches the senior team, the messy reality has often been stripped away – replaced with a tidier version of events.
The absence of insight. Perhaps the hardest part: you can’t easily notice what you’re not being told. Unlike a wrong answer, missing information leaves no obvious trace. There’s no alert, no gap in the data, no moment where the silence becomes visible. The problem only surfaces when something goes wrong – often weeks after the window for early action has closed.
The leaders who navigate this most effectively make a few consistent shifts. They ask different questions – less ‘what’s the status?’ and more ‘what are we not talking about?’ or ‘what would you flag if you were in my position?’ They slow down before deciding, creating space for the messier version of a conversation rather than the polished one.
They also pay close attention to how they respond when something difficult does land – because that reaction shapes whether it happens again. And they cultivate a small number of relationships where genuinely unfiltered perspective is possible: people who will say what others won’t.
None of this eliminates distortion entirely. But the gap between what’s happening and what reaches the senior team can be narrowed – if leaders are honest about the problem and deliberate in how they address it.
Reflect: Your response when difficult information arrives shapes whether it arrives again.
When was the last time someone told you something you didn’t want to hear – and how did you respond in that moment?
What signals might you be sending, intentionally or not, about the kind of information you welcome?
If you were a member of your team, what would feel genuinely safe to raise with you – and what might you quietly edit before it left your mouth?
Observe: The patterns in your leadership team conversations reveal more than the content of them.
When your leadership team appears aligned in a meeting, how confident are you that the real conversation has actually happened?
Who around the table is most likely to tell you what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear – and whose voice have you stopped listening for?
What conversation keeps getting deferred or softened – and what’s the cost of that?
Question: Information distortion isn’t a personal failure – it’s a structural reality. The question is whether your organisation is set up to work against it.
Where do surprises tend to come from – and what does that tell you about where information is moving slowly or getting filtered?
Where might people be managing upwards rather than informing upwards – and what’s created that dynamic?
What’s one single change – a habit, a question, a different kind of forum – that could make truth travel faster in your organisation?
