Published cartoon ·
How Everything Is Going
The same organisation sounds healthier with every step upstairs.
Why this one bites
The same question travels down the reporting chain, from CEO to front-line employee. Each answer reveals more trouble than the one above it. At the top there are minor issues; at the bottom, people are struggling to get through the day.
The final diagram makes the gradient explicit: distance from the work improves the story. No single reassuring sentence needs to look extraordinary for the accumulated filtering to become enormous. The cartoon asks what leadership can know when every layer makes bad news easier to hear.
Accessible summary
- Six panels follow the CEO, VP, director, manager, supervisor and employee. Descriptions progress from things going well to shortages, delays, frustration and systems that do not work.
- The closing moral says things sound better higher in the hierarchy, while more reality appears closer to the work.
Reading notes
Each layer has a plausible reason to shorten the answer. A supervisor summarizes several employees; a manager summarizes several teams; a director has limited time to explain competing concerns. Compression is unavoidable. What matters is whether it preserves the severity of the underlying conditions or systematically removes the parts that make the next conversation uncomfortable.
The distortion can accumulate without any one person inventing an obvious lie. A major problem becomes a concern with a mitigation, then a manageable concern, then a minor issue. The qualification that the mitigation is unfunded may disappear on the first step. By the time leadership hears the result, the words are reassuring because the information needed to challenge them has been edited out several times.
An effective route upward includes examples, unresolved decisions and the ability to ask the people doing the work what the summary leaves out. That does not mean bypassing managers whenever the news is unwelcome. It means testing whether the reporting chain is carrying evidence as well as tone. The cartoon's repeated question makes the comparison unusually clear: the organization is the same at every level, but the description improves with distance. The reader can see all six answers at once, a privilege the CEO's reporting system may never provide.