How Willful Ignorance Doomed HealthCare.gov - Clay Shirky - POLITICO Magazine: "HealthCare.gov is a half-billion dollar site that was unable to complete even a thousand enrollments a day at launch, and for weeks afterward. As we now know, programmers, stakeholders and testers all expressed reservations about HealthCare.gov’s ability to do what it was supposed to do. Yet no one who understood the problems was able to tell the president. Worse, every senior political figure—every one—who could have bridged the gap between knowledgeable employees and the president decided not to. And so it was that, even on launch day, the president was allowed to make things worse for himself and his signature program by bragging about the already-failing site and inviting people to log in and use something that mostly wouldn’t work. Whatever happens to government procurement or hiring (and we should all hope those things get better) a culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn’t well equipped to try new things...."
Pardon me, but don't blame the culture, blame the leader.
Tweet Follow @johnmpoole
