Three pitfalls to creating an open project culture

An open and transparent culture of project execution – ensuring that information flows in real time, decisions are shared and everyone moves forward with clarity and confidence – is critical to project success. In many companies, information about transformation projects is siloed, fragmented and often contradictory. This lack of transparency leads to misalignment, inefficiencies and a breakdown of trust within organisations. As projects become the primary drivers of value, these breakdowns become operational risks and strategic liabilities.

Watch out for these three pitfalls to creating an open project culture:

1. Reluctance to terminate misaligned projects

In many organisations, projects are launched with great fanfare but are rarely ended with equal decisiveness. Leaders and teams become emotionally invested, clinging to initiatives even when evidence suggests they no longer align with strategic priorities. The sunk cost fallacy, internal politics and fear of reputational damage often prevent timely decisions to shut down underperforming projects.

A striking example is Meta’s multibillion-dollar push into the metaverse. Starting in 2020, the company invested more than $60bn into its Reality Labs division to drive virtual reality and augmented reality innovation. Yet, despite the scale of investment, returns remained elusive – Reality Labs posted a $4.2bn loss in Q1 2025 alone. While artificial intelligence rapidly gained traction across the tech industry, Meta was slow to pivot, continuing to back the metaverse long after its strategic relevance waned.

Analysts widely criticised this delay, arguing that it diverted capital and attention from more promising innovation frontiers. This underscores a key principle in project-driven leadership: the ability to recognise misalignment and act decisively is not a weakness – it’s strategic maturity.

2. Becoming trapped in an incremental mindset

Despite the potential of projects to drive exponential outcomes, most organisations still approach them through an incremental lens. In my own experience, roughly 95% of projects across industries focus on doing the same things slightly better – streamlining processes and systems, shaving costs, meeting regulations or marginally improving performance. These ‘improvement projects’ amount to operational optimisation, not transformational change. This mindset limits the role of projects to maintenance rather than innovation, missing the opportunity to leverage them as strategic platforms for exponential thinking – where bold ideas are paired with disciplined execution and clear value creation.

Take the widespread approach to enterprise resource planning (ERP) consolidation. Large organisations routinely invest hundreds of millions of dollars and engage extensive consulting support to migrate from multiple ERP systems – such as SAP or Oracle – to a single, standardised version. While these projects are framed around harmonisation, compliance and cost control, they seldom unlock significant business value. Moving from one ERP version to another – or consolidating systems across business units – often becomes a painful exercise in internal alignment rather than strategic transformation. The outcome is typically improved reporting or reduced IT complexity, but rarely any exponential change in customer experience, innovation capacity or competitive agility.

3. Transparency is too little, too late

Transparency is often treated as a formality – an end-of-quarter report or a static dashboard rather than a real-time flow of information. But in project-driven environments, delayed or fragmented communication creates dangerous blind spots. Risks go unflagged, early signals are ignored and teams operate on outdated assumptions. The result? Slower decisions, diminished trust and a higher chance of failure.

In a project-driven organisation, cultivating an open and transparent execution culture means ensuring that everyone from project teams to senior leadership has a shared, real-time understanding of priorities, progress and performance. This doesn’t require overwhelming detail or micromanagement; it involves high-trust systems and rhythms that make key information visible, timely and actionable. This approach fosters a culture of open collaboration, real-time insight sharing and collective problem-solving while discouraging information hoarding and internal politics.

Netflix, under the leadership of founder and CEO Reed Hastings, has fostered a culture that emphasises freedom and responsibility coupled with radical transparency. Employees are granted access to a wide range of company information, including strategic plans and performance metrics, creating an environment where informed decision-making is encouraged at all levels. Hastings has articulated this philosophy by contrasting Netflix’s openness with other companies’ compartmentalisation, stating: “We’re like the anti-Apple. They compartmentalise: we do the opposite. Everyone gets all the information.”

This transparency is designed to build trust, promote accountability and empower employees to act in the company’s best interests. By embedding transparency into its operational fabric, Netflix has created a workplace where information flows freely, enabling swift decision-making and cohesive execution. This culture not only enhances alignment and efficiency, but also cultivates a sense of ownership and engagement among employees, contributing to the company’s agility and sustained success.

This article is an extract from Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez’s book Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026), reproduced with the permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Copyright 2026 Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez. All rights reserved.

Hear Antonio discuss the book on APM Podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.