The green board illusion

Every PM tool defaults to green. Yellow and red require deliberate action. Green is the path of least resistance.

The result is a board that's green even when the underlying team is struggling. Not because anyone is lying. Because the act of changing a status to yellow costs the person doing it something, and they get nothing in return.

The fix isn't to scold people into setting yellow. The fix is to remove the burden of setting it. Detect drift automatically. Surface signals that don't depend on the team manually downgrading themselves.