You join a team. Someone proposes a perfectly reasonable working rhythm. Maybe it is a weekly reflection doc, a shared running list, or a lightweight status ritual. Everyone tries it for a couple of weeks. And then the slow decay begins.

The artifacts degrade.

More and more information moves into 1:1 conversations.

Someone starts saying, “Well…we can’t really write that down, can we?”

Three weeks later, the once-helpful document is now a relic. If it is still technically being updated, it is usually a well-meaning project manager dutifully going through the motions. The real status lives somewhere else. The RAG chart becomes a watermelon chart. The “official” update becomes the optics update.