It turns out that incompetence and corruption are not the reasons an organisation goes bust, but optimism is. There have been several recent cases in local government of bankruptcy as a result of errors of judgment due to an outbreak of optimism bias infecting the leadership of an organisation. There is no reason to assume this case of bias cannot infect other organisations.
It is sometimes referred to as a culture of good news. However it is not simply the leadership talking up the organisation, senior managers putting a positive spin on performance figures or a tendency of managers at all levels to only feed up the good news.
