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In the absence of information, people will make stuff up.

This is a phrase I share often with mentees and colleagues – most often when talking about progress on a project they’re working on. I once saw a colleague take a lot of heat for a project he was leading – he was making great progress and doing (almost) everything right, but he wasn’t sharing his progress – and when he did, it was incomplete. He really was doing great work – I remain impressed today at how much he and his team were accomplishing and the obstacles they overcame, but if you weren’t part of his team or closely involved, you didn’t know what was going on.

And – as I said above, without the information, people made stuff up. The situation was a bit of a mess for a while, but he learned his lesson, and his work ended up back on course (although it was never far off course anyway). The point is that if you’re leading any sort of project, you have to let people know what’s going on – that’s one reason short iterations, demos, and retrospectives on agile teams are good – it’s a method of sharing progress, and it removes a lot of the ambiguity from the process.

This sort of thing happens all the time. When a professional athlete doesn’t dress for a game, or doesn’t play, the team usually makes an announcement explaining the situation. Without the explanation, people would make stuff up (although in the case of sports rumors, people will often make stuff up even if they have information).