Why watermelons are a problem

Updated 3rd Aug 2026.

Why Project Status Hides the Truth — and What to Do About It

There's something refreshing about a hot summers day and a watermelon. You can slice it and eat it, blend it into a smoothie, put it in a garden salad, or mix it with ginger beer for a lovely afternoon cocktail. The watermelon, to me, is a wonderful fruit. But they don't belong in the workplace.

You see, the defining feature of a watermelon is that it's green on the outside and red in the middle. And in work, many companies suffer from watermelon reporting.

I recall a fascinating meeting when a project manager raised a problem and, in doing so, he became the problem. He'd done what a good project manager should do: he'd raised the problems early, while there was still time to do something about them. But instead of being thanked for finding the problem, he became the problem to be dealt with. Everyone in the business noticed. And from that point on, everyone working in the business learned something very valuable. Being honest comes with consequences. Being truthful has a personal cost. Saying what should be said, is best left unsaid. And if you want to avoid being labelled a problem, the safest thing to do is say everything is green.

This is, sadly, more common than we may care to admit. The dashboards say on track. The updates say all is good. The slides are a brilliant wall of green, full of positive words in nice fonts. Underneath, delivery is slipping, morale is suffering and everyone close to the work already knows it. It's the illusion of positive progress. And it survives for a very human reason: somewhere along the way, being Red got punished, so people learned to report Green and pray they could recover before anyone looked inside.

The project manager was honest at exactly the wrong moment for the culture around him. Which means watermelon reporting isn't really a reporting problem at all. It's a fear problem.

People don't hide the truth because they enjoy it. They hide it because honesty has been made personally expensive. You see the same thing in the way RAG status gets used. Red, Amber, Green sounds objective enough. But most of the time the colour is somebody's judgement about reality, not reality itself. Optimism becomes confidence. Hope stands in for evidence. And because everyone is hoping they'll fix it before anyone notices, the Green survives. Until it doesn't.

A large government programme once ran everything on Red-Amber-Green status, and everything stayed refreshingly Green right up to the final quarter, when a collection of supposedly healthy projects came apart all at once, all turning red. The review found that people had been too frightened of the consequences to mark themselves Red. So the system was changed. The dashboards were fed with real data rather than optimistic interpretations. But the more important change was cultural: leaders publicly thanked teams who raised problems early.

Red stopped meaning you have failed. It started meaning we know where the problem is; how can we help? The effect was really staggering. People started raising problems sooner. And problems raised sooner are generally much cheaper problems to deal with. This seems obvious, but it's easy to forget. The purpose of a status report isn't to make the project look good. It's to tell us how healthy the project actually is.

If we want the truth to travel, we have to make it safe to send. That's the bit I think we often get wrong. We ask people for transparency while teaching them that some truths are inconvenient. We tell people to raise risks early, then make the person who raises the risk carry the consequences. We say we want the truth, right up until someone gives us a red status. Then we wonder why everything is Green.

So perhaps the simplest rule might be this:

Treat red as a request for help, never as an opportunity for blame.

Because the moment red means punishment, we've given everyone a reason to fudge the truth. And eventually you end up with the strangest thing of all. A business full of perfectly capable people, working hard on real problems, looking at a wall of green while everyone knows what's happening inside.

Green on the outside. Red in the middle.
A watermelon.