You can feel drift before the dashboard can prove it.
On a night paving job, trucks back up and idle in the dark because the real decision was made hours earlier: under uncertainty, the only socially safe move was to over-order. That pattern shows up everywhere. The team feels it first. Nobody wants to be the one who names the plan as wrong while it is still reversible.
The common mistake is to wait for visible failure, or to ask for more candor inside a normal status meeting. By then drift has already hardened. What was once awkward to question is now normal, then moral.
Run a Weekly Crossing instead. Same short block every week. Declare that no person is on trial. Put one artifact on the table: a plan, metric, policy, or forecast. Critics go first. The owner speaks last. Close with one commitment and one piece of evidence that would overturn it.
Do not use this on an exhausted or low-trust team. Cool the system first. Otherwise you get theater.
If truth only becomes speakable after the miss, you are already paying full price.