The fundamental challenge in development organizations is the gap between aggressive leadership timelines ("targets") and reality-based execution forecasts ("plans"); when leaders treat ambitious targets as factual plans, honest reporting goes underground, schedules become fiction, and leadership loses visibility into real progress — much like a commander who punishes scouts for bad news and walks into an ambush. The solution is "informed ambition": let teams build their own plans to engage their ownership and drive genuine innovation, then transparently surface the gap between targets and forecasts as a shared strategic challenge to close collaboratively through descoping, parallelization, or added resources — because when people own their schedules they optimize them, but when schedules are imposed, teams become passive order-takers who abandon plans they know to be lies.