> What I do know is that information arriving at Black Holes never leaves. That’s an exaggeration, you can pry it out of them, but their desire to hoard information confuses me.

As I know all too well from my own adventures in dysfunctional organizations, it's a defensive strategy: Black Holes are defending against the possibility (which most likely has been an actuality in their past, either more than once or maybe one time that really hurt their reputation badly) that somebody will hold them responsible for what *somebody incompletely or incorrectly understood them saying* rather than *what they actually said*. It's a reaction to things like people reading the first bullet point in a list and ignoring the subsidiary and following points that have caveats and cautions, then running off to tell other people "oh, [you] said [thing]" without your additional context.

Example: I was a new employee on a contract team and we were having an intractable issue with user desktops (something to do with elevated permissions required for installing printer drivers, though I forget the specifics 17 years on -- my vague recollection is that the fundamental problem was we were trying to bypass security prompts in Windows XP that were designed to not be bypassed). My manager asked me to take a look because the desktop-deployment folks were completely out of ideas, and see if I could come up with anything that might be a viable solution.

I looked around online and found a utility that looked like it might do the trick, so I wrote up an e-mail and sent it out to my manager, as well as his manager who'd been really bird-dogging us on this issue and was pressing for updates. I was very specific that this *might* be a path forward, I hadn't vetted it but I had talked with the desktop-image packaging person on the team (who would ultimately have to determine if it worked and if so, implement it) and he thought it looked promising as well.

Ultimately it didn't work out -- the tool didn't package up and run as cleanly as we'd hoped. We were no worse off than before, in theory, except for the 10-20 hours the packager had spent working on my idea. But it came back on me anyway -- because I had "promised" we had a solution, and that made us look bad when it turned out we didn't. And every single evaluation my manager gave me after that, he cited that one incident as a detractor for my performance rating.

So after that I became a Black Hole. You want to know what's going on? Unless you're my manager (or you're my peer, I trust you, and we're off-campus), I'm not telling you -- regardless of whether the answer is good, bad or indifferent: I'm now afraid I'll either be held responsible for raising hopes, or for exaggerating problems. Ask my manager to ask me, then I'll tell him in e-mail (where I can retain a copy of my actual words forever) and you can ask him what I said -- then if he gets it wrong, you'll come back on *him*, not me.