A lot of this comes from hard lessons learned at the business level. If you're ultimately responsible for the success of a project with any significant level of uncertainty, you very quickly learn that any significant level of uncertainty means that things are probably not going to work out well. This becomes a knee-jerk fear response whenever any report says that things are not going according to plan, where the immediate impulse is to give that work item to someone who promises to make it go according to plan.

Very quickly leads to a race to the bottom where executives settle on tried-and-true strategies for driving revenue: give Google & Facebook lots of money for paid leads, spend a lot on salespeople to convert potential customers, nickel & dime them for everything, work your engineers to the bone to deliver the features that salespeople promise, and flip the company before the accumulated technical, management, and oftentimes financial debt kills it. Ultimately, if you want durable success, you need to take some strategic risks and invest in projects where you don't know the outcome before starting. But that goes against nearly every emotional circuit in how we're wired, so few executives can do it.