“Second, deliver negative news in 2-3 escalating phases. For example, start by softly expressing the possibility of a problem to give people time to adjust. The next time, state the problem as fact.”
Your audience is (hopefully) smart. This pattern will be obvious by the third time you use it and you’ll lose trust because it’ll seem like you’re trying to cushion the bad news.
In any case there's a good origin story:
There’s an old joke about a guy who went away for a long trip and asked his brother to take care of his 16 year-old cat during his absence.
A week or so into the trip, the guy calls home to check in. He knows his cat is elderly and he’s concerned about it.
“How’s my cat?” he asks his brother.
“Your cat’s dead,” his brother tells him.
The guy is upset. “This is how you break it to me?” he asks. “This is how you give someone bad news? How insensitive can you be?”
His brother is, of course, sorry, but can’t help asking: “What was I supposed to say? The truth is the truth.”
“That may be,” the former cat-owning brother says, “but there’s a way to give someone bad news more thoughtfully. You should have psychologically prepared me for it.
“When I called, you could have said, ‘your cat was crawling on the roof of the house when he fell, and I took him to the veterinarian. And then, next week when I called, you could have said, ‘your cat’s not doing so well’. And then the third week, you could have gently broken the news. That’s all it would have taken. Just a little bit of kindness.”
“I’m really sorry,” the brother say. “I’ll do better next time.”
“It’s OK,” says the other brother. “I’m just upset. I really loved that cat. Anyway, let’s change the subject. How’s our grandmother?”
“Well,” the brother says, “she was crawling on the roof of the house …”
Ref: https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/first-tell-me-about-...
But there are situations where a problem unfolds gradually, the sort of thing where you become more and more aware and certain that something is going wrong. For example, when a schedule slips. It's possible they're talking about that kind of situation.
In that kind of situation, there's some threshold where it gets bad enough to let people know. But you could also give people a warning some time before that, i.e. have an additional threshold and an additional earlier communication. So maybe the advice is to go ahead and do that additional communication.
People adjust and you would be forced to be more and more positive if you want to just sound neutral.