In defense of the chip designers:

Design pipelines are deep and Intel at the time famously had very node-specific designs without industry-standard PDKs. The moment engineers were told to switch a design to 14nm, it basically reset the 5 year design-to-product pipeline. Management failed because they did not hedge the risk by starting a parallel 14nm design effort at first sign of 10nm troubles. They likely were engaged in magical thinking or some variation of the "Are YOU going to tell him?" Silicon Valley scene. It does not help that information like that is considered actionable insider trading information. I bet a lot of people working on 10nm designs first heard the news about the delays from the quarterly investor calls.