"Judgment fails when accountability is collective but consequences are individual.
In a status update where leadership wants certainty you do not have, you can feel two risks at once: acting too early and acting too late. The team needs a boundary more than it needs reassurance.
When the boundary is unwritten, people optimize for what is legible and defensible, not for what is true. That is how you get busywork and brittle systems. The system learns from what you allow under pressure, not from what you say you value in calm weeks. If you introduce a measure, name the distortion it creates, because the distortion is part of the cost you are choosing.
Decide the default action and the condition that changes it. That is what makes execution calmer. Write it so execution is obvious.