The higher up in large organizations you go, in politics or employment or w/e, the more what matters is not facts, but avoiding being visibly seen to have made a mistake, so you become risk-averse, and just ride the status quo unless it's an existential threat to you or something you can capitalize on for someone else's misjudgment.
So if you can't directly gain from pointing out the emperor's missing clothes, there's no incentive to call it out, there's active risk to calling it out if other people won't agree, and moreover, this provides an active incentive for those with political capital in the organization to suppress the embarrassment of anyone pointing out they did not admit the problem everyone knew was there.
(This is basically how you get the "actively suppress any exceptions to people collectively treating something as a missing stair" behaviors.)
I've not seen that at my fortune 100. I found other's willing to agree and we walked it up to the most senior evp in the corporation. Got face time andbwe weren't punished. Just, nothing changed. Some of the directors that helped walk it up the chain eventually became more powerful and the suggested actions took place about 15 years later.
Sure, I've certainly seen exceptions, and valued them a lot.
But often, at least in my experience, exceptions are limited in scope to whatever part of the org chart the person who is the exception is in charge of, and then that still governs everything outside of that box...
The higher up in large organizations you go, in politics or employment or w/e, the more what matters is not facts, but avoiding being visibly seen to have made a mistake, so you become risk-averse, and just ride the status quo unless it's an existential threat to you or something you can capitalize on for someone else's misjudgment.
So if you can't directly gain from pointing out the emperor's missing clothes, there's no incentive to call it out, there's active risk to calling it out if other people won't agree, and moreover, this provides an active incentive for those with political capital in the organization to suppress the embarrassment of anyone pointing out they did not admit the problem everyone knew was there.
(This is basically how you get the "actively suppress any exceptions to people collectively treating something as a missing stair" behaviors.)