A friend sent me a link to the wikipedia article on Schedule Chicken. The metaphor is the game of chicken, where two opponents play some dangerous game - such as driving cars towards each other or towards the edge of a cliff - and the last to "give up" (e.g. by steering to a safe course, or leaping from the vehicle) is the winner. The wikipedia article mentions the famous scene from Rebel Without A Cause.
In large projects where there are separate teams responsible for delivering different components it is very common for the game of schedule chicken to develop between the managers of the various teams.
The trouble starts with a baselined project plan, which will often not take sufficient account of unforeseen activities or has been squeezed to fit some politically or financially constrained box. Then the culture of punishing bad news plays its part in steering each manager to think "I know we can't deliver our part on time, but those other guys have to be in just as bad a situation, if not worse ... I'll keep quiet and let them break the bad news".
There are other forms of schedule chicken as well, such as when the development team hold back bad news about schedule slippage, thinking that the analysts or the "business" will send through late change requests which will provide ample cover for "re-baselining" the project plan.
The major fault in all this is that we often set things up so that bearers of bad news will be punished. This pushes everyone into concealing the bad news. All the troops may feel that the project is "doomed", middle managers live out some sort of denial, and senior managers seem blithely oblivious to the perilous state of the project.
