Key takeaway
A status color that has to be manually built into a deck is a status color that is already a few days stale.
A recurring pattern in troubled projects is that the sponsor is genuinely surprised when things go wrong, despite having received weekly status updates the whole time, all of which said green or amber-trending-green. Nobody necessarily lied. But by the time a status gets manually assembled into a steering committee deck, it has usually passed through several rounds of rounding up, softening, and a few days' delay between when the real situation changed and when the deck reflects it.
Where the drift actually comes from
Each individual step in producing a status deck is reasonable on its own: a delivery lead is optimistic that a slipping task will recover by Friday, so it gets reported as on track rather than at risk. A PM does not want to raise alarm over something that might resolve itself. The deck gets built the day before the meeting from whatever was true then, not the day of. None of these are dishonest choices. Stacked together, they produce a report that is systematically a little more positive and a little more stale than reality, every single week, in the same direction.
Closing the gap without more meetings
The fix is not asking people to be more pessimistic in their reporting, that just shifts the bias rather than removing it. It is shortening the distance between the actual state of the project and what a sponsor can see, ideally to zero: a project overview a sponsor can look at directly, built from live task and milestone status rather than reconstructed by hand into a deck once a week. It will not eliminate every surprise, real problems still emerge suddenly sometimes, but it removes the specific, avoidable kind of surprise that comes from a report being several days behind the truth by the time anyone reads it.