What you're talking about has been a trend in some places for a very long time. I would go back to the eighties, when I was writing progress reports on my project, and kept being told that I shouldn't write so much about what we had actually done, but rather what we planned to do. My interpretation of the word "progress" had always been that it referred to something done, but the reports were now serving a new function.
That function was to secure one's position in the hierarchy and to keep ahead of one's rivals. After a few months, it became clear to me that what we planned to do seldom came about on the timeline we expected, or even how we expected. Scientific research is like that. So I went back to reporting what my team actually had accomplished with perhaps a bit about reasonable expectations.
What you're talking about has been a trend in some places for a very long time. I would go back to the eighties, when I was writing progress reports on my project, and kept being told that I shouldn't write so much about what we had actually done, but rather what we planned to do. My interpretation of the word "progress" had always been that it referred to something done, but the reports were now serving a new function.
That function was to secure one's position in the hierarchy and to keep ahead of one's rivals. After a few months, it became clear to me that what we planned to do seldom came about on the timeline we expected, or even how we expected. Scientific research is like that. So I went back to reporting what my team actually had accomplished with perhaps a bit about reasonable expectations.
This all started back in the 1980s.