Hiding the Illness from the Doctor

CORE DEFINITION

A Chinese idiom drawn from the story of Duke Huan of Cai, who dismissed the physician Bian Que's repeated warnings and died when the disease became untreatable. The core proposition is that concealment is driven by the anticipated cost of disclosure rather than by ignorance, so the remedy lies in changing what disclosure costs rather than in exhorting people to be honest. The key qualification is that the idiom covers active concealment, not mere inattention; when a leader signals displeasure at bad news, the organization does not fail to see the problem, it hides it.