Have you witnessed or being asked to cut corners in your projects?

What I find interesting about your examples is that these are not simply examples where a random person made an arbitrary decision to cut corners with devastating affect. In the case of the Ford Pinto, a problem was identified, impact analysis was conducted, and a decision was made (most likely not by the project manager) to accept the risk. On paper, this is how things are supposed to work - this provides examples of change management, risk management, and (poor, IMHO) decision-making. I'd like to think I would have made a different choice, but I also think that as a project manager, it probably wouldn't have been my choice to make. I would guess that most experienced project managers have gone through similar steps, albeit usually with less devastating outcomes.

The most common scenario I've experienced is sacrificing quality for the sake of speed. In product development, I've seen Sales teams propose product that they had strong gut feelings about, but they didn't do any market analysis or prototyping and the large, expensive promotion was ultimately viewed as a failure. Working with software, I've seen expensive outages caused by a lack of testing - sometimes because a person took a shortcut to get things done quickly, sometimes because the company made decisions that limited the capacity for effective testing despite recommendations that would have avoided the problem that led to the outage.

On occasion, as project managers, we can do something about it. Other times, we can raise our concerns and then find ourselves in a position where we either have to get in line or get removed. I once "inherited" a failing project. My Director wouldn't let me stop the project and get it sorted out; I just had to get it done. I figured out which part of the project was working well and stopped the rest, without telling my Director. Working with the project team, we figured out the problems and ended up completing the project faster and better than expected. Fortunately for me, my approach worked and my Director never found out what I did.

I do my best to ask questions and push for root cause-level understanding so that we are making informed decisions, as quickly as possible. I've found that if you take too long to make a decision or recommendation, it can get made for you. I'd like to say that the Cynefin Framework is part of the answer, but if people aren't already using it when you need to make a decision, you may not have time to teach it to them AND make the decision. In situations like this I find it helpful to reframe things to sound less like project management jargon - raise the bar slowly to minimize resistance while getting things done. For some stakeholders, project management really is a different language.