I think part of the problem is more that they look to the policy. The policy tells them to do something, and then they do it in a way that they can argue fits the form rather than the substance.
In the Phoenix situation, the example I would give would be that the senior executives brought in S.i. Systems to do an external review. S.i. Systems did their work and identified some issues, but their work was controlled essentially by the people responsible for the project and they reported to the people responsible for the project. The substance for why an external review was done was to get essentially an independent and objective view, and that review should have been done in reporting directly to the deputy minister rather than to the project executives.
It was a case of saying, okay, the policy requires us to do this, and we will do this, but it was not done in a way that was really respecting why the policy was saying it should be done.