Totally. It strikes me that this would have been a more helpful tact for No Estimates. Just like estimates, expectations are a knee jerk reaction to stimuli. You want your estimate or your plan to be right so much that it's a very short stretch to "expecting" them to happen.
Given: frustration is the difference between expectations and reality
Then: in most contexts, we face a formidable challenge
As you point:
* We turn our (impossible) plans into expectations
* We deflect consequences (blame, pain, etc.) to others to "protect" ourselves
But we also make the thing worse in the first place by skipping the alignment. That was a difficult lesson for me.
A few years back, I thought we were doing very well with transparency/visualization, and quite well with avoiding the blame game and other such tactics. And then it all blew out in our hands.
In retrospect, it was an impossible misalignment of expectations. Not even their scale (which often is a simple output of too optimistic plans), but their direction. One can't move an organization in two opposite directions, let alone five. And when some people at the same time believe that their desired agenda will happen, then everyone is bound to get dissatisfied.
Thus, as you point out, the need for making all the decisions visible (and in a way that doesn't drown them in an ocean of noise, let me add).
I told my hubby from the start, "We'll only be happy if we stop having expectations of each other." Twenty-four years later, it still works.
Totally. It strikes me that this would have been a more helpful tact for No Estimates. Just like estimates, expectations are a knee jerk reaction to stimuli. You want your estimate or your plan to be right so much that it's a very short stretch to "expecting" them to happen.
Given: frustration is the difference between expectations and reality
Then: in most contexts, we face a formidable challenge
As you point:
* We turn our (impossible) plans into expectations
* We deflect consequences (blame, pain, etc.) to others to "protect" ourselves
But we also make the thing worse in the first place by skipping the alignment. That was a difficult lesson for me.
A few years back, I thought we were doing very well with transparency/visualization, and quite well with avoiding the blame game and other such tactics. And then it all blew out in our hands.
In retrospect, it was an impossible misalignment of expectations. Not even their scale (which often is a simple output of too optimistic plans), but their direction. One can't move an organization in two opposite directions, let alone five. And when some people at the same time believe that their desired agenda will happen, then everyone is bound to get dissatisfied.
Thus, as you point out, the need for making all the decisions visible (and in a way that doesn't drown them in an ocean of noise, let me add).