Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.
—Brandom Sanderson, The Way of Kings
Our expectations deeply affect how we interact with other people. In the working environment where we often depend on other people in order to complete our own work, this becomes even more apparent. When we set high expectations and they are not met we get frustrated and disappointed. What makes us create expectations that are unlikely to be met? How should we best deal with unrealistic expectations? How are expectations formed? We will try to answer these questions in this chapter.
How Expectations Are Formed
Expectations are beliefs we form on how the future should be. They help us plan for the future by allocating scarce resources (like time, money, and energy) on activities that might yield the results we desire, and are formed based on the information we have available at the moment as well as based on our experience from past events. Once we get used to a certain pattern that is repeated over time, we develop an expectation that the same action or event should repeat itself again in the future. This is normal human behavior and can be observed in many creatures across the animal kingdom as well. Any dog owner knows that whenever they get the leash their dog will act excitedly, expecting to be taken for a walk.
In the working environment, we create expectations all the time as well: on how coworkers would react to a certain demand, how customers will react to a new policy or service and what the boss will do if an important deadline is not met. We create expectations so often that it is common to not carefully assess whether they are realistic or not, many times we assume that because a behavior has always happened in a certain way it will continue to be repeated as such in the future. This is called inductive reasoning, or induction, and has been a subject of philosophical discussion since 300 BC when Aristotle first started pondering it, but as any experienced stock trader can assure you: Past behavior is not a guarantee for future behavior.
Sometimes we unintentionally create false expectations simply by agreeing with people when we shouldn’t: A manager that says “It would be nice if we could deliver this before the end of the quarter, do you think that is possible?” is not directly asking for a commitment, but depending on the answer given, it might become one. While “I’m not sure, that date seems a bit tight considering the other demands we have” makes it clear that you are not committing, on the other hand by saying “Yes, we have other demands but we probably can do that” you do create an expectation that might haunt you in the future. Notice how it was said that it “probably can be done,” when negotiating or even simply communicating this type of content it is specially important to be completely clear and avoid ambiguity at all costs. Otherwise, each side will interpret what was said according to what is most convenient to them.
Unrealistic Expectations
Unrealistic expectations1 are those that are very unlikely to be met and that can be identified as such at least by part of the team responsible for setting and/or executing it. Many realistic expectations are also not met due to other factors, like external events (recession, change in customer behavior) or unpredictable forces (like a pandemic). These are subjects for entire books in their own right, and outside the scope of this chapter. In the following sections, we will only cover unrealistic expectations and how they impact the working environment.
Origin
Misaligned interests: Some manager or boss needs to force the team to a deadline that is unfeasible because that would grant them some benefits, like a raise, a bonus, or prestige.
Insufficient or incorrect information: When expectations are based using incorrect variables their result won’t be correct, understanding what is relevant for any given artifact is a prerequisite to define a reasonable expectation.
Incompetence: Some people simply don’t deliver and try to postpone the inevitable outcome as much as possible, pushing the deadlines whenever they can in a continuous manner.
Biases: As already discussed in Chapter 3, our brains have limited processing power, and as a result we tend to form biases to help us navigate a complex and uncertain world. This results in disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea, thing, or person, leading to the formation of expectations that are simply highly unlikely to be met.
Lack of Situational Awareness: In its simplest form, Situation Awareness (SA) means “knowing what is going on around you.”2 While SA has its roots in the aviation industry, and goes back to pilots in WW1, it applies to any environment and is a fancy way of determining how apt an individual is at perceiving and comprehending their environment and then processing this information. Specifically, it tries to determine “how people pick and choose information, weave it together, and interpret it in an on-going and ever-changing fashion as both situations and operator goal states change.”2 Formulated less rigorously and put into the context of this chapter:: when you know what is going on around you, you can manage expectations. Leaders that do not know what is going on around them, tend to create unrealistic expectations.
It should be noted that, in some sense, the above items intertwine: Incompetence and biases, for example, are closely related and may be caused by incorrect information. Similarly, insufficient information can be a cause for poor SA (although the opposite—too much information—can be a cause too). We leave it up to the reader to untangle these relationships: a good exercise, and a difficult task in reality. The important thing is to be aware of these factors: once you recognize them for what they are, you stand a chance of counteracting them.
It should also be noted that, in some ways, expectations can be situational. There are a number of factors that can lead to misalignment that is not inherent to the individual but created by transient events, like someone having bad information or going for a bad breakup. One must be careful not to diagnose and label the nature and reason of unmet expectations without enough context.
Examples
Unrealistic expectations come in many shapes and sizes. Within the world of engineering however, they are most commonly manifested in the form of unrealistic deadlines, scope creep, and unmatched autonomy. We will discuss each of these in turn below.
Unfeasible Deadlines
Unfeasible deadlines are the most common type of unrealistic expectations, delivery dates that can’t be achieved with the existing resources are forced on a team that usually needs to select a path they’d prefer to avoid if possible, like working overtime, cut important features (i.e., removing scope), or incur into technical debt that hopefully will be addressed one day.
Such deadlines usually happen in a top-down manner, that is, a manager/boss decides the date with little to no input from the team and simply communicates to the team that it must be met. However, that is not always the case, sometimes team members are overconfident or ignore important aspects of the tasks, assuming they are more of what they are already used to and say that it is possible in a timeframe that is not realistic.
Scope Creep
Scope creep happens when unexpected features or demands are added to a project that simply was not ready for them. A project that was properly scoped and had a reasonable deadline might start to receive new requests that break the previously agreed terms, this is what we classify as scope creep.
Conditions that affect the project might change suddenly and the need to adapt is a force that should not be ignored, but embraced, however, this is no excuse to ignore any previously defined plan and work in a chaotic manner, disregarding previous effort in favor of information that might be previously known but ignored. Teams should have a clear mechanism to identify which tasks bring higher value to the company at the lowest possible cost and prioritize them.
Unmatched Autonomy
Unmatched autonomy happens when an individual expects a certain level of autonomy, usually on a new position or on a new project, and is faced with a different reality: red tape or excessive bureaucracy that simply does not allow them to make the choices they thought possible before, like a team leader that expected to be able to choose the people that would join their team or which technologies to use.
Although there are other manifestations of unrealistic expectations, like megalomaniac missions, unfeasible performance, or unmatchable precision for AI-based estimation, the three we listed above are the ones we see happening more often and tend to be independent of the sector the organization is in.
The Impacts of Unrealistic Expectations
Unmatched expectations affect everyone inside an organization and its products, services, and even customers.
At the individual level, a lot of pressure due to some unfeasible deadline might cause stress and demotivation. In case that is something recurrent, it can lead to turnover or even burnout.
Inside a team, it might manifest in different forms, like morale erosion as people will feel that their best is never enough, loss of confidence in cases where different teams need to interact and one (or both) of them never deliver on the expected timeframe (even though such timeframe is impossible). Ultimately, it might lead to a culture change where the company’s modus operandi is based on such expectations and everyone knows they are expected to work long shifts and sacrifice scope or quality in order to meet impossible targets. Once that culture takes place, people realize that planning sessions lose their meaning because reasonable deadlines won’t be respected anyways or the scope will grow making them irrelevant.
Lastly, it also impacts the company’s services and products, when deadlines and scope cannot be changed what suffers is quality. In software projects, this means not only more bugs but also bugs that take longer to get fixed, are more likely to return some time after “fixed” and have a more widespread impact throughout the system. Tech debt is another side-effect when quality is sacrificed, if not paid it piles up and makes even simple changes harder to achieve and riskier to do.
How to Deal with Unrealistic Expectations
By far the most important tool to avoid unrealistic expectations is communication. Clear, non-ambiguous communication. It is the onus of the task doer to ensure that he makes his opinion known about the reasonability of what is being asked, to consider all the information available and decide whether it is feasible or not. When we omit ourselves, be it for fear of what others might think of us, be it because we believe we’ll be ignored, we are accomplices and signatories of that bad decision. Unsurprisingly that omission will come to haunt us down the line.
We know this is easier said than done but most people tend to think that saying “no” is actually much worse than what it is in reality. A responsible company that trusts its hiring process will assume that their internal teams are composed of competent and professional people, such people are able to have diverging opinions and discuss it in a non-confrontational manner, exposing the arguments that those opinions are based on, ensuring the premises that lead to such ideas hold true. Assuming you did your homework when you expose the reasoning behind a disagreement or explain why a certain deadline isn’t realistic an honest and reasonable person will understand and together you can search for a better arrangement that satisfies what is needed.
Once agreements have been reached it is time to document them. Written commitments are another important tool to deal with unrealistic expectations. We tend to believe that once a decision has been made it will remain unchanged indefinitely, that is rarely the case. In cases like scope creep, having written documentation about what exactly was agreed upon is essential to ensure that in case new demands get added people know that the agreed deadline is not accounting for it, so accommodations need to be made. Here, we are not necessarily talking about a specific document just for this purpose; ideally, we should rely on tools we are already using and just ensure that people use the same source of information as “the source of truth.” A sprint with X items and 50 points allocated to it can very well serve for this purpose for instance.
Aligning Expectations
Unrealistic expectations aside, another significant source of frustration in software development, are poorly aligned expectations.
- 1.
Understand what the stakeholders expect and validate these expectations with the team to ensure that these are technically feasible.
- 2.
Prioritize features that have the lowest cost and highest impact on the business.
- 3.
Ensure that the team understands the main goals of a project and why it is important to the company.
- 4.
Try to anticipate obstacles before they occur(so they can be removed or mitigated) by checking in with both the team and the broader circle of stakeholders.
It is important to note that once your team understands what is required, they will automatically be able to help you calibrate expectations. Engineers may suggest paths that can help you achieve the objectives—for example, by illustrating features that might seem expansive to a nontechnical person but are not.
Although project-related expectations are arguably the most visible and highest repercussion, they’re by no means the only kind that a manager needs to handle.
Visibility of sensitive or confidential topics while keeping the team informed
Promotions and raises
Organizational structure changes
Process changes
Technology changes
Cultural behavior
While not comprehensive, we hope that this list illustrates how expectation setting is a critical aspect of the life of a manager, how diverse and time-consuming it can be, and how impactful the consequences can be when not properly handled.
Conclusion
Expectations are part of our personal and professional lives. We form them all the time as they are convenient tools used to plan the future. A large portion of these expectations, we formed subconsciously. Some are the subject of biases or extrapolations of past experiences. Others are based on subtle signals that we don’t perceive consciously. Especially within a professional setting, this can be dangerous. After all, our brains have a limited capacity, and we are apt at “bending” our perceptions. We have no way of telling how much of what we perceive to be real, actually is. Psychologist Lee Brosnan calls this “naive realism,” or as Arthur Schopenhauer puts it: “every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” While to a certain extent, there is very little that we can do about this, we should reflect on this regularly. Especially when we feel that our expectations are not being met.
We should also try to identify and mitigate (as soon as possible) unrealistic expectations. That is those expectations that are known upfront to be unfeasible or near impossible. Unrealistic expectations come in different shapes and forms. Sometimes they come from the top, and we need to make sure our opinions and concerns about them are heard. Other times, we create them ourselves inadvertently. and care with details is essential to avoid these latter traps. Regardless of how they are formed or where they come from, it is important to remember that once we start to accept unrealistic expectations as part of the company culture individuals, teams and the product and services the company provides will suffer.