Expectation is not evidence.
The other day, I was wrist-deep in a tub of Blue Bell cookies & cream because a client hadn't emailed me back. A week of silence after a pitch and I'd already reread the proposal four times, drafted my beautiful response to a rejection nobody sent, and rebuilt my quarter without the income. Then their reply landed: "Hey Michelle, we loved it. Thursday?" I was bugging over absolutely nothing. Classic!
Expectation is not evidence.
I mistake my own expectations as proof when I'm anxious (or hopeful) and working from too little information. And it's so easy for that pendulum to SWANG when reality doesn't match. Our brains are wired to predict constantly. An expectation is a prediction with my belief attached. And it will complete a story with...crumbs.
In this instance, the client's silence was a blank page. I wrote a whole Shakespearean tragedy (and cast myself as the lead).
Now give that same expectation an OKR and a Q3 deadline. My version of this costs $6.59 at Wegmans. The organizational version costs...a lot more.
You already know how it goes: A PMM team decides who the customer is before talking to a single one. A brand campaign gets built on an "insight" nobody ever heard someone that's not AI say out loud. The certainty FEELS earned because everyone in the room agrees. Buuuuut agreement ain't evidence. It's my Blue Bell spiral with more spoons.
And the fastest way to promote expectation to fact? A title. When the expectation belongs to leadership, it stops being a hypothesis and starts being a decision. Nobody calls it skipping the research. It's just "moving fast."
Which is exactly the problem. When expectations become evidence too early, teams stop gathering evidence. Why run research? Why test? Why interview users? Why prototype? ((insert crazy eyes))
Innovation doesn’t need every idea questioned into dust. But it does need someone to ask, “Do we know this OR are we just expecting it to be true?”
Now when I’m on the verge of crashing out, I ask myself the same thing.
One of those deserves action. The other deserves…pause.