Demand Entrapment

Sean Moore Gonzalez — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 19:44:57 +0000

We can't know everything about everything, our experiences are unique and communication is limited, so we must work within those constraints. We also have our visions and our expectations of people and code to realize those visions. The question is:
Does our limited communication have the messaging and bandwidth to coordinate the team so we are all working towards a vision together?

My go-to examples of harmony through communication are clocks syncing on sailing ships from the age of exploration, or metronomes syncing using a board and coke cans:
Teams obviously have more Degrees of Freedom than these illustrations, but it does beg the question:

What communication brings my team into harmony?

We can also ask:
What communication disrupts team harmony?
Demand Entrapment is certainly disruptive.

Demand Entrapment, or Expectation Entrapment, is the self-fulfilling heuristic where:

A person expects something of someone
That expectation is unrealistic
Whatever is delivered, it's never good enough
Feedback is ignored and blame is spread around
Expectations never converge, and the cycle repeats.

As an Angel CTO I experienced this while supporting a recent startup I helped secure Angel Funding for on their way to a Seed Round. The short short version is my co-founder wanted to iterate on design faster than we could keep up with, which affected their B2C experiments; in turn, I expected my co-founder to be familiar with our development style. Eventually the team was frustrated all around. I will always wonder what could have brought the dev and product team into harmony.

If you've ever experienced Demand Entrapment, or if you're guilty of it yourself (I know I am), please share your story and perhaps we can find new approaches to this common challenge.

DEV Community: Sean Moore Gonzalez

Demand Entrapment