The only thing harder than diamonds...setting clear expectations

One of the most disheartening outcomes of a project is when, after significant up-front planning, you review it with your manager or stakeholder and find out that you have not delivered what they expected. It can make you want to throw your computer at a wall. How does it happen? Because expectation setting is hard.

Think about how all of your prior experiences introduce nuance to how you think about a problem or situation. Now consider how different the life experiences of your manager are and how that could nuance their perspective. Now consider the differences in context you each have as it relates to the problem statement. Heck, even just consider how a word like 'important' could be interpreted as 'needs-to-be-done-immediately' or as 'needs-to-be-done-slowly-and-carefully'.

One low lift way to solve for this is the "20% check in", a tactic I learned from Blanchard and Johnson's The One Minute Manager. The tactic recommends that even though you align on expectations at the start of a project and review performance vs expectations at the end, you should also check in about 20% of the way into the work. When rubber meets the road and decisions start to be made autonomously any misalignment in expectation will start to show itself early. Checking in early into delivery gives everyone the chance to clarify thinking and work through any emerging problems that had not been previously expected.

It's an easy ask and a highly effective tool. Sometimes the most powerful solutions are the simplest.