Expectations

Lower your expectations, Better balance quality and fun at work. Ralentis un peu. These are comments I heard from some managers during my career. They took more and more importance in my daily work life, and I ended putting this on my wall. I could see them every day for quite some time, so that I could keep them in my mind and think about them. Was there something I was missing behind these advices? Is it time to slow down and live better?

Finally I made my mind on what I think about them.

Lower your expectations.

I do think that the world is as it is thanks to people who did not lower their expectations. Rosa Parks expected she would get civil rights. Mandela or Gandhi also stayed strong with their expectations. In other areas, Columbus did not render after initial “No”s. Science if full of inventors who tried and tried to reach the impossible for years. Probably with low expectations we would still be in the caverns.

My parents did not educate me with low expectations. As a child I was a Ham radio chatting with the other side of the planet using morse code. I talked with cosmonauts on the Mir space station. When I was 12, my expectation in life was to become an Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Engineer. At 16, I was selling software for PCs via postal mail and 3 ? floppies. I had my private plane license at 17. I targeted the best studies and had to choose between Polytechnique and Normale Sup.

Having high expectations does not mean you are stupid and unrealistic and think that any expectations you have will be achieved. You can have high expectations and know that at the end you will achieve only some part of it. But if you start with low expectations you will hardly achieve something higher.

Having high expectations is great, and for some people, like me, life is grey and sad without them.

So I want to keep having high expectations. And if someone tells me this is not possible, probably this is because this is not possible at this time, in this place, inside this organization, or with these people.

My answer is hence to put my expectations on something else.

Better balance quality and fun at work.

Why should I balance between these two things? Balancing tends to mean that the two objectives are incompatible, we need to choose and balance. Just like in decision optimization where business problems always have different and competing objectives: for example, economical cost and ecological impact. We, in general, balance using weights, we can also use lexicographical order, putting one objective before the other.

But why the two objectives should be contradictory? Cannot they be achieved altogether?

And what if in fact one objective is correlated with the other? Why if the fun we get is in fact proportional to the quality of what we do and deliver?

Some will say this is the difference between art and work. Artists do try to fill their life doing artwork, targeting high. And work is by essence, not fun. That is may be a wrong election of job for them.

Probably there is something chemical. Some people are happier when they have challenges, and work hard on those, while some other are happier when things are more “under control”. In that case, yes I understand one would need to balance.

I do think that doing great stuff is fun. And when you need to choose between quality and fun, this is probably because you are not in the right organization or not have the right process.

Slow down (and wait for others and go together).

I hear a lot the story about going quickly alone vs going far with others. This story is over-used to claim that group work is always better. This is the always which annoys me. Yes, in general, it is better to work as group, with a mix of skills, a mix of seniority, some diversity which will be beneficial. But not all groups go further than individuals.

This idea that everyone is valuable is great. In every person there is indeed some possibility. But there is not always achievements in every person. In a recent book, all these new theories on the management in the new millennium are challenged. Brainstorms are good as they allow potentially any idea to emerge, but it does not mean all ideas should be kept. We see the same in the design thinking process, all these post-its are ways for all ideas to have a chance, to break usual decision process limitations, but if all post-its are always considered with the same attention, and included in the final plan, then this will not work.

At school, we are trained to work hard, to get good grades. Not all answers are valid. Neither we are trained to wait for others, or to work for them. This might be bad, I don’t know, this is not the topic here. But at least we need to be aware that the school system and the work system appears fundamentally inconsistent.

Going together also requires you want to go to the same place, in the same direction, at the same pace. Then, indeed, each member can bring his specific skills, and each one has interest to share and help each other. But why if a part of the group wants just to go somewhere else, or deliberately want to go slowly, forever, as this is more convenient? Should the whole group adapt and slow down?

My conclusion is that working with others is great, that indeed you can go further as a group, but you need to carefully choose your group and ensure your objectives and directions are aligned with the other members of the group.

Conclusions

My conclusions are now on my wall so that I can remember them!