Expectation management isn’t just about you avoiding damaging errors, it also represents a fantastic opportunity. The most successful products, blogs and even businesses succeed because they exceed expectations in unexpected ways.
If “normal” is standard and you deliver something so much better than normal, you win. Taking Apple as an example again, one of the reasons they have done so well is their operating system is so much more reliable than the main operating system that people use – Windows.
Windows, while a capable operating system, has many issues that people have come to accept as normal.
The fact that the “blue screen of death” was so common in earlier Windows versions that it became a running joke, demonstrates how much people’s expectations had dropped, to the point where consistent errors were considered normal.
This was certainly not desirable, but accepted enough that people continued to use the operating system even with the obvious flaws.
How do you manage expectations of self and others ?
If “normal” is standard and you deliver something so much better than normal, you win. Taking Apple as an example again, one of the reasons they have done so well is their operating system is so much more reliable than the main operating system that people use – Windows.
Windows, while a capable operating system, has many issues that people have come to accept as normal.
The fact that the “blue screen of death” was so common in earlier Windows versions that it became a running joke, demonstrates how much people’s expectations had dropped, to the point where consistent errors were considered normal.
This was certainly not desirable, but accepted enough that people continued to use the operating system even with the obvious flaws.
How do you manage expectations of self and others ?