We humans have this bad habit of biasing for optics.

Sometimes the pressure of leading a project causes us to focus on the appearance that things are progressing well when in reality

• perhaps they aren’t
• perhaps you or your team missed something
• perhaps the expectations were not set correctly in the first place

So what do we do? We say that things are “on track” and focus on all of the things that are going well, and skirt those challenges or expectation changes under the rug a little bit 😬

I sometimes catch myself doing this when sharing updates on the projects or initiatives that I’m leading at @Buffer.

My colleagues @Jenny & @Hailley shared this simple but powerful proposal a few weeks ago: to challenge ourselves to embrace things being off track. We rely heavily on Linear’s Updates feature to share progress on projects, but we weren’t consistently sharing honest portrayals of the state of those projects. This was a push for us to do that.

I had a recent example with the Visual Redesign that we just launched. It’s live: we shipped it on time, and it’s performing pretty well! But we have a ton of cleanup to do of the old Buffer front-end codebase, and it’s pretty necessary for us to stay nimble as an EPD organization. @Martín realized that, while we planned on doing that cleanup verbally, we didn’t account for that in our target date estimation – so I had to send that unfortunate update to tell the company we were off track, but for a very legitimate reason, and that we’re resetting expectations to account for it. Fortunately nothing major had to slip because of it 😅

Felt painful for a second, but it feels better to be honest, and it feels less painful each time.