You walk into a meeting already braced for resistance. You've got your arguments lined up, your responses rehearsed. And then nothing happens. The resistance you expected never shows up - but you're so ready for the fight that you deliver your defensive speech anyway.
I see this all the time. Teams prepare for "the inevitable budget cuts" before anyone's proposed cutting anything. Individuals craft careful emails pre-empting resistance that hasn't materialised. The future you're imagining feels real. Really real. By the time you walk into that room, you can barely tell the difference between what you expected and what's actually happening. So you respond to the expectation, not to reality.
I learned this the hard way
Early in my career, I was in a senior management meeting discussing cost reduction options. I was so caught up in the drama playing out in my head - expectations about what was coming, assumptions about what it all meant - that I actually proposed we shut down my own office and move to a different structure. I was absolutely certain I was seeing the situation clearly.
Thankfully, the team went with an acquisition and growth strategy instead. Looking back, I can see I was responding to a projected crisis that existed only in my interpretation, not to what was actually being discussed in that room. The drama was real to me. The crisis wasn't.
Turns out, I was in good company.
Why this happens
This is completely normal. Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize partly for his work on this in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He showed that we don't just predict the future - we actively look for evidence that confirms our predictions and filter out anything that contradicts them. Your brain's trying to help, but it gets invested in being right.
The problem comes when you can't update - when the situation changes but you're still responding to the old version.
Learning how you do this
Start noticing how you prepare for things. What stories are you telling yourself about how that meeting will go or what'll happen when you send that invoice? Pay attention to the gap between what you're preparing for and what's actually been said or done.
Sometimes the first clue is physical. Your jaw tenses as you're drafting an email. Your shoulders creep up while you're thinking through an upcoming conversation. That tension? It's often showing you that you're already responding to what you expect will happen, not to what's actually happening right now.
Next time you're preparing for something, pause and ask yourself: "What am I bracing for here?" You might find you're already halfway through a conversation that hasn't happened yet. The other person hasn't even shown up, but you're solving for a version of events that exists only in your head.
What becomes possible
Once you start noticing your own projected expectations, you get more choice. You can stay with your preparation when it makes sense, or you can pause and check what's actually in front of you.
That choice - that's what makes the difference. And it becomes even more critical when you're working in groups, because this pattern compounds exponentially.
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Want to explore this further?
Quick reads:
Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow - the definitive work on how our predictions shape perception
Shane Parrish's "Confirmation Bias: Why You Make Terrible Decisions" at Farnam Street - on how we look for evidence that confirms our beliefs
Listen:
Hidden Brain: "The Influence You Have" - Shankar Vedantam on how expectations shape behaviour
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This is part 1 in a series exploring how we get stuck responding to our expectations, patterns from past experience, and assumptions rather than present reality - and how this plays out in partnerships and projects.
Coming next in this series: What happens when everyone in the meeting is doing this simultaneously - and how one client turned a deal she was ready to abandon into a contract that grew four-fold.