Smart, committed teams get stuck. Not because they lack capability, and not because people are difficult. It's because everyone's responding to different futures that haven't happened yet.
The deal she almost walked away from
I had a client ready to walk away from a difficult prospect. She'd become increasingly frustrated over several weeks of back-and-forth. Every proposal she sent came back with more questions. Every conversation felt like an interrogation. She'd decided they were time-wasters, out of their depth, never going to commit. She was very tempted to cancel the next meeting and not follow up.
When we talked it through, she started to see how much she was bringing her own expectations into the room - expectations about being dismissed, about being questioned, about wasting her time. Those expectations were shaping how she heard their questions. What sounded like skepticism to her might have been genuine curiosity. What felt like resistance might have been thoroughness. By distinguishing where she was contributing to the tension, she was able to shift from a defensive pitch to a consultative approach - genuinely exploring what the client needed rather than defending what she'd already proposed.
The meeting went ahead. The contract she was ready to abandon? Signed. And it grew four-fold.
What makes this a team problem
Most of us have walked into meetings already defensive, already certain about how things will go. Once you notice your own projected expectations, you can choose differently. But when everyone in a room is doing this simultaneously? That's when things get really complex.
One person expects resistance and goes on the defensive. Another expects to be dismissed and holds back their best ideas. A third expects the same tired arguments and stops listening for anything new. Everyone's responding to their own projection of how this will go rather than what's actually happening in the room. The conversation happening in the room gets lost in the ones playing in their heads.
Why this is so difficult
Daniel Kahneman's research in Thinking, Fast and Slow shows that our brains actively look for evidence confirming our predictions while filtering out contradictions. It's automatic - we're projecting constantly, without conscious effort.
What's difficult for individuals becomes exponentially more complex when groups do it together. Each person brings their own projected future into the room. Those futures interact - sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes contradicting, rarely aligning with what's actually happening.
What helps
Individual awareness is a critical step. When you can notice your own projected expectations, you get more choice about how to respond.
When teams make clearing projections part of normal preparation - before important meetings, before major decisions - it creates the conditions for responding to what's actually in the room rather than what you feared would be there.
Want to explore this further?
On projected expectations:
Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow - Part 1 on how System 1 constructs predictions and confirmation bias
Shane Parrish's "Confirmation Bias" at Farnam Street - why we see what we expect to see
On team dynamics:
Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - how lack of trust creates defensive patterns
Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - Chapters on mental models and team learning
This is part 2 in a series exploring how we get stuck responding to our expectations, patterns from past experience, and assumptions rather than present reality.
Related: Why We're Often Misaligned - How to Read the Room Better