Narrative Bias and Recipes for Disaster

How unreasonable expectations for estimation set your people up for failure

Consciously we know that everyone, every single human on this planet, suffers from cognitive biases. If we are interested in improving our selves as professionals and people, we try to be introspective and cultivate metacognition (thinking about thinking). But the fact is we may always fall prey to errors in logic, especially when we are the ones who construct those errors. This article is written for people who are stakeholders in any sort of project but the fact is I hope it can be useful for anyone, especially Product Owners or Scrum Masters to use when working with stake holders to help manage unreasonable expectations when they come. And they always come.