"It calms down after the release."
I have said this sentence to more teams than I want to count. I meant it every time. I believed it every time. And most times the release came, something new landed on top of it, and the calm never showed up.
I used to think the damage was a bit of lost goodwill. Then I went back to a book I first read years ago, and I think the damage runs deeper.
Two Christmases
Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and a camp in Bavaria. His account, Man's Search for Meaning, came out in 1946. By the time he died in 1997 it had sold over ten million copies.
In the middle of the book sits a short passage I keep coming back to.
The chief doctor in Frankl's camp told him the death rate in the week between Christmas 1944 and New Year 1945 rose beyond anything the camp had seen. In the doctor's view, the cause was not harder work. Not less food, worse weather, or a new epidemic. Most prisoners had lived on the hope of being home by Christmas. Christmas came. The news stayed bad. Their courage drained away, and a great number of them died.
Frankl tells a smaller version of the same story. His block warden, a composer, dreamed in February 1945 a voice told him the war would end for him on March 30th. He held on to the date. As it drew near, the war news made it plain nobody was going home. On March 29th he fell ill with a high fever. On March 30th he lost consciousness. On March 31st he died. On paper, typhus killed him. Frankl believed the broken promise did the real work.
Twenty years later and half a world away, James Stockdale watched the same pattern play out. He was the highest-ranking US military officer in the "Hanoi Hilton," held from 1965 to 1973 and tortured more than twenty times. Jim Collins once asked him who didn't make it out.
Stockdale's answer: "The optimists."
The ones who said they'd be out by Christmas. Then by Easter. Then Thanksgiving. Then Christmas again. "And they died of a broken heart."
I served in the US Army, nowhere near anything Stockdale went through. His two-word answer still stays with me.
One Doctor's Opinion Is Not a Study
I want to be honest about what these stories are and what they aren't.
The Christmas spike is one doctor's opinion, passed on secondhand, from a place where nobody kept trustworthy records. The composer is one man. Stockdale's optimists come from a single conversation on a walk across the Stanford campus. None of it is data. I'm not going to tell you it proves hope keeps people alive.
What persuades me is the agreement. Two men, two wars, two decades apart, with no reason to line their stories up. Both pointed at the same killer. Not hope. Hope with a date stapled to it.
The Date Is the Problem, Not the Hope
This is where Ian Pettigrew comes in. When Ian joined Debra and me on Corey-osity Unleashed, he used Frankl to make a point I keep testing against my own career. Hope doesn't depend on conditions. Frankl held on to his in about the worst conditions human beings have ever built.
Look at what Frankl held on to, though. Not a date. A task.
When he arrived at Auschwitz, the guards took the finished manuscript of his first book. Later, sick with typhus, he stayed awake at night and wrote shorthand notes on scraps of paper so he would be ready to rewrite it if he lived. He credited the work with helping him survive. He leaned on a line from Nietzsche: a person with a why to live for will bear almost any how.
A date is a bet on conditions you don't control. A why sits somewhere nobody reaches by moving a calendar.
Stockdale said the same thing in his own words. He never doubted he would get out and turn the experience into the defining event of his life. He also refused to lie to himself about the facts in front of him. Collins named the pairing the Stockdale Paradox. I'd call it hope without a deadline.
Your Team Is Not in a Prison Camp
Let me be clear about this part. Nobody's sprint compares with Auschwitz or Hanoi, and I'm not making the comparison.
The mechanism scales down, though.
Every time you say "it's only until launch," you hand your team a Christmas. They start counting. They ration their energy against the date. They tell their partners the late nights end on the 14th. And when the 14th passes and the pressure doesn't, you lose more than the date. You lose the next one too, because nobody believes it. I wrote about this kind of slow trust repair in One Apology Doesn't Rebuild Trust... a broken promise costs far more than the words cost you.
A while back I wrote about how I confused hope with optimism for years. Optimism expects things to get better without you. Hope comes with a plan. Frankl and Stockdale add a third piece I missed. Hope needs an anchor which doesn't move when the calendar does.
What I Do Instead Now
Stop promising end dates for pain
If I don't control when the crunch ends, I don't name a day. I say what I know. "This is hard right now. I don't know when it eases. Here's what we're doing about it this week." It feels worse to say. It lands better a month later.
When someone above me demands a date anyway, I give them the date of the next checkpoint, not the end of the pain. "We'll know more on Friday" is a promise I keep. "It'll all be over by Christmas" is a promise the world keeps for me, or doesn't.
Give the why, not the when
Tie the work to something worth the effort. The customer who has waited a year for this fix. The engineer whose design is finally going into production. The thing the team will be proud to have shipped. A reason survives a slipped deadline. A date doesn't.
Say the hard facts out loud
Stockdale didn't ban hope. He banned pretending. Forced cheer hides bad news, and I've written about the dark side of always looking on the bright side. Tell your team the bad news early and in plain words. People handle hard facts far better than they handle being managed.
Shrink the horizon
When the finish line keeps moving, stop pointing at it. Point at the next step. Celebrate the small signs of progress along the way... I call them glimmers. A team focused on this week's next step has nothing to count down to, and nothing to lose when the date slips.
Check your own hope first
Ian made another point on the show I keep chewing on. You won't sell your team a hope you don't feel yourself. If you're privately counting down to Christmas, they'll know. Find your own why before you go looking for theirs.
Date or Reason?
Think about the last thing you told your team about when things would get better.
Was it a date or a reason?
If the date slips, what do they have left?