We should ground our teams in reality whenever we can.
As ridiculous as it sounds, it is necessary to remind us and remind others to reign in our hopes and dreams back to reality. Mainly because it is so easy to become untethered. Once we are disconnected from reality, it is hard to make the right decisions or to properly plan.
Opposite to business reality is business fantasy. Business fantasy is an aspirational narrative that presents leadership's wishes as real while rejecting reality. It is the rejection of reality that turns an idea that can be a goal or a vision into fantasy.
Let's explore some examples. The new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) wants to fix all bugs within 24 hours. This is their wish. People in the company tells them that we can probably do that if we hire more developers. So the CTO sets a goal: to have 24 hour bug fixes within a year or two, the time that it would take to hire and train two the support developers.
What if the tech leads explain to the CTO that the code is a mess, there is no ticketing system, and we need to add more traces to our product to make this possible? The CTO can set the 24-hour-bug-fix as a business vision, a future normal state that will take a number of years to achieve.
We end up with a business fantasy when the CTO demands that all bugs will be fixed within 24 hours, with the lack of workers and the poor state of the current system, while keeping the rest of responsibilities to develop future features and keep the current projects and deadlines. Like trying to buy a new car with 100 dollars, it can't be done.
The business fantasy becomes stronger when people who bring up reality get punished. If it is dangerous to state reality, people will pretend to believe in the fantasy, even if they don't actually believe in it personally.
Business fantasies breed cynicism. This is because the people who run the business need to operate in reality, while publicly holding that the fantasy is real. Especially when the work that has to be done contradicts the fantasy.
In my opinion, the ultimate business leader who embraced fantasy was Stalin. He decided that the Soviet Union, a mostly agricultural society, was going to become an industrial country in five years. This was not possible. Those who would bring it up, would get punished because they were enemies of progress and the country.
The managers that actually had to do the work would then keep two books. The ones that fed the fantasy of the leadership, that showed that there were more furniture created than there actually was, and the actual books, that kept track of the lower, real production.
Everyone knew about the difference between the fantasy world and the reality.
There is this ongoing defense of Josef Stalin's leadership, that he industrialized USSR. This defense is similar to what current business leaders who embrace business fantasy: their out-of-reality wishes created products that many claimed couldn't be done. But this judgment also belongs to business fantasy.
When you carefully follow the facts, the success is not as great as apologists for fantasy business leaders or Stalin make it. Their original deadlines were never met; often the more sobering timelines were better estimates than the fantastic ones. Often if the goal was achieved, it was in spite of the bad leadership, not because of it. And the personal suffering is too big.
As usual, leadership has the most responsibility for creating a culture that respect reality by showing with words and deeds that they in fact respect it.