JC Quintana

what expectations companies bring when making decisions about technology purchases.

And so we surveyed about a thousand different companies, which is where the seven things came from.

Overall, the results included descriptions of expectation misses or misalignments or need for negotiation in certain expectation areas that used close to 1,100 different words to talk about the same things.

They all rolled off to the seven things.

Out of the seven things, engagement and understanding what engagement really meant and knowledge were the two things that really stood out.

Third to that was culture, really understanding or acknowledging the influence that culture, both local culture, national culture, have on how people manage expectations.

But yeah, the first one was knowledge, but the second one was engagement.

I use an analogy of gears all the time when I speak.

And I tell people that, and you may have seen a video, I posted a video recently about it.

It's a simple idea that a gear requires connection, right?

If you have one gear here, one gear here, connection, without connection, there's no movement.

But just because you've connected to something doesn't mean that you have the right amount of friction to make it move, right?

And so I try to appeal to companies to understand that engagement is not just connection and it's not just communication.

It's connection that compels movement.

And for some people, the expectation is that you increase the friction.

And for some people, it requires that you decrease the friction.

And friction is not a bad word, right?

Friction may require that we just press with enough friction to kind of get to a point, to get better understanding, to get more clarity.

For those of us who love conflict and have the job of managing conflict, I love friction, right?

Friction emerges so many great discussions.