FOMO, FOLS, and how it contributes to enshittification

How do bubbles and groupthink play out on your Agile team? Photo by Braedon McLeod on Unsplash

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Charles Mackay, 1841

I have been re-reading Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. I first encountered this book as assigned reading from one of the last classes I took for my Bachelors degree, a Sociology class on group behaviors that I took to fulfill a degree requirement. This has been the most important, consequential class that I took in my entire college career.

It has become so important because since this book defines the pattern of group delusions and manias. Although some of the storytelling anecdotes Mackay uses in his narratives of historical manias have been shown to be exaggerated (yet still entertaining), the pattern that Mackay details still exists:

• An idea, often an financial scheme, is released to the public;
• The public starts to catch on and more and more people hear about it, and a herd mentality emerges;
• As said idea/scheme grows in popularity, the idea becomes distorted by its own popularity, not unlike the child’s game of Telephone, when the phrase at the beginning of the game is very different by the end of the game. A bubble forms that divides people who believe in the idea and people who don’t. FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, becomes a social factor and people don’t want to look dumb by ignoring it;
• People start to question the idea, and those people, although correct, are often publicly ridiculed. In my opinion, this is when a trend escalates to a bubble;
• In time, which is never a set amount of time, the idea or scheme gets debunked, and the wave that led to adoption of the original idea reverses itself into a counter-wave of swift abandonment. In financial schemes, money is lost, in others, pride is lost, but in all cases the mania disappears as it never existed, barely to be spoken of again.

Since I read the book the first time, I have noticed this pattern repeat in both financial schemes and conventional “wisdom”, including but not limited to:

• The Dot.com bubble
• The buildup to the Iraq war and how people who were against it were labeled as traitors
• The housing bubble that burst in 2008, and the micro events that led up to it
• Cryptocurrencies, and I’m pretty sure that each cryptocurrency has its own bubble, NFTs in particular
• Trumpism and the events that led up to it

I notice this pattern in a lot of places, but it is particularly prevalent in the Product and UX Design space. For instance, right now we are living in a time when the bubble that was “OMG we have to hire UX designers now or we’ll go out of business” has burst and has replaced by a “how many designers can we replace with AI” bubble. I think that this profession is vulnerable to bubbles as still many people have no idea that UX designers do, often mixing them up with UI or graphic designers. There is ample space in our profession ready to be filled with misinformation and assumptions.

And speaking of assumptions, this is how this behavior pattern plays out on Agile teams:

FOMO, FOLS, and Agile teams

I have observed this bubble pattern often in my work as a product designer and manager, most often in the early stages of projects when people don’t know each other well and requirements are at their fuzziest. Groupthink, or group manias, do not require the group to be a large one. It can be your Agile team.

In the early stages of a project is when that FOMO appears to be at its worst as when that is when a lack of leadership is at its worst. Often that FOMO is truly FOLS, or a Fear Of Looking Stupid. And it is the FOLS that often kills innovation: why put an idea, any idea out there if you are scared of being ridiculed? If you take a chance and put an idea out there where none exists, you could be ridiculed by your teammates, your boss, or even your CEO if they’re an interested stakeholder (which they often are).

It does not matter if your teammates are from your own company or an outside contractor: everyone in your group is terrified of ridicule, a fear even more palpable than the fear of losing their jobs.

If, for example, you are assigned to re-do a product, and the product is terrible, is there a true opportunity to make that product better, or just make what’s already there worse? If the people who sign your paycheck want your honest opinion and their product is terrible, would you tell the truth, no matter how harsh? Some people may do it anyway, but most would just obscure the truth and say that it’s fine, but maybe add something…

And the route to enshittification starts, as always, as a group project… and a year later you have a product with a lot of features but it looks like a Frankenstein monster with all the UI patches and massive navigation menus.

Sound familiar? Keep reading:

How to provide relief for FOLS

Because this happens in the earliest stages of projects, as a product professional it is critical to your team’s success to establish an environment free of judgment as early as possible. There are two ways to do this, and you can opt for one or both:

• Anonymous surveys: this can have a fast turnaround time. Keeping the responses anonymous is important to build trust and get the information you need to start. A Google form (or similar) can go a long way.
• Guided Brainstorming workshop: this option can also work well, especially if you already know your teammates well. This activity includes activities that your workshop participants do on their own, or in tiny groups, then share out to the group at large. This format need ground rules to be truly effective: state at the outset that this is for ideas gathering, and not a group bitch session. A byproduct of this approach is that you can repeat it as your team gets to work well together and product challenges arise.

Providing an environment that encourages opinions and collaboration can remedy the toxic behaviors that lead to overvaluing assumptions and giving in to the herd mentalities that make mediocre products even worse. To truly do something innovative, you need to find a way to encourage the sharing of ideas an opinions.