Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

It's not FOMO. It's FOLS.

Everyone in the product business talks about FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out. The startup version, the Slack version, the "if I leave now I'll miss the IPO" version. It's the fear we name, the fear we joke about, the fear we put on conference panels.

For me, FOMO is really about choosing the right ice cream flavor. I'd like to introduce you to a different acronym. One I started using years ago to describe what I was actually watching kill projects in real time.

FOLS. Fear Of Looking Stupid.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Where FOLS lives

I've watched this pattern play out across more than a dozen companies, and it almost always shows up in the same place: the earliest stage of a project, when nobody knows each other well and the requirements are at their fuzziest.

That's the moment everyone — junior dev, senior designer, product manager, the VP who got dragged into the kickoff — is most afraid of saying something wrong. Not afraid of being fired. Afraid of being laughed at. Afraid that the first idea they put on the whiteboard will be the one their teammates roll their eyes at on Slack later.

So nobody puts an idea on the whiteboard.

Or worse: somebody senior puts an idea on the whiteboard, and everyone else quietly aligns to it not because it's good, but because aligning to it is safer than challenging it. There's a name for this in product circles — the HiPPO, or Highest Paid Person's Opinion. The HiPPO wins not because the HiPPO is right, but because nobody else can afford to be wrong.

That's FOLS. And FOLS, more than budget cuts or scope creep or any of the things we usually blame, is what kills innovation in the first three weeks of a project.

Why we mislabel it

Here's what I think is happening. When we feel the dread of the early-stage project meeting — the one where the brief is vague and the stakeholders are watching — we reach for the closest available label. And the closest available label, in most tech cultures, is FOMO.

But FOMO and FOLS aren't the same thing. FOMO is I might miss out on something good. FOLS is I might be exposed as not good enough. The first is about the world; the second is about you. They feel similar in the body — the same low hum of anxiety, the same scrolling, the same overthinking — but they push you toward opposite behaviors.

FOMO makes you say yes to too many things. FOLS makes you say nothing at all.

The reason this matters is that they need different fixes. FOMO gets fixed by narrowing your focus. FOLS gets fixed by removing the audience for your first ideas.

In some companies, people may be doing both FOMO AND FOLS at the same time. I’ve witnessed plenty of product managers try to jam too many features in a release because someone high up asked for it. They are terrified of saying no to the wrong person.

The audience problem

Most brainstorming workshops are designed to maximize FOLS. You put eight to twelve people in a room (or on a Zoom call), at least one of whom is significantly senior to the others, and you ask everyone to share their best ideas in real time, in front of each other, with their names attached.

This is the meeting equivalent of asking someone to learn to swim by jumping off a cliff.

I've sat in workshops where the lead facilitator opens with a Miro template, full of optimism, and within ten minutes the only person speaking is the CEO. Not because the CEO is the smartest person in the room, but because the CEO is the only one in the room who isn't worried about looking stupid in front of the CEO.

The marketing materials for design thinking show diverse teams with sticky notes and breakthrough moments and "everyone's voice is heard." The reality is usually that one or two voices set the direction in the first fifteen minutes, and everyone else spends the next two hours quietly aligning to whatever the most powerful person in the room said early on. Not because they were convinced, it’s because they were watching.

What actually works

The fix isn't a pep talk. It isn't a "this is a safe space" preamble at the top of the meeting. It isn't a Slack channel called #wild-ideas. All of those rely on people choosing to be brave, and bravery is a terrible thing to design a system around.

What works is removing the audience.

Anonymous surveys, sent before the workshop, gathered with names stripped — twenty-four hours, dozens of honest responses, no peacock behavior. Asynchronous brainstorms in a shared document where everyone adds ideas in their own time, not in front of each other. A facilitator who collects ideas privately and presents them as a group, so no single person owns the unpopular ones.

When you remove the audience, you remove the FOLS. When you remove the FOLS, you find out what people actually think — which, in my experience, is almost always more interesting and more useful than what they say out loud in the first kickoff meeting.

When I teach groups Object-Oriented UX techniques, the FOLS is pretty high usually. This is where anonymity can help you out. You can send a pre-mortem survey before your workshop. Like a post-mortem, there are three questions:

1. What’s one thing about this workshop that excites you?
2. What’s one thing about this workshop that worries you?
3. What’s one question you are afraid to ask in the workshop?

With a pre-mortem, you can really get a feeling of what people are thinking prior to your workshop.

This goes deep

Here's what I've come to believe after watching FOLS run a lot of rooms.

Everyone in your group — your teammates, your boss, the contractor on the other end of the Zoom — is more afraid of being ridiculed than of losing their job. Read that again, because I didn't believe it the first time I noticed it either. The fear of looking stupid is more palpable, more immediate, and more behavior-shaping than the fear of unemployment.

This is true even when the person feeling it is the most senior person in the room. Maybe especially then. Senior people have farther to fall in the eyes of their peers, and they know it. The CEO who fills out the workshop template the night before so they don't have to do it live? That's not arrogance. That's FOLS in a more expensive suit.

Once you understand that everyone in the room is operating from this fear — including the people you assumed were immune to it — the question changes.

It stops being how do I get my idea heard?

It starts becoming how do I build a system where fear doesn't decide what gets built?

That's the actual job. Not the screens, the roadmaps, not the OKRs. The system that lets the quiet, useful, slightly weird ideas survive long enough to be evaluated on their merits.

If this made you think of a meeting you sat through last week, send this to whoever ran that meeting. Or send it to the friend you were texting during the meeting who was there too. The thing about FOLS is that no one is ever alone.

— Mary

PS. My memoir Bad Fit is coming out soon. Interested in early access? Just reply to this email!

---