FOMO is a Wonderful Thing
Months of debate about whether to investigate something, then alignment in a week. No new data, no better argument. Just enough people independently feeling left out of the same thing at the same time.
That’s FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), and it has a bad reputation in engineering. Fairly earned: half-finished migrations, tools adopted six months before the community figures out where they break, decisions made because everyone else seemed to be doing it. But when the anxiety goes collective, it does something the bad reputation doesn’t account for: it moves things that good arguments alone don’t.
Why Does Collective FOMO Move Engineering Teams?
“We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.”
— Robert Cialdini, Influence
Most teams aren’t sitting on useful technology because they don’t know it exists. They’re sitting on it because switching anything costs effort, and effort has to compete with whatever’s already in flight. That queue never clears.
What collective FOMO does is change that equation, not through better arguments but through shared discomfort. When everyone on the team independently feels left out of the same thing, you don’t need to make the case for investigating it. The case is already there. The conversation jumps straight to “how do we approach this,” which is where it should have started.
When the Signal Is Real
CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) adoption is a good example. Teams knew continuous integration was the right call for years. They understood the failure modes of manual deployments. They still didn’t switch, because nobody’s queue had room for a sustained migration effort.
What moved them wasn’t a better argument. It was watching the team next door ship on a Friday afternoon and realizing they couldn’t. Not “we’re missing a best practice” but “we’re missing that output.” That specificity is what gave the anxiety teeth.
LLMs have followed the same arc. Teams that engaged early have built up operational intuition (where the failure modes actually show up, what things cost at scale, which abstractions hold) that’s hard to pick up from documentation alone. That gap is real, and the discomfort of it motivates investment that wouldn’t otherwise make it off the backlog.
When It Fires Wrong
The same thing that drove CI/CD adoption also drove premature microservices adoption in teams with no real need for it. At its worst, FOMO produces cargo cult behavior: copying what other teams do without understanding why, because the doing itself feels like the point. It fires on adoption, not merit, and the same anxiety that moved teams toward CI/CD moved others into microservices architectures before they had the organizational structure to justify it.
How Do You Turn FOMO Into Productive Action?
You can surface it deliberately, too. Sharing what teams like yours are actually doing with a technology (not as a pitch, but as a factual update) creates the conditions for collective anxiety to form on its own. A working demo from a team already using it, or a concrete account of what they’re getting from it, often lands differently than a proposal because it makes the gap visible rather than theoretical. People don’t usually argue with a gap they can see.
Not everyone who surfaces it has good intentions. Vendors, conference keynotes, and tech influencers know this mechanism, and some use it deliberately, manufacturing urgency around adoption that benefits them more than the teams they’re pitching to. The collective anxiety that moves good decisions can be manufactured to move bad ones just as easily.
Once the signal is there, the useful filter before committing is the constraint-first question: does the thing we feel left out of solve a problem we actually have? Let the FOMO open the conversation, then keep the adoption decision separate from the feeling that started it.
The move that works: a short, scoped experiment. Not a full evaluation, just enough contact to build a shared opinion. Two or three days, a specific question, something to show. Either the anxiety dissolves with data, or the data justifies taking it seriously.
In organizations where good ideas wait for someone to write the formal proposal, collective anxiety is often what finally moves them. Worth leaning into, not managing away.