drink the Kool-Aid
expressionops culture
To adopt a belief or technology with uncritical, group-driven enthusiasm.
Often said of teams that embrace a framework or methodology as dogma, past the point of honest evaluation. The phrase has a dark origin in the 1978 Jonestown deaths, so it carries an edge of warning about blind conviction even when used lightly in tech.
Drinking the Kool-Aid means accepting a belief system uncritically, and the phrase has a genuinely grim origin in the 1978 Jonestown mass murder-suicide, which is worth knowing given how casually it is used in business settings. Many who died were coerced or were children, and the flippant usage sits uncomfortably against that.
In technology it describes uncritical adoption: the framework that will solve everything, the methodology applied without regard to context, the vendor pitch repeated internally as though it were an assessment. The tell is not enthusiasm but the absence of stated limits. Someone who genuinely understands a technology can describe where it fits badly, and someone who cannot describe that has usually adopted a position rather than reached one.
There is a defensible inverse, though. Committing to a chosen approach and using it properly beats perpetual hedging, and a team that treats every decision as provisional never gets the benefit of any of them. The distinction is whether the commitment came after the evaluation or instead of it, which is a question about process rather than about how strongly anyone believes.
Also known as: drank the Kool-Aid