With many colleagues, I will determine the degree I will persist in explaining the issues with an idea based on how much backsplash I expect to hit me. If it is little or none, I will offer my advice and then stop, not objecting if they choose to go off on their own direction. For junior colleagues, it can be a learning experience. For more senior colleagues it can be a reminder to listen more closely to me.
The perfect example of this happened to a friend of mine who was in an industrial research group in another company. He and a very smart, very senior scientist in the government had co-invented a new circuit (my friend was also very smart, and very senior). He had an idea for an improvement and went to visit the government guy.
He explained his idea with much whiteboard action and discussion, with his government colleague raising objections and issues and him countering them. At the end of this, the government scientist (who was self effacing and not someone who relished confrontation) said “Well, You could try that. I wouldn’t do it that way, but you could try that”
My friend took this as agreement (he was really excited about his new idea) and headed back to his lab. It wasn’t until about six months later (and a fair amount of money) that my friend realized what his colleague had been trying to tell him was “That won’t work”.
Not to provide too much detail, but it’s a government job where I assess applications for their compliance with the law and jurisprudence, and then either write a report on why it isn’t compliant, or recommend that we approve the application.
There’s one issue that we’ve been trying to deal with for years now - almost decades at this point. My bosses say X is true, essentially all the applicants affected by this issue say, no, Y is true.
And here’s the thing: I mostly agree with the applicants (and I’m not the only one like that at my level). But I can’t get anyone above my level to see that. Our arguments seem to ignore the most recent jurisprudence, are logically inconsistent, and focus too much on irrelevant details, ignoring the larger context of the application we deal with. The applicant’s arguments make more sense to me, and their interpretation of the jurisprudence matches my own, from when this new policy was first introduced.
Just this week, I had three cases I thought passed muster kicked back to me by my boss, telling me to raise these objections again. One was borderline, one was “Seriously, what else could they do to overcome this problem?!?” and one was, “Seriously? I think you just contradicted what you just told me to do on another case!!11!”
But I wrote them all up as new reports, paraphrasing my boss’s weak-ass arguments. Because I’m sick of arguing with people who just won’t listen.
I eagerly await the next court ruling that slaps us down, because that’s the only thing I can imagine will get them to finally listen to the people at my level.
