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I struggle with a more basic issue here; there are plenty of things at my current job which are just "accepted". Lots of "this is the way it has always been", b

I struggle with a more basic issue here; there are plenty of things at my current job which are just "accepted". Lots of "this is the way it has always been", but are actually really bad for productivity and our ability to do business. I've tried to set out plans to address a few of these issues, and I'm willing to accept the risk that, if I fail, it might reflect so poorly on my career that I'd be fired to have to find a new job. My problem is simple; how do I convince the person above me in the pecking order that they should even give me space to attempt the project? I keep getting rejected, presumably because if my project fails, it might also reflect poorly on them, and they're not willing to take the risk. I guess the same would apply to people looking for funding for their mad, overly ambitious startups or projects. tl;dr: how can you "go after hard things" if nobody is willing to back you because they think it's too hard.

swsieber 7y ago
Ask for self directed learning time & use it to investigate, prototype and experiment. You can even tell your manager that you'll scope your learning material to things that could be useful for your job down the road... it's worth a shot. Or is the main concern not the time to develop, but the actual deployment & interpersonal verification of the idea?
miketery 7y ago
Repetition. Human communication is a lot dumber than we think. Repeat the message consistently and in simple terms, let it incept. Persuade through persistence and your commitment. And this makes sense, if people just changed direction based on one interaction the system / org becomes chaotic. There needs to be some sort of function that once a threshold is passed then something happens (like action potential). As an aside, I realized this both from work experience and taking guidance from marketing / propaganda.
yonixw 7y ago
In my previous work, I was developing training tools for new heavy machinery workers. I wanted to do everything in VR since we had the 3D models from all the engineers using all kind of CAD software. My boss also wanted to improve our division offering but no one at the upper management approved. That was our hard thing. So we did it slowly. At first, only see the 3D model in VR (so you can feel how it would look later) and feature by feature we kept developing VR. (While still working on all other tasks) At the end, we became the VR division. And old documentation were to be converted to VR. It was a lot of fun and a lot of challenge in the CAD<->VR space. tl;dr; Start slow until you have enough mass to convience others it worth it.
Timberwolf 7y ago
I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems. The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were willing to take any risk to get out of the "someone's gonna get fired for this" hole. They were typically rich in hard problems (the chaos was usually caused by failure to address one or more of them) and people liked the idea that someone else was taking on responsibility and becoming the person who was most likely "gonna get fired for this". I was happy taking that risk, considering the payoff in getting to work on interesting problems worth it. In the absence of disarray, I had to go down the much slower route of finding small things that received so little attention I could just do them; nobody cared about them enough to worry about success or failure, and the time input was small enough nobody got upset about it. Over time the cumulative impact would gain me enough trust to take on something bigger, and assuming that went well things would snowball from there. In this way I "trained" one of my bosses from flipping out at the most minor suggestion to pretty much leaving me alone to get on with what I felt like, on the basis I would usually find things to do that reflected well on him. Unfortunately I never worked out how to get anywhere with the kind of person who benefited from the hard problems not being solved -essentially those profiting from either the prevalence of bullshit or non-essential things being done as per points 3 and 4 in the article's section on what happens when you do tackle the hard stuff. I'd also caution in my experience it wasn't useful in advancing my career at the same company - I did see a big benefit in credibility but it was among peers and the people I depended on to "get a VIP pass around bureaucracy". This has been general across organisations in my experience: the career stage benefits only come when I move on and have a load of experience in problem spaces I simply wouldn't have encountered had I kept my head down and merely done my job.

swsieber 7y ago

Ask for self directed learning time & use it to investigate, prototype and experiment. You can even tell your manager that you'll scope your learning material to things that could be useful for your job down the road... it's worth a shot. Or is the main concern not the time to develop, but the actual deployment & interpersonal verification of the idea?

miketery 7y ago

Repetition. Human communication is a lot dumber than we think. Repeat the message consistently and in simple terms, let it incept. Persuade through persistence and your commitment. And this makes sense, if people just changed direction based on one interaction the system / org becomes chaotic. There needs to be some sort of function that once a threshold is passed then something happens (like action potential). As an aside, I realized this both from work experience and taking guidance from marketing / propaganda.

yonixw 7y ago

In my previous work, I was developing training tools for new heavy machinery workers. I wanted to do everything in VR since we had the 3D models from all the engineers using all kind of CAD software. My boss also wanted to improve our division offering but no one at the upper management approved. That was our hard thing. So we did it slowly. At first, only see the 3D model in VR (so you can feel how it would look later) and feature by feature we kept developing VR. (While still working on all other tasks) At the end, we became the VR division. And old documentation were to be converted to VR. It was a lot of fun and a lot of challenge in the CAD<->VR space. tl;dr; Start slow until you have enough mass to convience others it worth it.

Timberwolf 7y ago

I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems. The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were willing to take any risk to get out of the "someone's gonna get fired for this" hole. They were typically rich in hard problems (the chaos was usually caused by failure to address one or more of them) and people liked the idea that someone else was taking on responsibility and becoming the person who was most likely "gonna get fired for this". I was happy taking that risk, considering the payoff in getting to work on interesting problems worth it. In the absence of disarray, I had to go down the much slower route of finding small things that received so little attention I could just do them; nobody cared about them enough to worry about success or failure, and the time input was small enough nobody got upset about it. Over time the cumulative impact would gain me enough trust to take on something bigger, and assuming that went well things would snowball from there. In this way I "trained" one of my bosses from flipping out at the most minor suggestion to pretty much leaving me alone to get on with what I felt like, on the basis I would usually find things to do that reflected well on him. Unfortunately I never worked out how to get anywhere with the kind of person who benefited from the hard problems not being solved -essentially those profiting from either the prevalence of bullshit or non-essential things being done as per points 3 and 4 in the article's section on what happens when you do tackle the hard stuff. I'd also caution in my experience it wasn't useful in advancing my career at the same company - I did see a big benefit in credibility but it was among peers and the people I depended on to "get a VIP pass around bureaucracy". This has been general across organisations in my experience: the career stage benefits only come when I move on and have a load of experience in problem spaces I simply wouldn't have encountered had I kept my head down and merely done my job.