Advice for Young Scientists Series #5
News They Don’t Want to Hear

The time will come when you have to be the bearer of bad news. You will be the senior tech­ni­cal per­son on a major project, one that is very crit­i­cal to the busi­ness that you work for. The project plan will have been based on a very well devel­oped tech­ni­cal approach that you and a team of very tal­ented co-workers spent many hours, per­haps many months, review­ing, check­ing, and work­ing to improve. You very likely brought in out­side, inde­pen­dent experts to make sure that you and your team had looked at every aspect of the

I have had to be the bearer of such bad news sev­eral times in my career. I have had to be the one to tell my boss that our best laid plans will not work the way we have planned them. All but two of those times, I was able to tell my boss that although we could not pro­ceed with our plan and suc­ceed, we did know what we needed to do and I was even able to give a pre­lim­i­nary assess­ment of the impact (inter­pre­ta­tion: cost and sched­ule — it is always cost and sched­ule that your boss is going to want to know). These times were big prob­lems, but these times hap­pen. These were very hard dis­cus­sions, but not extremely hard. The two, oh boy, the two! Those were epic. Those were two of the hard­est pro­fes­sional con­ver­sa­tions I have ever had to have. But they were entirely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences because of the per­son­al­i­ties and approaches to busi­ness of the two dif­fer­ent bosses I had at the two times.

One was dif­fi­cult, unpleas­ant, and actu­ally career threat­en­ing because my boss at the time approached his job with a very dif­fer­ent atti­tude from the atti­tude with which I approach my job. We had a prod­uct that was in suc­cess­ful pro­duc­tion. Our mar­ket­ing group got the grand idea that the prod­uct could be improved by incor­po­ra­tion of a new tech­nol­ogy that had just been demon­strated by our research and devel­op­ment group. The first mis­take was made when the mar­ket­ing group sold the incor­po­ra­tion as a sim­ple change to the exist­ing prod­uct. The research and devel­op­ment group did not speak up firmly about what was required to eas­ily mod­ify the exist­ing prod­uct. I need to give you a lit­tle back­ground. This was occur­ring just about the time that I was join­ing the com­pany, so much of the details of how all of this occurred, I only learned much later. Bot­tom line over the next sev­eral years, after an extended prod­uct engi­neer­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing devel­op­ment fol­lowed by exten­sive field tri­als, the extended capa­bil­ity prod­uct was work­ing, but only some of the time. This was when I was asked to step in and “fix” the prob­lem. Unfor­tu­nately, the def­i­n­i­tion of “fix” as I under­stand fix was not the same as that of my boss at the time. I did not, and do not believe that patches and duct tape ever make fixes. My boss at the time believed that any­thing that would make a prob­lem go away today was a “fix”, even if it became some­one else’s prob­lem tomor­row. I will never for­get the day when I walked into his office and explained that I had come to firmly believe that if we did not under­take a redesign we would never achieve reli­able per­for­mance from the enhanced prod­uct. He actu­ally said, “You can­not tell me that”. Hon­estly, I did not know why I couldn’t, so I did again. He really didn’t like it any bet­ter the sec­ond time, or the third, or the fourth … Look­ing back on the expe­ri­ence, the next sev­eral days were kind of like the Span­ish Inqui­si­tion ala Monte Python (I can laugh about it now — a stream of peo­ple try­ing to get me to change my posi­tion just because they didn’t like my posi­tion). In the end, I did not cave. But I was not really allowed to be the spokesper­son for direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the cus­tomer. Nor were we allowed free reign in com­ing up with a solu­tion. We were con­strained to try­ing small patches rather than a thor­ough redesign. In the end we did suc­ceed after a fash­ion. But it was not smooth. What we ended up with was a com­pro­mise solu­tion. It worked but only with very care­ful adjust­ment. To this day I believe we could have fin­ish the redesign in about half the time and had a prod­uct that was much eas­ier to build if we had just approached the issue fully and not kept try­ing to find a quick fix. It was not a very sat­is­fy­ing effort. But at least I tried to com­mu­ni­cate the issue

The sec­ond was dif­fi­cult but not unpleas­ant because my boss at the time approached his job with the same atti­tude that I approached mine. We both believed that when an issue arose it should be under­stood, com­mu­ni­cated, options explored and alter­na­tives dis­cussed openly. This made it very easy for me when I became con­vinced that the tech­ni­cal approach we had orig­i­nally cho­sen had a flaw that would pre­vent it from achiev­ing the project objec­tives with­out step­ping back and chang­ing part of the basic approach. The path to suc­cess­ful recov­ery of the project was hard work but direct. We pre­pared a detailed expla­na­tion of what was wrong with the orig­i­nal approach and how we would go about deter­min­ing the best alter­na­tive approach. I then had the task (priv­i­lege really) of explain­ing this to the cus­tomer along with our esti­mate of how much addi­tional time this would add to the project. Rather than being received with anger, the whole issue was received with grat­i­tude. Because we were totally open about what the issue was, why the issue had occurred, the con­se­quences of not address­ing the issue at this time, what we thought we could do to over­come the issue and the con­se­quences that it would have on the project; the cus­tomer walked away feel­ing we were giv­ing them every­thing they needed to make the best informed deci­sion for their inter­est. For what it is worth, the cus­tomer decided that con­tin­u­ing the project in spite of the set­back was in their best inter­est. We did in fact com­plete, although sig­nif­i­cantly later than orig­i­nally planned, giv­ing the cus­tomer a capa­bil­ity that proved to be exceed­ingly impor­tant to their over­all mis­sion. In the end, we all were successful.

No mat­ter the sit­u­a­tion, no mat­ter, the boss, no mat­ter the threat to your career, I offer this advice. And I offer it know­ing from my own per­sonal expe­ri­ence how stress­ful it can be to take the right stand when it might well put you employ­ment at jeopardy.

When you come to under­stand that the approach you have been tak­ing is not going to lead to the desired out­come, you owe it to your­self, your co-workers, your boss, your cus­tomers and the even­tual users of the results of your efforts to com­mu­ni­cate this under­stand­ing clearly as soon as possible.

The sooner that every­one involved under­stands the issue, the sooner every­one can begin to con­sider what alter­na­tive action can be taken. It is almost cer­tain that any change in direc­tion will not be deter­mined by you alone. The new direc­tion may not even be a direc­tion that you would have cho­sen. That is fine, so long as you have com­mu­ni­cated the sit­u­a­tion and the alter­na­tive as best as you can iden­tify them. Please, please, please remem­ber this point. Your job may not be to make all final deci­sions. But your job surely is to present and com­mu­ni­cate your under­stand­ings, be they good news or bad. You need to make sure you are under­stood. When it is bad news it make take a lit­tle (or a lot) more work to make sure you are under­stood. But once you are, then an informed deci­sion can be made. It just may not be very easy to do that job and it may take a lot of will power to present the case.

♦ Is Still Here