Getting buy-in from a diverse cast of characters is one of the between-the-lines features of my job description. Everyone has this problem to some extent. I will admit that I’m quite lucky- Instead of having a single type of difficult character, I have a wide variety of them. I should feel blessed.
Problem solving is one of the activities where divergence commonly occurs. I’m pushing for this, you are pushing for that. The usual stuff. You advance your arguments and they stand or fall on their merit. But in the end, there has to be convergence. We all have to agree on a path forward.
But what to do if you are the only one trotting out ideas? What if there is another form of problem solving where one person advances an idea and everyone else spends their creative faculties lobbing bombs at it and citing reasons why it shouldn’t be tried? Rather than posing alternatives, the negativist op-poses but is unable to pro-pose.
I will confess that this relates to one of the great disappointments of adult life. A lot of ones adult cohorts reach a tidy level of comfort early in their lives and stay there for the duration. Many people are terrified to leave their comfort zone and take a walk on the wild side. Wading into unfamiliar territory and trying to build a structure amidst the reeds and swamp creatures. Intellectual land lubbers are fearful of residing outside of known space.
I have have a long list of weaknesses and limitations as well. I doubt that I’ll be quitting my job to live in a hut in Phuket and tend bar, fun as that might be.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
“Many people are terrified to leave their comfort zone and take a walk on the wild side. ”
Leaving the comfort zone implies risk. So what are you risking? Your Job, your time, your pride, your name, your money? All of it?
Does risk seeking elevate you against your peers? Isn’t that a game of chance? You throw yourself onto the winds of fate to prove what, to who? Why?
Where does it all go and what are you really feeding?
Many a scientist burns the midnight oil, fueled by notions such as “I’ll show them they’re all wrong! Lead can be made into gasoline!”
“I’ll show them…”
“I’ll prove them wrong…”
Think about what that is. Dissect those statements and hold them up to the light. The answer is no doubt a diamond in the rough.
The only one trotting out ideas? It is a sign you are fast-smart and flexible, not a sign that the crowd is amorphous. There are two reasons for opposing your ideas: 1) you may not have the authority. In France, much more than here, people only agree with the chief. 2) People oppose what they hear for the first time. You might read “You can negotiate anything”, an old Cohen book. I think it is where I found the concept. He said everybody first opposed the impeachment of Nixon; one year later, everybody understood it. This concept helped me a lot becoming more functional.
I am not a chief, what worked for me was to say: “it was your idea”: use their thread and amplify it in your direction. People do not fight their own ideas. Also look for retirement: there is comfort in it and time to write books. Friendly
Interesting labor related link. “Laid off factory workers occupy building”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28084616/
I’m wondering why the 20,0000? 30,000? 40,0000? chemists and scientists laid off the last two years don’t react in a similar fashion. Maybe chain themselves to the roto-evaporator?
I see my own first responses as a negativist and I don’t like it. I prefer to give credit to being a scientist- first instinct is to test, pick, examine etc. The other option is that I’m simply being a jerk.
Lyons- One of the themes to this blog is entrepreneuralism. I occasionally get on the soap box and try to convince chemists to launch their own businesses rather than just “working for the man”. It plain to see that the training of chemists as well as the filtration process of chemical education fails to produce chemists with the desire to start a business. I blame the ACS and the blind adherence of academia to the ACS certified curriculum. Our national research apparatus (universities) really must reconsider the needs of our culture and be less doctrinaire about the fidelity of the ideal curriculum.
Hi Morris- your instinct to process problems in a scientific manner is pretty normal. It is critical in certain domains of problem solving.
What decision makers in management want from their industrial scientists is a basis for making a choice. If all the scientist can do is make a convincing case for the inherent lack of clear choices (or inherent fuzziness), then management will turn its attention to those who can offer clarity. People who can reduce an intractable problem to a few choices and generalize the individual consequences are highly valued individuals in industry.
It is important for people who are analytical in nature to be able to function on a coarse setting as well as a vernier setting.
Some scientists only come with a vernier setting. Such people can have great value, but why would you want to have such an individual lead an organization when they are focused on the minutiae?
I think the time investment in school (and perhaps the way people are educated or the kind of people the education attracts) makes entrepreneurship tougher for chemists – when you’ve spent five or six years working lots of hours in grad school, you’ve spent at least some of time when you have the energy to start your own business, and have less lifetime to spend doing it (and perhaps less desire, as well). Chemistry tends to focus on narrow technical problems, though its application is obviously broader – the business mindset seems to require a far broader base of knowledge (and not just technical or accounting knowledge, but wisdom of people) and is deprecated by lots of professionals – lots of the complaints about pharmaceutical companies’ failures (some of which may be true) revolve around the stupidity and greed of managers who are avatars of business skill, let alone salespeople and marketers.
The other problem might be that starting a business seems at times like gambling at Vegas – the house (not you) always wins. If you require lots of funding, the funders will own your business. If you have patent problems, you will probably get choked to death by lawyers even if you’re in the right. Risk is hard enough for people to swallow, but if you have a fair chance to win, then that’s all one can really hope for. When there isn’t a fair chance to win, it seems pointless to try there rather than to do something else.
I don’t see chaining ourselves to rotovaps working well – the jobs gone to smaller companies or overseas aren’t coming back until wages and costs drop to a point where no one will actually want to do those jobs (where the cost of the inputs is greater than the expected payout). Entrepreneurship might be the only way to get by for those already chemists, until the costs of other countries equalize and the lack of people willing to be chemists for the pay offered forces pay higher. I don’t like it (because I have lots of reasons, both neurotic and rational) to dislike risk, but those are (probably) the breaks. Trying to hold on to jobs by force doesn’t seem to have worked out so well in the long run, and we have divorced ourselves from one another for too long to form alternate institutions (other than unions) to assure our social and professional well-being (and we don’t know how to get around the problems of unions and in some cases believe any sort of collective actions is bad).
Hi Hap,
I understand and sympathize with your point, but if we want to retain a technological edge here in the states, then more technical folk like you need to be involved in business creation. Can’t get around it.
Nope. I understand that. I was just trying to delineate reasons why people don’t.