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Comment by spenczar5 | Hacker News Reader

You are wrong because you are ineffective. You want a good thing: you want your environment to change for the better. But if you find yourself getting into arguments with managers, then you are probably not effectively changing minds, and you will get frustrated. You already sound frustrated.

Speaking the truth straight out can feel good, but it is rarely a good rhetorical strategy. Instead, back up, and start with this: what do the people across the table want? What do they believe is good, and what do they believe is important?

Now, how do you recast your arguments to appeal to those goals? How do you frame your position in such a way that they will want to agree with you?

This is the foundation of convincing people: empathize, understand them, learn their communication patterns. Once you see how they communicate and think, you work down those routes but send the message you believe is important.

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> what do the people across the table want? What do they believe is good, and what do they believe is important?

See, this is why the public sector is usually so ineffective and why it's so frustrating. The people across the table tend to jump from posting to posting, and make safe moves that are far from being the correct ones to fulfill the organization's larger goals, while cultivating political capital. Ultimately, they are motivated by the prospect of future postings and promotions, which are determined not by their performance in achieving the organization's goals but by how much political capital they have succeeded in accumulating.

There is no way to sell reform to these people, because reform involves upsetting the status quo, and upsetting the status quo costs large amounts of political capital.

Successfully leading change from the bottom in the public sector is for that rare cadre of people who are not just visionaries and cheerleaders for change, but are patient enough to spend years and decades building upon small changes that build up while not losing their patience and escaping to the private sector.

Source: been there, done that, screw that, couldn't pay me enough to go back and do that again

I've given advice to young professionals in the past in this same vein. I ask, "What magic is it that people love good ideas, yet, you have a good idea and no one listens to you?"

The answer boils down to this: if you have a good idea but people are rejecting it, find a new way to talk about it.

The real answer is that ideas are a dime a dozen and execution is everything.

When you proclaim a good idea, you aren't offering an execution plan to go with it, so people (rightfully) ignore it.

Actually it is not even execution, but who promotes the idea and whether they have clout.

People in management also tend to buy impossible lies especially considering deadlines.

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