The way I see it, you are just a single data point to the senior people. You mention something, they hear it from a couple of other places and they are now convinced that its a good path forward.

You can put your black hat and game this by making sure you suggest whatever you’re after to more people/sources of info that your target listens to. Bonus points for going through intermediaries that obscure the source of the idea.

At some point, your senior decision maker has his “epiphany” as what you want is “what everybody is talking about”.

Interestingly this is something we talk about with my partner as a lot of times one of us would suggest something, the other might be dismissive, but then someone else would suggest, it gets done and and I/she would get upset that “you listen to them but not to me”.

But in reality whats going on is that we are both waiting to accumulate enough data points to make a heuristic work.

Once that became apparent we’re much more understanding to each other.

As for managers, if they smart enough, they would notice that a lot of the things you’re suggesting ends up what being done, and at some point they would value your points a lot more. But hardly anyone would use only one source of input to make their decisions.