Please Exceed Your Authority

Feels like a discussion on game theory ought to have been included from the employee's perspective:

1. If you don't speak up, no one will ever know you had an idea or solution.

2. If you speak up and someone in power is offended, you may limit your career, end up PIP'ed, or even fired. It's also possible nothing will happen, in which case speaking up has no benefit.

3. If you speak up and you're heard, you might get praise or even a promotion in the long run. Likely, it'll just go unnoticed or with limited impact.

Not speaking up is the safest bet, especially in corporations.

It really depends on what kind of organization you are in at what time.

When I worked at my Uni circa 2005 the Central IT department was badly disorganized and I could only get things done by "vendor management" which meant keeping a "rolodex" of people in the IT organization and when I had a problem I'd guess that person Y could help me and I'd call them say "I'm a friend of person X, can you you help me? <No> Do you know someone who could?" I'd get the name of person Z and say "Hi I'm <so and so> and I work with X and Y told me you could help me" and so forth.

One time it took me 20 minutes of wallclock time to get a configuration change made in the university firewall and I get off the phone and it hits me "how did he know who I was?"

Something like that really should be done by going through channels but at the time the channels were hopelessly fucked up and if I'd tried going through channels it could have taken weeks if not months.

That organization was in crisis and so I was and I wound up talking to all sorts of people there including top management who explained to me their desire to apply systems thinking to their problems.

20 years later that organization runs a tight ship, has an SLA, put a ticket in and you always get a response, if you try to bypass channels they call their boss who then calls your boss who calls you -- the way it's spozed to be. Soon after that crisis cost me my job I went to work for an outside vendor developing software on a contract basis for Facilities Services I was tasked with finishing up various projects that were stuck and tried my bag of tricks for expediting responses and they... talked to their boss who talked to my boss who talked to me.

I talked about this with a teacher who changed my life who served as an officer in the USAF and he told me you had to go at this with a lot of tact and cultural sensitivity. In some situations you are seen as a hero, a go getter, if you do this. In other places people feel really offended that you crossed boundaries.