You should know better what is the purpose of what you do

In one of my earlier jobs, I had a senior leader (let's call him Mr. Boxer) who used to be very direct in his communications just like his namesake famous boxer of yesteryears. Even very experienced engineers who had spent more than 30 years in the company used to be worried with just the thought of attending his review meetings because of his direct and no-nonsense approach to conducting the reviews.

Those days I was working on a predictive model for a very complex non-linear transient system level problem. The problem had so many dimensions and so exciting that it used to keep me mentally occupied for almost full day. I was working in what I used to call in "3 shifts". The moment I wake up, I used to go and check my simulation runs on the high performance computing in the office (even without brushing my teeth) and do any corrections if needed and then come back before any other person comes to office by around 8:30am in the morning. Then I used to go back to office at 10am for normal working hours. Then again after I come back from office and have dinner, I couldn't resist checking on the status and output of my runs from home even though I couldn't make any changes in the big computer aided engineering (CAE) model from home. If the runs would be going well, I used to feel good and go to sleep in a good mood or else, it would set me thinking on how to further improve the model and go to sleep thinking.

After trying hard for more than a year and after countless iterations, I managed to achieve what I thought was a breakthrough; I made the simulation work for the full duration with all the detailed physics I wanted to include. Excited, I wrote a mail to all my stakeholders and copied the mail to Mr. Boxer. For me as a technologist, it was a highpoint that I was able to make the complex model run without a glitch and I specifically highlighted the lines "This detailed physics based model took ** days on *** CPUs (a high number) to complete. I am so excited to be able to complete the run considering the details of physics modeled that renders the model highly susceptible to abnormal terminations during the course of the simulation run".

What I expected was congratulatory mails from the stakeholders. Instead the first mail I got was from Mr. Boxer. It was just a few short lines, "This doesn't look right. Let's discuss this tomorrow. Please fix a meeting looking at my calendar".

I set up the meeting and we started the discussion. "So what do you think will be the use of this model?", was his first question. I told him how this model can now predict the system level responses to the higher degree of accuracy than any other single model developed so far in the organization. "We have three different models which can predict in different time scales of the physical event, but no one model that can predict this accurately over the entire time horizon. It's like having a grand unified theory of physics, theory of everything", I answered with my trademark passion.

His voice on the other side of the call was cool. "So who wants this?", was his question. "The *** team, Boxer. That's why we have this New Technology Introduction (NTI) project going on". I thought this question was really irritating.

"Have you really gone through the project charter? Do you know the evaluation of technology at different milestones that you should have done before coming to this stage? I have been made to understand that this methodology hasn't been checked at smaller milestones to see whether it really adds value to our business before we kept adding more and more complexities. Let's take a step back, go back to a logical point in model development and see whether at that stage we are able to predict the physics of the problem any better than our current predictive models or not. If your claim is true, then it should and it will already be a big game changer for the business. It should have been done six months back because we are really struggling with our new product introduction due to the erroneous predictions of our existing models and we have to go back to do all these reworks costing us months and millions. That was the really useful time for you to have applied your model. You should know better what is the purpose of what you do." This was a really long lecture from Mr. Boxer.

"You should know better what is the purpose of what you do." This line kept ringing in my ears. Yes, how foolish I have been. In my excitement to add more and more physics and more and more complexity to make it closer to reality, I had forgotten the larger purpose of what I was doing. Why did my manager not give me this feedback earlier? Why did my mentors not provide such honest opinion? I thought this to myself again and again.

As I reflected more and more, I realized my mentors and manager have been giving this feedback. But they have not been direct. They have told it in somewhat convoluted tones many a times and me, lost in my own world of trials and errors and "3 shifts", haven't really internalized the feedback.

As I reflect back on that episode today, I wish that direct feedback would have come to me much earlier. In our own world of passionate work, we really need people who give us an honest feedback. I can't thank enough to all my managers and mentors who have given me direct and honest feedback which has helped me to continously improve myself. I truly owe all of you my utmost respect.

To complete the event, Mr. Boxer paused my project and started a new project with one of my peers as the project lead. The objective was clear; check out the business benefit my new model would give as we expect, going back to a logical point in development when the simulation complexity allowed the model to take a much more practical time. If the model worked for that, we can go further in complexity, but with clear goals on what added business value even more complex details would bring. I was put as a technical consultant and team member for the project. It was a public downgrade of some sort for me, but I learnt a lot from my peer on how to take a new technology to try to solve a business problem. For that experience, I am a much wiser person now.