If some executives can't seem to understand a basic issue... maybe it's just because they don't want to.

The quote from the title card comes from prolific writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Upton Sinclair:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

What I'd like you to take away from this article is this:

• Humans are rarely upfront with their internal motivations (i.e., their self-interest)
• These non-obvious motivations may be completely at odds with what you perceive as the "common good"
• This disconnect between someone's self-interest and common good results in some really bizarre behavior.
• This happens far more than you'd think in the workplace.
• Recognizing this fact will help you become better adept at navigating workplace issues and be a better doer of things, instead of a casualty of office politics

Let me share a couple of stories about this.

#1: Holding on to an albatross, instead of letting go

Literally, an albatross is a bird. However, when we call something an "albatross", we use the word figuratively to describe a curse or burden. (see: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

In the workplace, especially in fast-changing businesses like the tech world, a lot of things start out as great investments. You make huge, brave investments on them, committing yourself to playing the long game on them. You go big.

Then, suddenly, a tech wave appears and crashes.

Your investment - be it a product, department or an entire 5-year strategic plan - is now an albatross around your neck.

So, say it's the year 2000, +/- a few years. You know the internet is going to be a big thing, you know demand for online services will be a thing, and you know lots of businesses will need server space, hosting, etc. If you're a top executive at a huge telco, you know what totally makes sense? Right, expanding your telco operations to accommodate a new business - offering data center space to businesses, offering colocation, server hosting, virtual servers, etc.

It makes complete sense! And so you propose that, everyone agrees, and your telco ends up betting big on this. And for several years, it's a great bet. It's a huge investment (data centers aren't cheap to build and operate), but it pays. Huzzah!

Then Amazon came in, created AWS, and kickstarted this thing called "Cloud Computing". Then, a few years later, Microsoft and Google decided to join the party.

The cloud computing revolution is in full force, enabling tiny startups all across the world to have global infrastructure for pennies on the dollar.

Good for them, but for that Telco-owned datacenter, it's a gut punch.

You would think that it - the local data center business - is so obviously an albatross now. Operating a data center business, in the midst of the cloud computing revolution, is a dead-end. Such a telco, surely, would just try to find a way to offload their data center business, instead of doubling down.

You would be very surprised to hear how their boardroom meetings typically go:

(Executive 1): Our business can still cope, we can do the following...

(Executive 2): Yes, sir, we can still corner some of the local market...

(Executive 3): Indeed, this is a time to re-invest in our business...

Are they just too dumb to realize Microsoft, Amazon and Google are impossible to compete with, and that their market is just going to shrink year over year? That while they (hypothetical telco-owning data center) are working on data center accreditations and certifications, AWS is rolling out it's 300th managed service that allows noobs to rollout a crazy Machine Learning project? And Microsoft just gave huge free tier to CosmosDB, making it more attractive to try out NoSQL? And that there are hundreds more reasons why the top cloud vendors are just a far better value?

The point is, it's hopeless. While your local data center is just trying to get relevant accreditations, the actual competition is so far ahead, offering advanced services and platforms, making their respective services easier to use and cheaper.

But those executives aren't dumb. They're actually pretty smart guys. But you'll never be able to convince them to "understand" that it's impossible to compete, and that the business is a dead-end, because that means signing their own pink slips. They're not going to shoot themselves in the head, so to speak.

So any consultant that disagrees with them will NEED to be shot down. They aren't just protecting the business model - they are protecting themselves, their own livelihood, and in essence their family. No amount of charts and graphs will make them willingly see what is obvious to any dispassionate consultant.

#2: Projects that can be fixed, but no one does

A former student of mine dropped by my old office and told me about his experiences in the world of work. (I'm no professor, but I am invited to teach a class once a year or so, hence having a few former students)

In particular, he talked about this extremely toxic environment in a client of theirs. He was working for a company that offered Salesforce expertise and customizations, and their customer was a huge company.

The gist of it was that the project has existed for a long time (even before he came in), delayed for seemingly forever for multiple reasons, and not one of the involved business units of the client wanted to take ownership.

As my former student described it, he eventually had to take copious notes during every meeting and presentation with the client, otherwise the succeeding meeting or presentation will become a clusterfuck of finger-pointing and blame-shifting.

The finer points don't matter here. The gist is this: If any of the business units really want the project to succeed, someone has to first acknowledge that some personal (client-side) failures happened in the past, learn from those and implement coping strategies, modify the project process going forward, and then do this entire thing repeatedly, iteratively, until the project is actually rolled out.

That's nothing special, as that's literally what any sane project should be doing 24/7.

Unfortunately, just the first step (acknowledging mistakes from the past in order to find out what behaviors and processes to modify) was already a non-starter. Executives from the various business units seem to understand that anybody who takes ownership for failures in the company will risk getting fired or have his chances of promotion reduced to zero.

And so, another tragedy of the commons happens here: Everyone knows what the right course of action is, but they also know the huge personal risk for them, thus their self-interest overrides the common good, and each executive individually makes the same calculus and decides to let the project continue in limbo.

They're not dumb. They will not listen to any proper advice, because as far as they are concerned, their livelihood is at stake.

You have to change the calculus

The cleanest solution to either type of scenario is to change the calculus. If your employees don't feel like doing the right thing has the proper risk:reward ratio, then they won't be doing the right thing, guaranteed.

For top decision makers, this means making sure the environment you set, the example you set, isn't one of finger-pointing and threatening. That sort of environment will only guarantee that your executives and key people will see the risk:reward ratio of doing tough but necessary things as too risky, and they will often default to self-interest. They're human, they have families to take care of. They should feel empowered to become better by learning from mistakes, instead of fearing that they have to cover-up every single mistake because everything could be fatal.

For people lower down the chain and you think you may be dealing with this scenario: If you manage to unravel what the underlying motivation is, see what's a viable plan of action for you. I'm not gonna lie, being a low-level employee sometimes means you have little or no influence on these things. But you can show leadership through your own actions and examples, and by championing rational courses of action despite top-level hesitation due to self-interest.

And when you do champion rational courses of action, don't dwell too long on why the action is the best (i.e., don't get stuck showing why it's logical). Remember, if you are in this scenario, the issue is nobody wants to understand the issue at all, because of self-interest, and not because they need a clear lecture or more data to have their minds opened. Instead, if at all possible, try to show how there's nothing to be afraid of (if that's actually true, because you shouldn't be lying).

Yeah, so this is a super tricky thing, and I sincerely hope you don't often find yourself in similar situations. Otherwise, if it happens all the time where you are, and you are completely powerless to change it, maybe it's just time to jump ship. Work on your skills, grow, be better, and find a happier place to work.

On the next issue of The Behavioral Workplace: Why it's often more effective to be a bit nicer than to be harsher at work.