Part of the problem here is that there is a balance to be struck with these sorts of things: Cost, User experience, Mange-ability, and time spent shopping around rather than just going with the industry-default or one with the best sales-team. Responsible decision-makers have to make trade-offs.
When you say
> Reports...are roundly ignored
That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem.
So what is the solution?
1. Understand the problem they're trying to solve. What are their real motives and pressures?
2. Understand where your needs align with theirs and where they diverge in reality.
3. Tell a compelling story of where your needs are in fact aligned.
3.1) Prepare Evidence
If your case is "This tool is causes literal permanent eye injuries to our staff", then there should be written reports of those injuries. If your case is "This software package has multiple missing-affordances which present operational risks to the business", then you should be able to take screen recordings of that.
3.2) Start with why
When turning evidence into a presentation, remember that people listen better when they know why they are listening. So start with: What is at stake?
3.3) Credible language
If your words say "the UX for hundreds or thousands of others is 'the software literally shoots knives out of the monitor and gouges out your eyes'" but you can't actually back that up with the factual reality, you seem like you're exaggerating. If I think you are exaggerating, then I can't trust your words when I'm trying to understand magnitudes.
If I can't trust your words about magnitudes, then how do I give you a voice in making a well-balanced trade-off?
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Literally: (adverb)
1. In in a way of speaking that is completely accurate and unexaggerated.
2. In in a way of speaking that is exaggerated for emotional effect.
Is it the report's job to bend over backwards to prepare a series of easily digestible info-graphics to convince the manager that the decisions they've made are bad? Or is it the manager's job to follow up on decisions they've made to see how they turn out, and to investigate to see if reports of eye-gouging are substantiated? In theory, the person whose eyeballs were affected by your decisions already have a litany of responsibilities that do not cease to exist when someone makes decisions that rock a company to it's very core. Maybe instead of shlepping the responsibility of identifying the consequences of their actions downstream, they should exhibit a little initiative and attempt to take a role in evaluating whether the decision they've made was the right one for the team.
So my understanding is that you're right to say that the manager has a responsibility to listen keenly for the impacts of their decisions. I'd say it is one of their primary responsibilities as part of their responsibility for the health of their team. The
But my understanding is that in general communication is a 2-way street: Both people in a relationship should be listening with the intent to understand the others' perspective and to watch for misunderstandings. Up and down a larger organization, I think this communication tends to be harder because
1) It is often indirect -- multiple hops from individual contributor to CxO.
2) The communication that can possibly happen grows with the size of the organization.
3) People work on things that are more and more delegated. So the day-to-day problems of an accounts admin are very different from the day-to-day problems of the CFO. So the gap of "understand each others' perspectives" becomes wider and harder to jump.
All this doesn't diminish a leaders' responsibility: it raises it. But it also makes it that much harder to execute if the signals from people in the org are hard to interpret.
> A series of easily-digestible info-graphics
Are nice, but "I've noticed a serious problem. Here is a 30 minute screen-capture of it." is faster to produce and send to a direct manager and then you can (ideally) collaborate on how to raise that to the wider business.
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All this comes with the caveat that I'm an individual-contributor-level software engineer who has never managed a team for an endeavor more complex than a care-package-drive... and I might in fact be far enough on the autistic spectrum that I massively misunderstand how any of this works. (See other comment)
Sure, you're not wrong about any of this. But in GP, the commenter was essentially saying that if the CxO was not listening, it was because they didn't come with proof and business impact explicitly outlined in a convincing presentation, while I am arguing that in an emergency software-behaving-dangerously situation, it should not necessarily be the duty of the person bringing the claim to write a full report and presentation ahead of time.
Meta question: Why are we talking about people's eyeballs being literally stabbed out?
I had assumed that this was an expression of some (unknown) level of difficulty, and that if we could shift the discussion to describing that realities of that difficulty and its impacts on business operations and morale, we could get some insight.
But am I wrong?
This is the first time I've heard about "literally shooting knives and...gouging out eyes" in an IT discussion. Is this actually a thing that results from IT procurement in a literal sense? By "literal" I mean the sense that would refer to a piece of material entering the eye-goo of another human being and causing actual pain and hospitalization.
Does anyone else find it very difficult to understand situations when you are not sure at all how seriously to interpret someone? I'm aware I'm probably on the autistic spectrum...but since we're having a discussion about engineering or technology procurement, could I ask for a bit of specificity?
Is it odd to find the idea of literal eye-gouging to be out-of-place here? That it seems really extreme and like a very black-and-white way to talk about problems? Or am I just losing my mind?
Genuine question: Does my difficulty with understanding the role of literal eye-gouging in IT procurement and UX design signal that I'm becoming unhinged from reality?
The eye gouging on this case is a metaphor to stand in for "doing awful things that the software should never, ever do" which allowed them to be less specific about the exact nature of the problem that the software was having. This is because the specific problem with the software is not a detail of interest. Rather, you are supposed to take for granted that the software problem is very serious and being ignored by the superior. People will commonly use exaggerations and ridiculous metaphors to gloss over something as an unimportant detail so you, the reader, know that isn't the point they are trying to make.
I just rolled with it because it was GGP's example.
The person you replied to pointed out where leaders were failing them. Rather than empathizing, you skipped to pointing out what they should be doing instead.
They made a hyperbolic comment (“literally shooting out knives”) and you’ve focused on dissecting it and accused them of using inaccurate language. Of course they’re just exaggerating when they said that even if people were losing eyes management wouldn’t care.
You switched to first person (“how can I know...”) representing the boss. This not-so-subtly puts you above the person you’re responding to.
Copy-pasting a definition comes off as pedantic.
Finally, no-one asked for an enumerated lecture on how they should be behaving.
hmmmm... I had tried to convey "hey, not being listened to really sucks" but now that I re-read "That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem." that's a pretty damn sterile way to express that. Also you're right that it should come first before the "here is this other perspective you should consider" bit.
> You switched to first person (“how can I know...”) representing the boss. This not-so-subtly puts you above the person you’re responding to.
hmmmm... really I hadn't considered that. My goal had been to suggest seeing things from the leader's perspective because they have a goal of changing leader's mind. But now that you point this out, I can see how this also creates a pompous framing.
Thank you, thats helpful to know to watch out for.
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> enumerated lecture
By this do you mean I was overly verbose? Or that having things in numbers comes off as...professorially pompous? Or both?
> no-one asked for ... how they should be behaving.
So I had interpreted the comment as a combination of an emotional vent but also a request for advice, particularly the "I'm unsure how to solve it. What do we do..."
Is this unreasonable?
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> They made a hyperbolic comment ("literally shooting knives")
> Copy-pasting a definition comes off as pedantic.
> Of course they’re just exaggerating
I... I guess I'm really struggling to cope with the loss of a word which is so dear to me and my ability to bridge gaps of understanding with my fellow human. Like, if the word "literally" no longer means.... _____
...I don't even know how to express the concept without a verbose and phrase like "a way of speaking that is completely accurate and unexaggerated." that would overtax the patience of anyone. Take that away and...as far as I can see whole swaths of meaning about the world that I'd want to express are silenced. And I let the emotion of that get away with me.
The word is dying.
And if it affects me so deeply, I should not rage against the dying of its light but actually find a way to properly grieve it on its way.
I'm sympathetic to your concern about the use of the word "literally". It's sort of a special, meta word.
But there's a subtle difference here in how they used it. They said "even if the UX is ... 'the software literally shoots knives'".
They're speaking in hyperbole, not metaphor. So "literal" is somewhat appropriate. They're not directly saying that their boss wouldn't care about a bad UI. They're exaggeratedly saying that their boss wouldn't care about literal injury.
Literally has not meant what you perceive it to mean, as a wholly intentional and really existing condition, since at least the 18th century. Your response seems to nitpick to the point of pedantry, rather than addressing the steel-manned version of the argument, or even necessarily arguing the argument itself.
When you say
> Reports...are roundly ignored
That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem.
So what is the solution?
1. Understand the problem they're trying to solve. What are their real motives and pressures?
2. Understand where your needs align with theirs and where they diverge in reality.
3. Tell a compelling story of where your needs are in fact aligned.
3.1) Prepare Evidence
If your case is "This tool is causes literal permanent eye injuries to our staff", then there should be written reports of those injuries. If your case is "This software package has multiple missing-affordances which present operational risks to the business", then you should be able to take screen recordings of that.
3.2) Start with why
When turning evidence into a presentation, remember that people listen better when they know why they are listening. So start with: What is at stake?
3.3) Credible language
If your words say "the UX for hundreds or thousands of others is 'the software literally shoots knives out of the monitor and gouges out your eyes'" but you can't actually back that up with the factual reality, you seem like you're exaggerating. If I think you are exaggerating, then I can't trust your words when I'm trying to understand magnitudes.
If I can't trust your words about magnitudes, then how do I give you a voice in making a well-balanced trade-off?
-------
Literally: (adverb)
1. In in a way of speaking that is completely accurate and unexaggerated.
2. In in a way of speaking that is exaggerated for emotional effect.