Lend a Hand

I can't believe it's been a week since FO hijacked my meeting to spout his draft business priorities.
You'll be pleased to learn that the drones were missing from this now weekly event (that's two weeks in a row, so it must be regular). Doodles was going to be excluded as non-essential, so I didn't bother ringing him. He rang us five minutes in, and we kept talking as if he knew what was going on. He couldn't possibly have done, because my report, which works like an agenda, had only been sent out an hour before, and Gabriel had convinced me to squeeze "just one more wafer" of an item onto it.
Big mistake. FO tore it to shreds. I know he's been ill. I know he's having a hard time of it, but there's no excuse for ripping into a perfectly good idea as if it was the worst thing ever hear.
It was a pro-active approach to dealing with system overload. I'd proposed something similar months ago with zero response, but things have been moving along, and Polo has instigated some work to get the stats needed to determine when we would reach levels of diminished service. I wasn't too happy with how it was going to be implemented, but Tank and I could discuss that over time.
FO said that there had to be something fundamentally wrong with the system that we had to even consider an apporach to dealing with overload. He said that we should bring in someone from the outside - a consultant - to give us some pointers. I told him what the consultant was likely to say, with Tank and Gabriel nodding in industry knowledge unison, and then FO snapped at me!
"You don't know that! They might come up with something we haven't thought of!"
Redundancy is the key. Redundancy costs money for something you don't use. So much for cutting costs.
I know consultants. I've been a consultant. The only purpose in life as a consultant is to consult. You don't necessarily have to do a good job, just continue to be employable. Do something. Sound impressive. Sound certain. Convince the people who, like FO, don't trust the experts around them. Learn about those people. Pander to them. Confirm their suspicions. Leave quickly and send the bill before the dust settles and the internal experts have had time to digest a lengthy report full of meaningless techno-babble and pat statements from an industry study.
It wasn't the career for me. I've met too many people who were essentially unemployable who do quite well as consultants. There are few good ones.
What was fundamentally missing from FO was trust. He has no faith in the technical people because he doesn't understand them. He doesn't understand what they do, and he's afraid that they are cleverer and more knowledgeable than him (not the same thing). He is used to working in an aggressive work environment, where people like Polo and Gabriel, who have no real ambition, should be after his job - not his actual job, but his status. It's not paranoia, just his experience.
I prefer to work in a collaborative environment. If someone gives me an opinion or estimate, I might raise an eyebrow or two, but I trust that
1. They're not trying to stall and inflate that estimate because they want goof-off time
2. They have some idea of what they're talking about
If we don't trust the people who work for us, or the people who work with us, then it's time to take a good hard long look at ourselves and ask what the hell we're doing working in such an environment!