Looking at another team's work, there was a workflow that seemed a bit inefficient.
On a casual basis I asked again exactly how the flow worked, and thought about whether anything could be systematized.
To cut to the conclusion: the workflow was not changed — status quo — but personally I was a bit disappointed.
There was simple repetitive Excel work, so I proposed writing a macro to automate it (I would build the macro myself).
Skipping the back-and-forth, the result was: "At our current scale we do not feel it is that much trouble, so we are fine."
Applying a macro to Excel does require an initial change, but mid-to-long term the logic said changing would be better — and it did not go that way.
It felt a little wasteful, and I wondered what approach would have made the logic land.
I had two kinds of concern.
At the personal level: "I should have taken a different approach."
At the company level: "Precisely because the scale is small now, if we do not do this, when volume grows the labor and change cost will only get larger (so we should change now)."
On the latter: for a startup where systems are incomplete, being full with day-to-day operations makes it hard to keep reviewing and changing ops — a realistic problem. (That is why the first design is everything.)
No matter how correct you are from the outside, sometimes you are not heard.
(I am in the same company, so we broadly share incentives and I am not strictly an outsider — but in the sense that I am not involved in that workflow, I am "outside.")
To get that accepted, you need either "communication skill" or "authority to execute (power)," or both.
I am not equating the latter with leadership, but one element of leadership is: accurately grasp something that can be explained correctly in logic, and then just push it through.
As long as humans run things, internal political dynamics exist to some degree — so whether someone can accurately grasp fine-grained operations and exercise authority appropriately changes how the organization runs dramatically.
(A brilliant executive asked about how they manage said, "Decide 100 things to do, and make people do all 100" — that impressed me deeply.
It can sound like micromanagement down to how you lift chopsticks, but doing it requires outstanding field sense that accurately grasps every workflow.)
Well, I do not have matching authority, so I have to cover it with the former.
(In a counterfactual: if this had been discussed and decided by consensus, it would almost certainly have been executed.)
Afterward I kept testing approaches in my head — maybe I should have done this.
I did write down the problem and solutions side by side for comparison, and showed a simple prototype of the output image — but it never reached a decision that would change the status quo into action.
If you push communication ability all the way, in the end it is trust — and more often than not, people do not accept a correct argument and turn it into action just because it is correct.
Put another way: communication is the means, earning trust is the goal, and with that trust you get them to act — that may be the right order.
At least for getting people to move in one-to-one exchanges, trust is necessary — that was the takeaway.
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