[dheera]

> If you're confident in your approach

That's the thing. I'm not a narcissist, and my confidence in my approaches is driven by the objective statistics and uncertainties of the approach and NOT my ego.

If I think there's a 90% chance something will fail but there's a good reason to try it for the 10% scenario in which it succeeds, that's exactly my confidence and I'm not going to coat it in some bullshit pitch about how I'm confident it is going to work. If there's an 80% chance it is going to work, I will not lie about the 20%. And if I say 98%, it's actually pretty damn near that. The 2% accounts for my typical sick days per year.

Your job as a manager is to deal with these statistics and hedge the risks. Hedge funds do it with money, you do it with people and resources.

Unfortunately it's the people who say it's going to work 100% and actually fail 50% of the time that get the love of typical corporate managers.

[jldugger]

While I doubt most people have sufficient "objective statistics" to truly remove ego from the equation, there's a middleground here.

Write up your detailed proposal as typical, but before you click send, put an "executive summary" at the top, with maybe two sentences. One to describe the problem and one to describe the solution. You can put all the detail you want in the rest of the document. But the onus remains on you the engineer to make a recommendation, not just list options. If you genuinely believe yourself to be a probabilities it should be easy!

[jsmeaton]

Agree. Rounding most of the advice to providing an executive summary is about right.

If you’re not fully confident and think an experiment is worth while, lead with that, and provide assurances there are mitigations in place or a decision is easy to back out of. That’s still doing the work.

If you want an easy decision, you need to do the work. Not expect others to get into all the detail you did. There’s still room for those decisions - they’re just not as quick/easy.