When you tell a someone again and again and again, “Hey, this is a problem, here’s why, here’s how we can fix it”, and they smile and nod and say “sounds good, bro”, but then they gently take no action… Well, their actions suggest that maybe they don’t actually care. And actions speak louder than words, as they say.
Just about everyone at least claims to want to do their job well. It would be career/social suicide to openly declare otherwise, right? They might think they care, too. Sometimes I’ll remind myself to be optimistic about this, via Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”.
But at some point, you have to look beyond intentions and weigh actual results. The difference between stupidity and malice starts to become irrelevant as time goes on, as occurrences add up.
(Also: You have to at least consider the notion that stupidity can be a convenient front for malice.)
So I’m coming around to a new way of thinking on this: making judgments about people’s intentions and making predictions about their future behavior not by what they say but by what they do.
