My father who was also involved in IT tells a similar story where the executive cut him off and said "I asked you for the baby, not the labor pains."

Love this idea; won't go over well at all with the other accountants I work with. MY CFO doesn't like graphs because they "hide too many details' and insists on everything presented to her being in a table. MY VP pulls out a calculator and re-does the math on tables in decks by hand to help him 'understand'.

A lot of leaders like to hide in the details because the bigger picture is a harder problem.

What can be done, when writing an article, to not stumble during reading when an unknown abbreviation such as SVP occurs?

Best article I’ve read this month. The SVP expressed unqualified trust in the team. Asking the team for the next steps emphasizes this trust.

Just give me the solution to the problem of Lack of care to understand the details by people who can actually make a difference.

We call this incident postmortem, part of a company process. After serious problems and firefighting, when the patches and hacks and people working 24 hour and it admins wake on a Sunday morning to do work, we sit down and try to figure out how this will _never_ happen again.

>If your corrective action depends on people remembering a conversation from six months ago, you don't have a corrective action. You have organizational folklore.

I appreciate this.

> At first I thought "I don't want the details" sounded dismissive.

Well that is because it was delivered by someone who was actually being dismissive!

If they want to know what "we are changing" but don't want to know any detail as to why, even presented at an appropriate level, they are very likely looking for you to take all the risk of the decision and they are dismissing your need to have the necessary informed consent for it to become the we.

Now, if you're presenting that information at a level of detail that is truly irrelevant or deep, that is your problem to fix.

But otherwise be very wary of this pattern of communication where "we" might mean "you". Anyone with any sense of risk management should know not to do this.

If you have not seen it, watch Margin Call. When you get to the boardroom scene [0] you'll see this play out, but you will also see the (pretty rapacious, direct) boss understand properly that the information he is getting from a low ranking employee is nevertheless his problem to understand, even if only at a 10,000 feet level.

Beyond the drama of the way the scene ends, it's actually a very good model of how that interaction should play out for everyone — making it clear that everyone in the room shares in the "we" of it, including the decisionmaker.

I have been in rooms where it played out at least something like that, where the boss wants to make an attempt to share the burden of the detail, and I've been able to leave them feeling somewhat supported, or at least without feeling like I was being shafted.

And I've been in rooms with people who don't want to know the details but just want to know what "we" are going to fix — those guys have never been as good to work for. If they say "we" but leave you with the impression they may mean "you", it's bad.

[0] said scene, but really, really, watch the film if you never have:

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechma...

Thats funny. When I try to only give the conclusion, I'm often asked for the details.

If you don’t know what happened how would you be able to tell if the changes are addressing the problem? If you don’t care about the problem being addressed why jump in a call in the first place?