How Do You Scold Your Grandfather?

The process of learning, on a fundamental level, can generally be broken into two styles:

• The easy way
• The hard way

I have always been a big fan, philosophically, of the first, but tend to head naturally towards the latter as my "go-to" learning method. Nonetheless, I do try to heed the experiential wisdom of those that have stood at whatever fork in the road that I may be facing. This has paid off especially well in the field of marine engineering. There are too many obscure lessons, too many tricks of the trade, too many shipyard maneuvers that simply cannot be calculated by knowledge accumulated from texts. I like to think that having respect or reverence for the advice of my elders has been one of the keys to a (thus far) reasonably successful and enjoyable career of 7 years.

This approach does not work when you are asked to take the lead. There may be nobody who has done what you are trying to do. Alternately, if things hit the fan and you are in charge, it is your responsibility regardless of who's suggestion the bad idea was. The worst instance of conflict here, though, is when you are asked to check/correct an elder engineer's calculation.

You flip through the pages of the document. It's a wreck. It's crap. The numbers are right, but the approach is crude, the references vague, and all the explanations/assumptions/background details have apparently been compiled using Mad Libs. If a rookie put this on your desk you would just draw giant 'X's across each page with a note saying "do over, and please think this time". But this is no rookie. It is a 68 year old engineer, a former U.S. Marine with over 40 years of engineering experience. He HAS to know what he's talking about, right? The problem can't be with him, you must just not be focusing hard enough. So you dig through his references, dig up extra references he's not using, make leaps of logic, make leaps of faith, and somehow convince yourself that, aside from a few typos (surely that explains all the incomplete sentences), this isn't half bad. Just a little polishing up and this piece of work will be ready to publish. But then your supervisor sees this rose your growing from the pile of manure. And he really does find it to be a piece of something. Back to the drawing board you go.

I was able to explain myself reasonably well in this instance, and I'll work through it. But how does one manage it? How does one develop an on/off switch for RESPECT? How can you hold somebody's advice in high regard and then evaluate their work by assuming none of it is right until explicitly proven otherwise? How do you scold somebody with an established record of performance and could be your grandfather? I clearly haven't figured it out yet.