Ruminations on today

Today was quite an emotionally draining day off the back of what would have been a great meeting. Content and direction-wise, there wasn't any thing major that needed addressing and the work was pretty much 75% the way there. However, sometimes when targeted, the 25% can be the most painful to work on especially when the comments about the work feels somewhat invalidating of the hard work that you've put in so far.

Factually, the discussion went about like so:

My colleague and I were working on a document that highlights the constraints we face in the region when we want to create a better digital experience on the web. My colleague dived into the details while I will provide the wrapper and context around how best to present this data to the leadership. 

What started out as a web constraints document for just the global web team, quickly became a document for senior leadership and we had to quickly pivot the narrative. As I was the most experienced on the team to do that, I took ownership of narrative-crafting while my colleague worked on the evidence. 

The work was done well into the night at the 11th hour (quite literally until 11pm the previous day) and while hardwork doesn't necessarily equate to quality and performance, I was quite chuffed about what was on the report and how I manage to highlight how APAC couldn't align to the global corporate strategy because of the difficulties we face. At the back of my mind, these issues have been raised on a few occasions and there's nothing new that senior leaders didn't already know. 

So when my boss asked what is the aim of this document, who should receive it and what do we hope to achieve at the end of it, I answered with the idea that the senior leadership needs to know the challenges we're facing and how they don't align to the corporate strategy that she has laid out because of the multitude of technical challenges.

I was caught by surprise when the approach that my boss wanted, was to frame "challenges" as "opportunities" and potentially change the narrative on its head and he felt that my language was too strongly worded. 

For example, 

Global shared web strategy	APAC’s challenge
Connects us and our work to build web experiences that align to portfolio and corporate strategies	APAC cannot connect to portfolio and corporate strategies because there is no international web strategy that brings regions to parity in terms of language, depth of content and user experience.
Reverses legacy trends that contribute to sprawl and waste	Our CMS, website system and sprawl of content is making regions harder to catch up and localise, creating dead-ends and tech debt which disrupts the user experience.

While factual, I've been asked to rephrase the narrative to ensure that people won't be put on the defensive and that they're failing (verbatim from my boss). I am perfectly fine to phrase things in a politically sensitive way, and I've tried my best to already par down and not make the document into a "rant". The feedback was basically to not have us potentially land in minefields with other stakeholders that might cut us from working with them in the future.

I don't disagree with my boss and I think a lot of these could have been avoided if he told us from the start how he wanted to position the team in front of leadership from the get-go, rather than tell us post-production and then have us rectify the work.