It happens often to be in an awkward professional situation where things seem to be quite complicated and from the very early stage you see/envision/feel problems in the long run. This can be either due your incompetence or the ones of your colleagues in the loop, either due vision inconsistency either due upper management misjudgement. In such a setting, you have three options:
- evacuate the problem, run from the very beginning. Since it is obvious that most likely things will never work out, simply run. The objective is to figure out a way disassociating yourself from the effort as early as possible. The arguments can be a little bit fictitious but it doesn't matter, situation will blow anyway. This will allow you a "honorable mention", no one will be hurt (yourself, colleagues, upper management) and your image will be preserved. Wisdom will never get you in trouble. The risk is to end up working on second class projects, simply because in many cases highly ambitious projects seem problematic.
- involve yourself but moderately from the very beginning. This will allow you to negotiate and re-adjust your position depending on the outcome. Maintain a neutral position as much as you can and be ready to abandon the effort when the situation seems to become complicated or whenever the whole effort converges to oblivion. Be as diplomatic as you can, make as much alliances as you can and position yourself as a catalyst. Most likely no one will pay attention to you when things move in the wrong direction and no one will blame you. On the negative side most likely you are heading towards become a manager, with limited perspectives and complete lack of leadership and ideas that will make the difference.
- it is a quality of a person to make the call and simply stand behind it. Most likely, in order to be able to make such a call you are appreciated from your colleagues and your upper management. Running away is not consistent with your principles and ethics, and if you don't stand up no one will do it. Think of your colleagues, who have respect for you not because you have been placed in this position from the upper management but because you deserve it. These colleagues do not have the ability to stand up, do not have the means neither to avoid or run from these problems. If you don't do it, things will not change, incompetence will prevail, situation will be repeated again and again and like as usual the weakest parts of the chain will suffer the most. Well, the risk is that you will have quite limited support because most of your colleagues will run away from the problem and that you have to face upper management and explain that things are wrong, something that is usually not appreciated, but as I said before, it is a quality of a leader to make the best possible decisions not only for himself but for his colleagues as well, stand behind and fight for them. It is the only option if you want to be loyal to your principles/ethics, loyal to your colleagues and loyal to yourself.
To conclude, depending on your track record, the support you can get from your colleagues and your long term career plan you have to make a choice. All of them are equally good, wisdom and intelligence immediately pay out, leadership does the same in the long run but certainly will create you problems in the present.
