Are People Stalling Your Ideas? Here’s What You Can Do

When you’re dealing with stalling behavior, using a sensitivity analysis or putting the burden of proof on the other person can help you break out of that stall and move your ideas forward.

Every organization suffers from some level of political intrigue. Whether it’s hoarding of resources, manipulative tactics, or passive aggressive behavior office politics distract your organization from getting things done. It also makes time at the office stressful and discouraging. Ignoring these dynamics can create risk for you, but you can take a productive approach to dealing with common political issues.

People Stalling Your Ideas

Some people aren’t comfortable directly opposing your idea, but they don’t want the idea to move forward. So what they do is they stall. They hope your idea just eventually dies. This person might seem really interested in helping you. They’re very interested in your ideas and your recommendations—a little bit too interested. Every time they interact with you they say how excited they are. They’re really eager to help you. Then they ask for more information. Then the next time they sit down with you, they ask for more information, and more, and more, and more. They’re using this as a stalling technique to prevent you from moving forward. But the way they’re doing it makes them look really helpful and supportive in the process.

To get past this dynamic, I like using a basic sensitivity analysis if people are bringing up concerns about maybe how many customers you might lose because of your idea. You might start drilling in and doing retention analysis and looking at historicals. But that is going to be a never-ending pool of analysis you need to do. Instead what you can do is say, “You know what, for this to turn into a bad idea we would have to lose a thousand customers. Does anybody in the room believe that this idea would cause us to lose a thousand customers?” If everybody in the room says, “There’s no way we would lose that many,” all of a sudden, that analysis this person is asking for is completely irrelevant and you can move forward.

Another technique I encourage people to use when you’re seeing this stalling behavior is putting the burden of proof on the other person’s plate. If they have to do work, suddenly some of their concerns aren’t as important to them. What that conversation can sound like is, “Hey, you know what, that’s a really interesting concern. I would love to see your analysis on that. When do you think you can have it done?” The person might say, “Yeah, it is really important and I’m going to go do the analysis and I’ll get it to you next week.” Well then it’s a big concern. More often than not, what I see is, “Well, you know that’s actually going to be complicated and I don’t really have the time to do that analysis. And you know, as I think about it some more, this really isn’t that big of a concern.” And then you’ve gotten past the stall.

Let’s imagine you have a chief financial officer who doesn’t like one of your ideas. They keep showing up to your meetings and asking a lot of financial analysis questions. You find yourself answering those questions every single time and getting them more data and more data and more data but they keep asking for more. A way to break out of this stall is to ask them to run the financials using their scenarios. That’s going to be a lot of work. They might just walk away from the situation. If they really do believe that these are big concerns, they’re going to do that analysis. If they don’t believe they’re big concerns and they’re just really trying to stall you, you might find that they walk away from it and say, “You know what, I guess the project can proceed from here. I’m not as concerned as I initially thought I was.”

When you’re dealing with stalling behavior, using a sensitivity analysis or putting the burden of proof on the other person can help you break out of that stall and move your ideas forward.

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