🧠 Sometimes the Goal Isn’t to Change Minds
During a project in an emergency department, a nursing supervisor made an offhand comment to me:
“The quickest way to screw something up is to bring in an engineer.”
This is definitely something I have heard before. No tension and no confrontation; it was just a comment, shaped by past experiences and said as a joke.
At the time, I was working on a computer simulation intended to support operational decision-making.
The model was technically sound, but as anyone who works in simulation knows, correctness alone does not guarantee impact.
🧩 Champions, Neutrals, and Blockers
I’m no expert in change management, but over the years I’ve had formal training and have completed organization-specific certifications. One idea that shows up again and again is that people involved in change tend to fall into three groups: champions, neutrals, and blockers.
Champions support the work.
Neutrals sit on the fence.
Blockers don’t need authority to slow things down; they just need influence.
In this situation, my goal was never to turn that supervisor into a champion of simulation. My only objective was to make sure he stayed firmly in the neutral group and didn’t become a blocker for others.
🤝 The Lowest-Effort Intervention
I didn’t manage change, explain modeling assumptions, or try to persuade him of anything. I was simply very pleasant and consistently positive.
I made sure every interaction we had, no matter how brief, ended on a good note. It was easy to do, took very little time, and didn’t distract from the actual technical work.
For simulation practitioners, this is an important point: technical correctness doesn’t guarantee adoption.
📉 When a “Correct” Simulation Still Loses
The main takeaway for me is this: not every comment deserves engagement, and not every person needs to be converted. In complex environments like healthcare, sometimes the smartest move is not to spend extra time and energy trying to drive adoption of a model or its results.
A technically correct simulation that people choose not to trust or act on can still feel like a loss.
If stakeholders decide not to take your recommendations, the system doesn’t change, regardless of how strong the analysis is.
✅ Final Word
Simulation doesn’t change systems. People do.
Keeping someone comfortably on the fence can be just as valuable as winning a champion. Sometimes success looks like this: when your name or your simulation comes up, someone says, “Yeah, I like them. They are cool, they’re easy to be around, and they really care about what happens here.”
For engineers and simulation professionals, leadership and soft skills aren’t separate from technical work. They’re what allow good models to actually make a difference.
This article was collaboratively written with the help of artificial intelligence, with human oversight and editing to ensure accuracy and coherence.
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