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I believe many of us have this challenge especially on 'important' projects lead by or for 'important' people where the focus is very high. The fact is, normally solution architect/designer needs to have the solution approved by various decision makers so that a conflict of interest would be avoided. However what happens if your decision maker has no clue about what the solution is about, and wants to reject it, mostly because of that fact? What do you do? Do you spend your time doing a crash course for the person and make it all look positive? Do you spend your time being annoyed and escalating, putting up with the fact that this person earns more money than you and doesn't know IT? Do you just take the decision and move on to the next project having your3-6 months work never see the light of the day, or even worse adjust your solution to the level of absurd so that your decision maker would understand? What is the best thing to do?
No two brains are cohherent in thinking.
Therefore, every solution is a question to others.
Use a language to the solution the decision maker is versed with.
I like that interesting phrase; "incompetent decision maker", gets thinking alot. Any way, if you are sure that the decision maker is truly incompentent, talk to your co-workers, explain to them & convince them about the idea & proposition you have at hand. If they are truly convinced beyond reasonable doubt that your idea & propostion are good, agree with them to pick out the most suitable members (most liked, favored & intelligent) to address the issue to the decision maker & thereby explain & convince them. As a group or team, you stand a better chance to be listened to & considered
This is an interesting question .I think this would have been faced by people across different business sectors not only IT.
When it comes to ,
"Do you spend your time being annoyed and escalating, putting up with the fact that this person earns more money than you and doesn't know IT"
Yes we get annoyed.If effort doesnt prove we will need to move out and look for a suitable place.
I am not into management nor a decision maker in my organization so disregard if this doesnt give any betterment .My opinion would be ,if the decision maker is not capable of understanding your terminology then i think one should approach him in a layman terms,keeping in mind this doesnt divert our solution .We could also tell him that implementing this solution could save huge money.i think the word MONEY would be understood by everyone :-) .Eg: Storage thin provisioning(In his terms: making one to believe that he had been provisioned what he had requested for but not really).Again this may not be the case with everyone.
