Right Or Wrong

 A little more than ten years ago, when I was participating in a research project on process mining, Moe, my supervisor, told me that we needed a presentation for a few business stakeholders later that day. "I would like you to have a try as this is a practice for you." she told me in the morning when I had just come into the office. "What should we put on the PowerPoint slides?" I asked. "Our project is about cross-organisational comparative process mining," she explained. "Our business partners want to compare each other's ways of handling business processes, so that they can know how they perform compared to organisations in the same industry, and thus they can learn from each other. Today people from a public organisation will be at the presentation, and they are keen to know how competitive their performance is compared to private organisations in the same industry."

"But I'm still confused," I said. "How do we measure performance? I mean there are too many dimensions to compare."

"We only use the processing time, as it is impossible for us to compare based on other criteria."

I hurried to prepare a few PPT slides which showed the results based on my analysis from the past few weeks. After greetings with the people from our business partner, Moe introduced me, and then I showed them the PPT slides.

"It is clear from the figures that your organisation is handling the business processes significantly slower than the private counterparts," I presented.

"It's impossible!" one person from the business partner interrupted. "I've done research internally, and it doesn't look like what you presented. It must be wrong."

"I don't believe the results to be true," the manager from the business partner added.

"Sorry, he just graduated," Dr. Moe Wynn spoke up. "I think he's made a mistake. Nevertheless, he's quite new to this area, as he has just started in process mining research since last year. His understanding is still not so well."

"I am very confident of the results and what I’ve done." I argued. "I've done it several times to ensure the correctness, and..."

That afternoon, I was blamed heavily in the office of Arthur, who was the disciplinary leader. Then I can still clearly remember almost every word from a statement that he said, "Your understanding of the theory is correct. Your approach to investigation is scientific. Your results are objective and true. But your results make the business partner very upset, which will have a very negative impact on the university, as that public organisation is the one that provides funding to this research. Therefore, we have to make them happy.  While Moe said you were wrong, she had softened the influence of your harmful words. But you still argued with her..." I was shocked and couldn’t believe this was spoken from Arthur’s mouth. 

I felt puzzled. Was I really wrong? Or were they wrong instead？ I told my parents that evening that I felt I'd been bullied.

"They were just teaching you," my parents said. "You're a fresh graduate, and they have experience, so they want to help you. There’s no motivation for them to hurt you."

Half a year later, I recounted this story to one of my best friends during my visit to Hangzhou. "I made a very big mistake," I said sadly.

"No, you're not at fault," he said.

"Really? But everyone said I was wrong."

"From a research perspective, you're correct," my friend replied. "But for the career development of yourself, this is not good." Then he sighed. "Maybe it will be better if you just view it as being wrong, as I really hope you can live easier and have a better career development."

“Research is not suitable for you.” He added, “why not try something easier and more comfortable?”