Real-Life Decision Making
You are employed as an industry liaison officer in a university. The university is situated in a region where forestry is the main industry. You have a degree in forestry. Before you went to work for the university, you had been a self-employed forestry consultant. Over the years, you have built up many contacts in the forestry business.
A big part of your job involves bringing forestry concerns to the attention of university researchers. The university has established goals with regards to its research, and you are naturally expected to work towards these goals at all times.
You receive a lot of phone calls and visits from people who want you to address their particular issues. Many industry liaison officers have to work hard to attract interest from industry. You, however, have the opposite problem. You have more industry people asking for assistance than the university is equipped to handle.
Today, you look over the pile of notes on your desk and you sigh. You have at least six requests from people in forestry. Each one of the people who have submitted these requests is a former colleague of yours, and each one expects you to represent their interests.
But as an employee of the university, it is your role to represent the university's interests. When both industry and university have the same interests, there is no problem. When those interests differ, you are in a tight situation.
Looking over the requests, you note that three of them are requests that are suitable to be discussed with the research committee. You set them aside to be forwarded to the researchers.
Two other requests are valid, at least from the industry's viewpoint, but do not meet the research objectives that the university has established. Clearly, you must communicate to the forest people that you cannot process these two requests.
The last one is a request asking you to write a proposal to government on behalf of a logging company. By writing the request, you will be giving the university's support to an issue that they haven't agreed to support.
You are certain that the university would want to help, but there is a problem. There is a very tight proposal deadline. However, the committee members that approve these decisions are not available. Many are away on vacation or are traveling to conferences in other countries.
If you wait for them to return, it will be too late to submit the proposal.
What do you do?