Rewrite IRstuff's post and substitute brain for gun. The problem with this approach to gun fighting is you usually shoot yourself in the foot and have to stick it in your mouth to try to stop the bleeding.
I don’t think that there is a single definition only few very good ones.
This could happen when shooter makes a suggestion that is coming from left field. The origin is normally a sycophant trying to get the first suggestion tabled. It will usually be followed later on when someone tables a viable approach and you will hear the words “That is kinda what I was trying to get across or that’s in line with what I was thinking.” Then continue to make off the wall comments while talking directly to chair.
In a breakdown situation when you are awaiting someone’s appearance with the a report on the current situation and when they walk in and state the agitator shaft is in two pieces, up pops our shooter with the suggestion that we ought to make it out of stainless. Again not a clue about the specific equipment or the mechanics of an agitator.
The shooter is also the late arrival who has to have half the minutes repeated then start offering suggestions, most of which have absolutely no relevance or merit. Again, once a viable suggestion is tabled they would chime in again with technobabble just to get the floor while contributing absolutely nothing to a resolution of the current problem.
You can usually tell a shooter by the fact that they tend to forget a statement made 10 minutes ago or keep trying to inject a revised form of the same suggestion at every opportunity. You could usually get them off track by asking “Do you have anything to back that up?” If the questions would get very binding they would work very hard to find an exit strategy, either the question or the meeting.
Another way to spot one is when you develop a plan and a sequence of events to make it happen and when they join the discussion it is usually with a suggestion of a change in the sequence or timing of the events that had been decided on to resolve the problem.
A prima fascia case was one very good machinist that attended the meetings we would have on problems with mechanical equipment and involved the machine shop. The big team. We would present the circumstances surrounding the failure and the laboratory report for informational purposes and he would be the first to speak while everyone else was try to digest the information presented, “ If we would make that out of cold rolled we wouldn’t be having this trouble”. If there was anyone new attending they would want to know more about this and the meeting was off on a tangent. His argument for using cold roll was that in his father’s machine shop they made everything out of cold rolled, especially for all the pulp wood trucks. Several people tried to get him dis-invited , but to no avail as was the shop’s head represenetive.
Being somewhat sneaky I made a couple of trips by the paper mill and every time I would see a pulpwood truck on the side of the road with the cones out I would take a picture. When I had about ten pictures I was ready. The very next meeting up jumped the cold rolled problem and I immediately dropped the pictures on the table with the statement “Eddie if cold rolled steel is so good why are all these trucks broken down on the side of the road”. Later on I explained to him that he should stick to the machining aspects and leave the material problems to the engineering group. I always had some pictures, any kind, in my papers at the meetings and made sure he saw them.
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