As a child I was frustrated with the process to make fudge. It always took hours, and generally turned out as more of a chocolate sauce. The problem was, from age 7 I knew I wanted to be an engineer, and I tended to follow directions. The directions I followed to failure several times included something like this: “Set the burner on medium-low, and cook until you reach the soft ball temperature on the candy thermometer”.
This is a combination problem of thermal mass and thermal insulation. The fudge ingredients have considerable thermal mass, and you have to push quite a bit of heat energy into it to get to the point where it just starts to boil and the magic happens. But the ingredients also don’t conduct heat as well as you might think so if you just turn it up, you’ll incinerate the stuff at the bottom of the pot while you watch the calm surface of the ingredients mock you.
Start on high. Yep, flames curling around the bottom of the pan high. And stir it constantly to let the hot stuff on the bottom dissipate its heat into the cooler stuff elsewhere in the pot. Stir to cover the entire bottom of the pot, not just a nice circle around the edge. It will be boiling in no time.
Now reduce the burner to whatever keeps it boiling moderately. Those labels on the burner dial aren’t for you. Ignore them, and set the burner to get the moderate boiling result you’re looking for. Continue stirring and watch the candy thermometer to get it to between 235 and 245. Too low and you have sauce. Too high and you have scorched crumbles to sprinkle over ice cream. Hit the temperature spec, and you’ve got fudge in record time.
Those labels on the dials aren’t for you. Neither are the conservative cooking directions. And in an engineering organization, nobody is going to tell you what you can do, only what you can’t do. So you must assume you can do anything. If you find yourself asking “Do you think they’d let me…”, stop. Don’t ask. If it’s a good idea, do it. “They” are too busy managing what they can measure, and ignoring the more important stuff they can’t measure, to grant you authority to do anything. Seize the authority, and do what needs to be done. If someone says stop, persistently, then stop. And if it happens too many times, go work somewhere else.