For full disclosure, I have a design background and I am certified in design thinking techniques. This doesn’t mean that I can’t be critical of those techniques when I see flaws. And there are many flaws!
When I have hosted or participated in workshops, most of the time I see the same pattern:
- Workshops are full of senior executives and often the CEO
- Everyone else in the workshop is low key concerned about what those executives will think of them and their ideas
- The workshop results in going forward with whatever the CEO, senior executives, or whomever the HiPPO (high paid opinion) thinks is a good idea
- Rinse, repeat, also known as “build fast, fail fast”
When design thinking emerged as a practice, it didn’t come with an effective way to handle business hierarchies. And those hierarchies are why design thinking fails: some people in the room, regardless of the guidelines that moderators set, do not truly speak or create freely. There is a tacit approval process inherent in companies, as approvals are what makes design and product processes move forward.
People like me with design backgrounds - years of practice of giving and receiving criticism and feedback - get dropped into companies where you might be the only person who is trained to handle criticism. If you are the only one who stays calm during feedback sessions, this alone can cause communications with your teammates to go awry fast.
In order to truly break through and do innovative things, two things need to happen before running any workshop:
- Accept that no one else on your team knows how to give or receive criticism the way that you do;
- Teach your team how to communicate critically: show them that criticism is not a personal attack or an automatic to-do list.
Any successful collaboration between diverse teams needs to first define, together, what makes successful communication. Hint: it’s not saying something like:
“This is boring, how could you do this? Our users won’t like this. This isn’t what we hired you to do!”
(obviously)
Teaching people how to handle feedback involves teaching people how to give good feedback. A great way to give good feedback is to:
Concentrate on what you think when you, and only you, are looking at something.
Feedback and criticism are, in essence, all opinions. Those opinions - positive or negative - have great value. Keep your feedback framed as opinions: start with “I think”, “I feel”, or “I see”. For example, a possible reframing of the rather hostile quote above:
“I think that I am confused as to where I need to go when I look at this.”
It is your interpretation of what you are seeing that matters, and it is yours alone. No one has any idea what “the users” (I can’t stand that term btw) will think of it, just focus on what you see and your gut reaction.
In a room where everyone shares a common expectation of what criticism is, communications can go more smoothly with less friction, anxiety, and squabbling. No one who participates in building the thing feels like they need to brace themselves for a torrent of insults and demands for immediate “corrective” actions. No one who participates in approving the thing feels like they don’t know what to say when they see something.
This all said, even experienced designers can have trouble with criticism, it is an ongoing process that (hopefully) bends towards open communication.
In the next newsletter I’ll show you a way to use object-oriented UX techniques to help set up a common understanding of a feedback loop. If you want to find out sooner, get in touch.
ICYMI: I wrote about what the music of Sly and the Family Stone means to me as a creative person. Links to deep tracks included, no paywall to read on Medium.
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