“I want to be open to critique but to be honest I feel it is hurtful and I don’t know how to respond… …I do feel defensive and attacked and not trusted and I don’t know what to do.”

That quote comes from a long-time friend in the design community. Someone who has worked their fair share of challenging projects, led teams and organizations, and wrestled with difficult clients and collaborators. I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for them. They’ve been at this game for a while… and they still struggle with receiving feedback.

In the years…

“We help organizations improve their design and innovation capabilities.”

“We help organizations be more collaborative and human-centric.”

“We help organizations learn how to utilize their talent and execute on their creative and innovative ideas.”

These are just a few of the lead lines used in the various pitches and introductions we’ve had for Mad*Pow’s Organizational Design practice over the last year or so. And while they aren’t wrong, I feel like they sit just on the cusp of buzz-wordy, hype-fueled meaninglessness as well as only scratch the surface of what we do.

Our practice grew out of the realization that…

Asking for feedback is a universal part of the design process regardless of organization, industry or maturity. At some point in the process of making something you turn to others and either explicitly or implicitly open the doors to collecting their thoughts on what you’ve constructed. It could be that you’re doing this in meetings. It could be that you’re grabbing the person next to you after staring at your screen for two hours. Or it may be that you’re just posting what you’ve just created out into the world in some fashion.

In many organizations, teams use the words…

Like many others I know, I’m using the beginning of this year to attempt to make some adjustments to my life. I’m trying not to be fanatical or even all that strict about it. I didn’t start work on a bunch of new habits and behaviors and life changes immediately on the 1st of the month. The little bit of research I’ve done about New Year’s resolutions seems to indicate that only about 8% of people actually succeed at whatever changes they set out to make. That’s pretty abysmal. …

Most of us have been in situations where, instead of getting what we’d consider to be useful feedback on our designs, we get a list of changes to make to it. And often this list doesn’t include a clear indication of why the changes should be made. Beyond that some of the changes might be things that are detrimental to the design and things we’d advise against.

The most challenging of these kinds of situations is when it’s not actually a list we receive, but rather a new design that the client has put together on their own. We sit…

In the time that Aaron and I have been sharing our thoughts on critique, we’ve had a lot of opportunities to speak with designers, developers, project managers, etc. about their organizations and how they’ve incorporated critique (or haven’t) as a part of their process.

In those conversations, the topic of Design Reviews often comes up. We hear from a lot of people who are frustrated because they feel like reviews are the point in their process where critique is or should be happening and for one reason or another it isn’t working.

Now the term, “Design Review” is itself vague…

People have a tendency to jump to a solution before they fully articulate the problem that they’ve found. Design Researchers see this all the time in usability studies, interviews, etc. Participants frequently make statements that begin with phrases along the lines of “It should do…”, “I wish it did…” or “What they should have done is…”. A skilled researcher knows that this is an opening to dig deeper. Why should the design be different? What problem does the change they’re suggesting solve? What is it that the current design isn’t doing well enough?

Problem solving in a critique is also…

In a recent post Aaron talked about the importance of intent in the success of critique. Without the right intent on both sides critiques can go nowhere. Or worse, they can hurt the design, the designer and the relationship between the designer and the critics.

But now lets say that the intent is right. The critics are looking to help the designer understand the impact of the decisions he or she has made. The designer has every intention of listening, of critiquing right along with the critics, and using what they learn to iterate and improve upon their design.

There…