Leading a Culture of Critique
The Conversation Factory
Building a Muscle Memory
Christen, how do you feel like making those raps possible and safe happens? Youou sort of create scaffolding and structuring and education around that. We talk about fear, we talk about psychological safety. What needs to be present when you're having a disagreement? Don't run from that disagreement. Sometimes i think of it as running to the fire, if you won’t give people the skills to run to the fire in a way that's useful.
Recently, I've been reading a book called "Ethic of Excellence" by Ron Berger. He teaches teachers about how to invoke pride in students, to invite them to work through community engagement and thoughtful feedback, and multiple drafts of work. Check out his classic short video called "Austin's Butterfly" here.
He asserts that thoughtful feedback (ie critique) is essential to making great work, which he also asserts is the whole point of life: Make great things.
He boils a philosophy of critique down to three principles:
Be Kind
Be Specific
Be Helpful
I wanted to bring together three of my favorite leaders to have a roundtable conversation about leading a culture of critique, and to open up about how to bring these ways of working together to life at work.
Aaron Irizarry has been on this podcast before, with his co-author of "Discussing Design" Adam Connor. He's the Senior Director of Servicing Platforms Design at Capital One and is a deep, deep thinker on this subject.
Aniruddha Kadam recently left LinkedIn, where he was a Senior Design Manager. He's also an Advisor at Rethink HQ, which recently released an excellent guide to leading critique.
One of my favorite points in that guide is: Make it clear what you are NOT asking for feedback on!
And the roundtable is rounded out by the amazing and delightful
Christen Penny, who is a Design Educator & Community Builder and leads the Design Education team at Workday, an enterprise cloud application for finance, HR, and planning.
I wanted to open with Christen's quote about culture change being challenging, because it's critical to have empathy for ourselves and others as we try to facilitate and lead change.
Creating rituals around critique takes time. Getting people to lean into the discomfort takes effort. Building psychological safety doesn't come for free.
We should remind ourselves that we're asking people to lean into discomfort - to run into the fire.
Ron Berger's perspective is ultimately the goal:
We want our work and our organization's work to be excellent. And we need outside feedback to make that possible. Critique before a launch is a lot less painful than realizing a missed opportunity after we hit "send".
There is so much goodness in this conversation! I hope you take the time to absorb it all.
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Links and Questions:
Aaron Irizarry, Sr. Director, Servicing Platforms Design at Capital One is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroni/
Adam Connor & Adam Irizarry on a way-back episode: Designing a Culture of Critique
Aniruddha Kadam, Advisor at Rethink HQ, formerly Design at LinkedIn is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aniruddhakadam/
Rethink HQ Critique guide: https://www.rethinkhq.com/design-critique/leading-effective-design-critiques
Christen Penny, Design Educator @Workday is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christenpenny/
Some questions that guided our conversation:
Why is Critique important?
Why is a culture of Critique important?
What are the barriers to cultivating a culture of critique?
What are best practices on the individual, team and org levels to invite more critique?
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