‘You should take the note and not the solution’
A few years ago, during a particularly rough patch on the road to the launch of an updated brand identity, a manager told me we were going in to contentious meeting to “collect input, not feedback.”
I had never really heard those two terms distinguished in that way before. Indeed, for me, they were effectively interchangeable.
Words are precise, though, and there is a great big difference between a mindset of input and a mindset of feedback. The former collects information as a process is beginning or taking place or developing, while the latter assesses the outcomes of a process with an aim toward refinement or course correction or optimization.
In the moment, the distinction mostly helped to stiffen my spine. This was not going to be an easy conversation, but our counterparts were not going to be taking the wheel from us. But it’s stuck with me well beyond that one tough meeting. Indeed, I’ve internalized it to a degree that I use this kind of framing any time I see a potentially tough conversation on the horizon. It took a long time to learn this lesson, but I’m more professionally mature now that I’ve got it down.
And, hey, this works for everyone. Take it from actress and writer Rashida Jones, who appeared on Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang earlier this year and relayed getting virtually the same advice from fellow comedian and writer Bill Hader when she started to get in to writing:
[Hader] once said to me … you know, you should take the note and not the solution. …
And that’s, that’s what I feel like with feedback and people. It’s like aggregate, the kind of like common threads. …
It’s like if you see somebody’s having a problem with an area of the script, or like a theme of the script or a character, you know something’s wrong, but they’re never going to know how to fix it.
When you’re a working creative this is one of the very hardest things to master. It’s hard, draining work to make something - to bring an idea to life and put it in front of someone. When you work hard on something, and it’s something you make, you, of course, want people to be appreciative.
But appreciation is really for the courage to attempt something, and it’s a whole world away from whether the attempt was any good. You need to get to that part of the conversation to make something bad, good or make something good a whole lot better. And getting there means actually being willing to hear when something isn’t quite right.
Yes, people offering criticism often quickly lapse in to solutioning - in to telling you in specific detail how to fix what’s wrong. And that, in turn, can feel extremely personal, as if you’re being told how to do you job.
Your actual job in that kind of moment is (usually) to brush off all that comes after that quick lapse. No matter their degree of skill, people are usually right when they are telling you something isn’t working. What they aren’t remotely as good at is fixing it properly. The good solution? That’s a conversation for another day. In the meantime, take the note.