Don't grab the wheel
April 12th, 2026
I've been wondering if admitting I find feedback hard makes me look like a bad leader. Probably it makes me look more like an honest one.
Relevant feedback is not trivial. Positive feedback is easy — it's like a nitro shot when the car is already on the right track. Lifts morale, ego, and releases oxytocin. Everyone's happy.
Negative feedback, on the other hand, requires effort, articulation, and empathy to balance constraints against results. It often means a complete remapping of the journey, finding alternative routes, to put it back on track, while trying not to grab the wheel as much as possible. When I say feedback, I mean proper feedback. The mentor needs to step outside whatever context they're in and immerse themselves in a new one, not an easy task on its own. Bias needs cleansing, as much as possible, so that you're not working from narrow frames of reference. And there needs to be acknowledgment of and empathy with the process limitations — tools, time, brief — framed with clarity on the vision and objectives.
To me, and borrowing Rams' formula: good design is appropriate. Which may sound very boring, but what I mean is that it's always in play with the context it's meant to operate in. And appropriate means that sometimes it should be bold, edgy, even violent. We can't dissociate appropriateness from the design, and therefore from the feedback. Appropriate design is empathic design. It's at the core of design thinking and making. It needs to be at the core of design feedback too.
Which is probably why it's hard. And probably why it matters.