How to Improve the ROI of Your Creative Feedback
“The more I learn, the less I know.”
Regardless of who said this, (or something like it), this statement is 100% true when it comes to creative projects. The process can be non-linear and messy and we don’t know all the pitfalls the project team will encounter. Likewise, we don’t know all the opportunities they’ll discover along the way. The best creative feedback accommodates these unknowns and empowers the project team to bring their very best to bear.
As a creative leader I’m often asked by my business stakeholders to determine the specific solution during a creative review. I might have a sense of which path to take, but unless I’m the designer doing the work, the best I can do for the project is to be curious and ask more questions.
“Why aren’t you using our standard color palette?”
“Did you explore other headlines?”
“Can these elements be consolidated?”
I don’t necessarily know or see everything that was brainstormed, dreamed, explored and discarded. And because presenters and presentees are increasingly time-starved, extensive storytelling about the process is not always feasible. Fortunately, we don’t have to pretend to know all the answers.
Whether you’re the creative leader or the business stakeholder, it’s unlikely that you possess all the necessary knowledge to divine the solution for any given project. Nor should you want to. You actually want the creative team to find the answers themselves. The experience of getting that win is invaluable for individual career development, team morale, efficiency for future projects and better outcomes for the brand.
But where does that leave us, the feedback givers? Don’t worry, we still have feedback to give and it’s invaluable.
Two (easy-ish) steps for better feedback
Step 1
Acknowledge that any creative problem may have more than one viable solution. As good as you are at what you do, what you think the solution is might not be the only answer and might not be the best one either.
Maybe the logo doesn’t need to be bigger, but instead just needs a simpler background. Or perhaps customer adoption of your new feature is low not because of wayfinding, but because the customers don’t understand how to use it. Staying open to all potential solutions, even the farfetched ones, gives the team the greatest chance of success.
Step 2
Frame feedback in the form of a problem to solve. In the former example, it might be something like, “The logo is hard to read.” In the latter example, it might sound like, “Customer adoption of our new feature is low.” This approach requires a faithful acceptance that there is indeed more than one way to solve a problem and that your creative team is talented enough to figure it out.
Focusing on the problem to solve also gets you, the feedback-giver, off the hook for coming up with the solution on the spot. The best creative, product and marketing leaders rarely know the multitude of potential solutions at the moment of feedback. Plus, the mental commute we make from meeting to meeting strains our abilities to be truly creative on the spot. Instead, give this responsibility to your designers and writers and let them crack the code…that’s what you pay them for.
In contrast, prescriptive feedback (do it specifically like this), shuts down creative thinking and limits the team to a narrow course of action. Unless the feedback giver was embedded in the creative process, their prescriptive feedback can create unexpected consequences in other parts of the project, causing the team to second-guess decision-making or forcing them to revisit previously resolved issues in order to address the new feedback. What was intended to be decisive and helpful ultimately costs more time.
Giving feedback as the problem to solve has a lot of upsides. That said, it’s worth mentioning a few caveats:
Caveat #1: Late in the project
Sometimes prescriptive feedback is needed, such as nearing the end of the project when explorations are complete and the team is polishing the work. The feedback at this stage is arguably more objective and less creative such as flagging inaccurate content, specs and formatting.
Caveat #2: Ambiguous strategy
Identifying the problem to solve can be difficult if it’s not underpinned by a clearly defined strategy (brand, product, marketing, etc). If the strategy isn’t clear you shouldn’t try to refine it during the creative review. Pause the project, re-evaluate and align.
Caveat #3: Shaky foundations
Occasionally there are, “Do it like this…,” moments where you need to show the team an example of exactly what you mean. However, these situations should be few and far between. If they are happening often you might reconsider how you're writing the project brief or if you have the right team in place.
Getting more from your feedback
The “ROI” is in reference to the amount of effort you put into your feedback as compared to the benefits you get back. At minimum, your feedback needs to help the team deliver on the brief, however acknowledging there are multiple potential solutions and focusing on the problems to solve have numerous short and long-term benefits:
Gives the team the max flexibility to bring the best possible solutions
Fosters pride and confidence in the team when they eventually find the solution
Saves times for the feedback-giver
Avoids unknowingly trapping the team in a bad solution
Teaches the team what problems to look out for in future projects
Avoids turning prescriptive direction into a “standard” when it was only really meant as a one-off solution for that specific scenario
Gives the team the ownership to determine how much they’d want to scale what they learn with knowledge sharing, documentation or templatization.
Final thoughts
When you hire (or assign) a creative team for a project you’re hiring them for their skills, experience and their opinions. They should, in theory, be able to solve any problems you clearly articulate.
The key is to:
Acknowledge that any creative problem may have more than one good solution.
Frame feedback in the form of the problem to solve.
The intrinsic motivation of solving a problem goes so much further than the extrinsic motivation of praise (or avoiding punishment). By keeping our options open the project is more likely to succeed and the team will be fueled well into the future.
What are your top feedback tips? I’d love to hear what you do to set teams up for success.