How to Encourage Radically Candid Writing Feedback
Joni the artist has never thought about her customers a day in her life. For forty years, she’s supported herself and her family selling oil paintings through galleries up and down the California coast. When asked why people purchase her paintings, she wrinkles her nose and admits she hasn’t thought much about it. “I do what makes me feel deeply,” she says, adding, “But also, if people want to change a color so it matches their room, I don’t do that. That’s the gallery’s problem.”
Joni is the definition of a pure artist. On the spectrum of customer research, she sits at the far left.
On the far right is a Dutch chocolate bar company called Tony’s Chocolonely. Its wrappers are scientifically designed to elicit maximum nostalgia from people who grew up in the 1970s, when the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory debuted and fonts mimicked whirling lava lamps. The company exists to end child slavery. It only happens to sell chocolate because that’s what people buy. It is a chimera, ever shapeshifting to match customer tastes.
Two approaches. Two completely different views on customer research.
This tension is present in all workplace writing. Do you do the artful thing that feeds your soul and hope others like it too? Or do you take a human-centered design approach and become whatever readers want?
Your writers are struggling with this. For reasons I'll explain, it's difficult for them to access their inner Joni at work. The best way to help them navigate that spectrum is to encourage radically candid writing feedback.
Team Joni or Tony?
Most people in corporate culture are conditioned to withhold feedback. It’s the game theory exercise known as the prisoner’s dilemma where the costs of cooperation always outweigh the upsides. If you tell someone they’ve erred and they don’t appreciate it, you’ve made an enemy. Whereas if you politely smile and say, “The clipart looks great,” and everyone else smiles and agrees, Chaz makes it into senior management and feels positively about you.
Hierarchies accentuate this. Senior people with fragile egos think feedback is insubordination. Employees suppress their suggestions and everyone watches silly decisions flounce out the door. This deference is so strong in some work cultures it causes plane crashes.
On top of all of this, your writers have likely had the immiserating experience of being edited by very senior people who do not understand clear writing. This is because companies tend to develop inverse writing competence hierarchies—the more senior an individual, the worse their writing because others have stopped being honest with them. The style grows globular, amorphous, and self-serving.
Writers learn to protect themselves from these people’s edits by silencing their inner critic. They’d rather keep their job, so they grow numb. Maybe they even come to … love the edits.
When you tame a fox, its ears flop over like a dog’s. When you cage an orca, its fins wilt and bend. And when you domesticate a writer, the same thing happens to their spine—it liquifies. They lose touch with their inner Joni. In which case, they’ve no choice but to be Tony’s Chocolonely. And often, the buyers you’re studying do not even know what they want. They must be shown.
Here’s how I personally navigate this spectrum. I find immense value in customer research—it’s core to Fenwick’s success. To help clients achieve a specific reaction from readers, we need insight, and can’t just paint for ourselves. However, when all that research is done, we cannot simply repeat what’s been said, either. We must reorder the reader’s world. We must be artists, too.
If everyone on your team is afraid of critique and fears giving it to others, they'll withhold their dearest (read: best) ideas, and then they're all stuck being Tony. They do as asked, wait to be told, and always need to talk to the customer. Maybe that works for you. But I find it much more enlivening and effective to encourage Jonis, who venture bold, personal ideas that make them feel deeply. Which means everyone needs to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and delivering and receiving radically candid feedback. They have to know their darlings might get chopped and volunteer them anyway.
And it’s up to you, as editor, to cultivate an environment where that can actually happen.
To encourage candor, abolish the honesty tax
Be warned, this doesn’t happen overnight. You’re undoing the damage done throughout your writers’ work careers; it is a great unlearning, and never easy.
Explain the need for candor. Tell your team that if you aren’t all honest, you’ll publish terrible things and become known for it. You must learn to disagree productively.
Explain how to communicate nonviolently. Never make it personal. Teach writers to share observations, feelings, needs, and requests.
Establish that you trust them and want the best for them. When editing, be candid, yet assume the best intentions (“I’m sure you noticed this, but …”) and leave them in control (“Ultimately it’s your call.”).
Ask for radically candid feedback yourself. Don’t stop digging until someone’s honest. Show them you need critique just as bad as they do.
When you get honest feedback, get unreasonably excited. Give them the opposite reaction they’d expect. Be thrilled. You got criticized! Yess. Thank them.
When you sense people are withholding, ask what they’d want for themselves. Coax the feedback out of them, and teach them to be excited about it when they do the same for others.
Be consistent. Let them see that this is always your reaction.
I like to think we’ve cultivated a good bit of this on the Fenwick team. A friend I often talk to about work said, “It seems like your team critiques you a lot.” I consider this the highest of praise. Our critique is friendly and productive and a sign that everyone speaks their truth. We research like Tony, but we each have our own vision—and we’re honest with each other about where it begins and ends. We share the critique without fear of retribution. And just as radically as it is given, it can be radically ignored. Said Donnique the other day to my edit: "I'm going to change it back." No apology needed. We trust each other to be tapped in and feeling deeply.
I’m convinced it’s how we’ll support ourselves for forty years, and then some.
For next week
Test your team for radical candor: Present what’s known as a “sacrificial idea”—a patently dumb suggestion meant to get everyone talking. If everyone smiles and agrees—if they say they like your clipart—time to follow the radical candor checklist above.
Chris Gillespie CEO and Editor Fenwick
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Writing tip
To get people ideating, offer a sacrificial idea
You want that idea to be believable, but also so preposterous people cannot help but save you from yourself. Like, “We should publish a newsletter but not allow anyone to sign up; it’ll drive them mad with interest.” Done right, people cannot resist the urge to correct you and debate.
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