Dear (none)Designer,

Welcome back to the thirty-fourth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.

In our new series documenting design decisions, we have stumbled upon the challenge of how to collect feedback and how to effectively move forward.

Collecting feedback is often a concern when we approach it as a collective exercise. We often see that more people in the room actually make fewer or worse decisions. Why is that? The power play is in the room; it's in you. If your boss says that she or he does not like an aspect of the design, then you are less likely to challenge their mind in front of the other people. The conversation is often set to collect the feedback, not to make a decision. But how to go about it?

Every piece of feedback is specific. Now, not every feedback is qualitative, but if it is quantitative, we cannot measure whether we have 20 yes's or 30 no's, but we can understand whether the agreement has the genuine possibility of going forward. I mean by that that sometimes formal feedback is a likelihood of agreement. Have you ever heard "yes, I like it", or "yes, it's pretty", or "it's somehow different"?

Collecting the feedback is not entirely on the person who voices the question; the higher responsibility falls on the person who asks the question. Without being inquisitive, we need to set the environment for collecting feedback that is safe. More importantly, the questions that we asked are very firm and offer a questionnaire. The Ability to construct a picture of whether the proposition is going in the right direction or not.

So prequalifying feedback is to align the parties to get a yes. An organisation getting feedback from more people means a high level of risk. Bringing all parties in one call and agreeing on a single homepage or the button, you're facing the risk that you will never get us, and your decision will most likely look like a Frankenstein rather than the actual Solution to the problem.

Instead of dividing the entire team into small clusters for business content development, you allow someone to focus on a very specific artefact of the decision-making and get qualitative and quantitative feedback from your peers in order to reach an informed consensus. This way, when everybody arrives at the Friday call where the final decision needs to be made, all parties have already made the decision, just waiting for the final verdict from the key stakeholders.

This way you will most likely shorten the cycles of the decision-making, make all parties heard and not expose them within the internal politics. More importantly, you will be seen as a decision-maker who connects the decisions with the actions while equally empowering all parties to be seen as equal contributors.

Last but not least, the quality of the decisions will be much higher if they are brought to the light in these circumstances. Not because they have been discussed in silos, but because the appropriate parties and specialities have equal weight.
Documenting design decisions that are reached in the most democratic way strengthens the team and allows all parties to be seen as equal contributors, whereby the expertise plays the role over the title or the loudness of the voice in the room.
The opinions matter, but none of them are definitive. In the majority of the cases, the feedback is qualitative and quantitative.

For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.