Feedback Thoughts: Why Simon Cowell Is the Perfect Client

As vague and terrible as feedback can be on creative work, it's also vitally important for anyone who wants to get better at any creative or artistic skill.  It's also surprising how many people who know this are terrible at giving effective feedback.

The ad agency I work for has this notoriously high-maintenance client who I helped write social media copy for. The client gave feedback both on individual Twitter/Facebook posts and on the weekly work we had done as a whole. The workload was fairly heavy, but also unnecessarily frustrating due to the vague and unhelpful nature of the client's feedback. It was always, "more storytelling." Well, alright--challenging, considering the content we produced was constrained by literal character limits, but we took it seriously. I focused on finding stories and blog posts with themes similar to the client's branding, and wrote copy focusing on those common themes. What feedback did we receive the next week? "More storytelling." And the next week, and the next. I had no idea if they liked my work, or if the problem was more with the other writers and designers. It didn't help that it never came up during the approval process for individual posts, which only yielded comments like "let's shorten this," or "love this!" Whenever I wrote for this client, it was with a sense of dread, never knowing whether it was what they wanted. By the time the semester ended and I went on to different projects, it was a relief.


Maybe it's because of this experience that Grant Wiggins' piece on the 7 Key Characteristics of Better Learning Feedback was most informative for me. To summarize, helpful feedback is:

Pictured: dream client.

1. Goal-referenced: feedback exists for the sake of a goal. Ergo, if feedback doesn't take an ultimate goal into account--the "why?"--it's not effective feedback.
2. Transparent: feedback should involve concrete results related to the goal, like the hit or miss of a bat is obvious to a baseball batter.
3. Actionable: actionable in that the feedback is factual--not praise, blame, or value judgment
4. User-friendly: feedback should be understandable by the user, not overwhelming, highly technical, or generic.
5. Timely: the sooner, the better, though immediate feedback might not always be best--you wouldn't want your piano teacher critiquing you during a recital.
6. Ongoing: the more timely feedback there is, the better the end result will be in ongoing performances or other situations
7. Consistent: this one is big, especially in academic settings and those with more than one teacher or mentor. If feedback isn't consistent, it's hard to judge its accuracy or trustworthiness.

In my opinion, creative work can be very difficult to judge. In grade school, we were judged on effort, but post-college, no client would want to hire an advertising agency that tries hard but whose results aren't effective. This is why the above criteria are so appealing to me--they can be applied to creative feedback as well as other kinds.

Other helpful articles:
Silence the Critical Voices in Your Head, for how to receive feedback effectively--focusing on both the positive and the negative.
Using Harsh Feedback to Fuel Your Career, for how to train yourself to react to criticism effectively, and understand why we react the way we do.
The Difference Between Praise That Promotes Narcissism vs. Healthy Self-Esteem, for how to give feedback that promotes self-esteem, instead of inflating someone's ego.

Image: Simon Cowell. Web source.