Topic: criticism

From BigThink: All orga­ni­za­tions make mistakes. The econ­omist Tim Harford argues that orga­ni­za­tions need to create a culture where these mistakes are revealed, exposed and corrected as soon as possible.

At Pixar, there’s this colle­giate envi­ronment, but people are able to disagree with each other and crit­icize each other’s work because they’ve developed a language. They call it “plus-ing.” So rather than spending all this time to say, “Hey, I really love what you’re doing, it’s really great work, blah blah blah” before you finally get to the crit­icism – which people have long since ignored because you’re wrapping it in all this fluff – instead you get straight to the crit­icism but you express it very posi­tively. You just say, “Well, that’s great, and wouldn’t it be even better if we did X? Wouldn’t it be even better if we did Y?” In a very positive way, very honest and direct, “Wouldn’t we improve if we did it this way?” Rather than getting fussed about whether the work as it exists is good or bad. It doesn’t really matter whether the work as it exists is good or bad. Can it be made better? · Go to Creating a culture of dissent →