Endorse or improve

When you work in a collaborative team, you often seek feedback from others on your ideas and proposals. I’m sure many of you are familiar with this process. If you have ever written a short document that you circulated among peers or given a presentation to your team about an idea you had, you know what I’m talking about.

One of the most frustrating things that can happen in this situation is when some of the people giving you feedback make a comment along the lines of: “Something something, I don’t think this is going to work because of something something”.

Needless to say, this type of comment is not very useful. A comment like this unveils a problem with the proposal but doesn’t really help move it forward. You are now stuck. The feedback givers have turned into gatekeepers.

One useful principle I found to avoid this type of situation is the endorse or improve principle.

Let’s rewrite the comment above according to the endorse or improve principle.

“I don’t think this is going to work because of problem A. If you do X instead you will avoid problem A and still achieve your goal.”

See the difference? The comment calls out a problem but it also proposes a solution to it. The comment improves the proposal.

If people can’t think of ways to improve the proposal, then the only choice left is to endorse it.

The reason I like this principle is that it essentially completely removes the gatekeeping option from the table. The principle doesn’t allow people to block work without showing a new way forward. This is especially important when more experienced members of a team are often asked to review the work of less experienced members.

The other reason I like this principle is that it shifts the responsibility of finding and solving issues to the whole team. This results in the whole team having a steak in the proposal and the solution. When people have skin in the game they give a sh*t. When people give a sh*t they produce good work.

Give this principle a try and let me know how it goes!

Have a great weekend!

-Ale

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