Design Ops Handbook/Chapter 05 of 06
Rituals, Critique & Reviews
Most design orgs have too many meetings and not enough feedback. That is not a contradiction. It happens because three different things all get called critique, and running them as one makes all three worse.
Section 01
Three Things, Not One
Crit improves the work. Review makes a decision. Demo shares what happened. They have different attendees, different outputs and different rules about who gets to say no. Run them together and you get a meeting where nobody is sure whether they just gave advice or approval.
Section 02
The Weekly Rhythm
Everything above lands somewhere on a calendar. Publish the calendar once and stop negotiating it. The total design meeting load below is under six hours a week, which is the actual constraint.
Section 03
How To Run a Critique
Thirty minutes, one piece of work, five boxes. The two that get skipped are the silent read at the start and the restate at the end, and those are the two that make the difference between feedback and feedback theatre.
Section 04
Decision Rights
Every decision has exactly one decider. Write the list down and publish it. Most of the pain people attribute to bad feedback is actually an unwritten decision rights table being discovered in public.
Section 05
Four Ways This Goes Wrong
Each of these is common, each is fixable with a rule rather than a conversation, and each one quietly teaches designers that showing work is not worth the trouble.
Section 06
Ritual Health
Two of these measure load and two measure whether the rituals are doing their job. The reopened-decision number is the one that tells you the decision rights table is not being honoured.
