Can you clarify what your assumptions are about the criticized orgs? What would an org have to do before it became a bad idea to follow these steps?
It seems like these steps rest on an assumption of the org both wanting to be cooperative and having the skill to do it well. And not, e.g. explicitly promising confidentiality and then forwarding it to the exact person the author didn’t want to see it. I believe that was an honest, human mistake, but that’s exactly the problem: orgs are human- er, made up of humans- who have full plates and stuff gets missed. If organizations want the favor of previewing criticism, they need to take reasonable steps to make that easy and productive for critics.
One particular way to do this would be to talk with people earlier in the process. The discussion I’ve seen around previewing criticism implicitly assumes there’s a full polished blog post, ready to go except for the criticized org’s response. That’s a very annoying time to find entirely new facts, and imposes a very high tax on criticism. It also makes it easy for a defensive or merely human org to create a bunch more work for the critic without adding value.
If orgs made themselves available earlier in the process, to discuss concerns before someone invested tens of hours doing their own research and carefully writing it up, I would feel much better about strong norms of checking in with them ahead of time. Alas this probably necessitates spending a bunch of time with potential critics whose criticisms are stupid or who were never going to write them, which is pretty costly. But so is spending 30 hours writing a delicate, polished piece of criticism only to have the org create a bunch of work for you.
Can you clarify what your assumptions are about the criticized orgs? What would an org have to do before it became a bad idea to follow these steps?
It seems like these steps rest on an assumption of the org both wanting to be cooperative and having the skill to do it well. And not, e.g. explicitly promising confidentiality and then forwarding it to the exact person the author didn’t want to see it. I believe that was an honest, human mistake, but that’s exactly the problem: orgs are human- er, made up of humans- who have full plates and stuff gets missed. If organizations want the favor of previewing criticism, they need to take reasonable steps to make that easy and productive for critics.
One particular way to do this would be to talk with people earlier in the process. The discussion I’ve seen around previewing criticism implicitly assumes there’s a full polished blog post, ready to go except for the criticized org’s response. That’s a very annoying time to find entirely new facts, and imposes a very high tax on criticism. It also makes it easy for a defensive or merely human org to create a bunch more work for the critic without adding value.
If orgs made themselves available earlier in the process, to discuss concerns before someone invested tens of hours doing their own research and carefully writing it up, I would feel much better about strong norms of checking in with them ahead of time. Alas this probably necessitates spending a bunch of time with potential critics whose criticisms are stupid or who were never going to write them, which is pretty costly. But so is spending 30 hours writing a delicate, polished piece of criticism only to have the org create a bunch of work for you.