I found some of this surprising. I’ve heard staff and leadership of a few orgs in the community (especially newer ones) say things like, “maybe this project will fail because I’m incompetent,” or rattle off a list of ways their org could be doing much better. I’ve also seen a group of people present substantial criticism to at least one org and receive responses that were at least respectful (and in that case were followed by substantial reforms). Some public, substantive criticism (e.g. [1], [2]) has also seemed to be well received by the community. So I’m having trouble seeing where this is coming from. Maybe we’ve seen different parts of the picture, and there’s more of a culture of fear in parts of the community that I haven’t seen?
(The examples I have in mind are mostly of people being receptive to criticism that is privately expressed, is focused on tactics/strategy, and/or doesn’t single out specific people/orgs. I expect people tend to be significantly more defensive in response to criticism that is public and personal, organization-specific, or values-focused. It’s not clear to me that defensiveness toward just the latter is (very) harmful though—such criticism can be more destructive and harder to get right, so maybe it’s good for it to need to meet a higher bar.)
If people are worried about retaliation, I also don’t immediately see why anonymous criticism isn’t a good alternative.
Well, you might be able to get away with that, but it would be hard.
Lastly, I think it might be helpful to disambiguate this. “It would be hard” could mean anything from “people aren’t very likely to change organization policies in response to criticism” to “people are likely to retaliate by withholding professional opportunities,” and the latter could be a much worse state of affairs.
Thanks for this!
I found some of this surprising. I’ve heard staff and leadership of a few orgs in the community (especially newer ones) say things like, “maybe this project will fail because I’m incompetent,” or rattle off a list of ways their org could be doing much better. I’ve also seen a group of people present substantial criticism to at least one org and receive responses that were at least respectful (and in that case were followed by substantial reforms). Some public, substantive criticism (e.g. [1], [2]) has also seemed to be well received by the community. So I’m having trouble seeing where this is coming from. Maybe we’ve seen different parts of the picture, and there’s more of a culture of fear in parts of the community that I haven’t seen?
(The examples I have in mind are mostly of people being receptive to criticism that is privately expressed, is focused on tactics/strategy, and/or doesn’t single out specific people/orgs. I expect people tend to be significantly more defensive in response to criticism that is public and personal, organization-specific, or values-focused. It’s not clear to me that defensiveness toward just the latter is (very) harmful though—such criticism can be more destructive and harder to get right, so maybe it’s good for it to need to meet a higher bar.)
If people are worried about retaliation, I also don’t immediately see why anonymous criticism isn’t a good alternative.
Lastly, I think it might be helpful to disambiguate this. “It would be hard” could mean anything from “people aren’t very likely to change organization policies in response to criticism” to “people are likely to retaliate by withholding professional opportunities,” and the latter could be a much worse state of affairs.