The most expensive round of revisions is the one before you started

The fourth round of revisions almost never brings new feedback. It brings the same feedback, phrased differently. Someone asks for something more modern. Someone else wants it to feel warmer. A third person asks, with the best of intentions, whether it could be tried in blue. Nobody in the room is trying to be difficult. Each comment is reasonable on its own, but together they point nowhere. The design doesn’t have a problem. What it has is a decision that has been waiting for weeks for someone to make it.

What the feedback is saying

Feedback on a design is rarely about design. It sounds like personal taste, but it almost always hides a question nobody answered at the start.

“Make it more modern” usually means nobody decided who the piece is speaking to. Modern for a seventy-year-old client and modern for a college student are almost opposite things. “It’s missing something” usually means nobody decided what it had to accomplish. It’s hard to know whether something is finished when you don’t know what it’s for. And the blue, almost always, is someone trying to contribute something concrete to a conversation that has nothing to stand on.

What arrives as feedback is really a pending decision. And a pending decision isn’t resolved by a new version of the design. It just gets pushed to the next round.

Several people, several projects

The first level of the problem is easy to see: the organization started without quite knowing what it wanted. But it rarely stops there.

In almost any organization, several people have authority over a project, and each of them has a legitimate idea of what it should be. The problem is that they’ve probably never discussed with one another what they’re looking for before the project starts.

So the disagreement doesn’t surface in a strategy meeting, which is where it should be resolved. It surfaces in the feedback on the design, where each person reacts according to the project they had in their head. And the design becomes the place where the organization argues with itself. That’s an expensive place to do it, because every turn of that argument costs a new version.

Add to this a figure who shows up in almost every project: the person who wasn’t there at the beginning. The board chair, the partner, the director who sees the work for the first time when it’s nearly finished. Their opinion carries more weight than anyone’s, and it arrives when it’s hardest to incorporate. Deciding who decides is also a decision, and it’s usually the one that gets forgotten.

When the strategy isn’t a strategy

Then there’s a third level that’s harder to see. Sometimes the organization does start with a clear direction, agreed on and written down. And it still changes three times before the end.

It changes because a new board member arrives with different priorities. Because a budget gets cut. Because a competitor launches something and suddenly it seems urgent to respond. Because an important donor made a passing comment at a dinner. Each of those events is real, and each change seems reasonable at the time.

But a direction that changes every time circumstances change was never a strategy. It was a well-written preference. A real strategy is designed to withstand exactly those circumstances, because it rests on something that doesn’t depend on them: why the project exists and what it has to accomplish.

The useful distinction is between a new fact and a new opinion. A budget cut is a fact, and it can justify changing the plan. Someone influential preferring something else is an opinion, and it almost never does, even when it arrives with more force.

We’ve seen what happens next many times.

Every round sands something down. The boldest idea gets softened because someone wasn’t sure. The core message gets broadened so nobody feels left out. The tone is adjusted for one audience, then another, then both at once. No single change is a mistake on its own. But added together, they wear the project down until all that’s left is what nobody objected to.

The result can be beautiful, well resolved, well finished, with good typography and good photos. But it doesn’t say anything. Not because the design team didn’t know how, but because what it needed to say got lost along the way, one comment at a time. What survives a process like that isn’t the best idea; it’s the least objectionable one.

And the goal that started it all, raising more money, attracting a different kind of client, finally explaining what the organization does, goes unmet. Nobody notices at delivery, because the project looks finished. It shows six months later, when nothing has changed.

Revising isn’t renegotiating

None of this means revisions are a bad sign. A good project gets revised, and it gets better through revision.

The difference is in what gets revised. When the important decisions have been made, feedback becomes more precise and more useful: whether this image conveys what was agreed, whether this headline is understood on first read, whether this color works in print. That’s refining. When they haven’t been made, every round reopens the question of what the project is. That isn’t revising, it’s renegotiating, and every renegotiation starts a little further from the goal.

What’s worth being clear on

None of this is solved by a perfect form at the start. But a few things change the course of a project if they’re clear before it begins.

• The first is what it’s for, stated in one sentence and in terms of what has to happen in the world, not how it has to look.

• The second is who has the final word. There can be many voices, but there should be a single decision, and that person should be involved from day one, not from the third round.

• The third is that the people who will carry weight have agreed among themselves beforehand, at least on the essentials, so the disagreement doesn’t have to be resolved on top of the design.

• And the last is knowing ahead of time what would have to happen to change course, so that when a new circumstance arrives, you can tell the difference between a reason and pressure.

Part of our work is raising those questions, even when nobody asked for them. Design isn’t where a project’s decisions get made. It’s where you can tell whether they were.