Thanks for the explanation. I don't think there is anything dramatical if someone says that idea is bad, expect if there are no arguments provided. But in anyway. this doesn't mean that you should fall into deep well of depression, go for the vodka and end your day in some dark empty room with heavy rain outside.
Most of us tries to explain why idea is goor or bad (however, "I like this" rarely follows with "because") and that's a whole point of discussion: take a wide look on idea from positive and negative sides, locate it flaws and good points, find a balance in trade-offs and come to the solution that turns all negative effects to zero or makes them non relevant. Speaking about our example, there is no issue at all: idea was proposed, critique provided, people found idea good and respond on critique with the facts. Quite healthy discussion. I also find people who would like to give up with the first negative feedback on their ideas as not the best base for community as it's too easy to ruin it while they cannot defend own visions and position. But we don't have such (: What really hurts conversations is false-positive feedback, when you have to lie people and lie to yourself about foreign ideas. That's really bad since we should be honest in our words and thoughts. I feel that this problem is sort of trade-off and it's not possible to satisfy both groups. So any strong agreement cannot be reached here. But what indeed we need is keep our conversations healthy: avoid to be toxic, avoid to say things that people want to hear, but you think in other way, provide a balanced vision on ideas and the work. I think we have all of these now and there is nothing to worry about, right? P.S. You know, there are two kind of life experience: negative and useless. No need to afraid any critique, especially if it comes with a reason. -- ,,,^..^,,, On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 14 Sep 2015, at 12:08, Alexander Shorin <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Hi Jan >> >> On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote: >>> We agreed on a “Yes and…”-style of feedback, and it looks like that we >>> are defaulting to a “But…”-style feedback. >> >> Could you explain what are "Yes and..." and "But..." feedback styles >> and how they are different? > > Sure, I had hoped that just mentioning this recalls our previous discussions. > Here’s an example (sorry Michelle for picking on your example here, but it > was freshest in my mind. In general, I don’t mean to re-play this as it > happened on dev@, and I don’t want to single out anyone in particular, so I > changed things a little): > > > “But…”-style: > > “Hey, let’s create a design@ mailing list for designers.” > > “That’s a bad idea, we already have www@ and nobody uses that.” > > “…” > > <after a few of these, the person with the original suggestion leaves the > project> > > > > “Yes, and…”-style: > > “Hey, let’s create a design@ mailing list for designers.” > > “That’s an interesting idea: safe spaces are important! We still have the > somewhat dormant (which is a different discussion) www@ mailing list for > website stuff, have you considered repurposing this?” > > “Ah, good call, maybe that works, but I feel www@ isn’t as inviting a name as > design@ is.” > > “I can understand that. If we go down that path, what would be even more > inviting than a design@ mailing list? I can imagine that our mailing list > system is not very approachable for designers to begin with, maybe we should > look at a Discourse instance or a Slack channel?“ > > <fruitful conversation continues> > > * * * > > If your read this and thing “golly, ‘But…’-style is a lot more efficient, we > don’t have a lot of people contributing in the first place, so cutting these > discussions short is brilliant”, just know that our #1 purpose as a project > must be to attract more contributors. Having more contributors is the #1 > thing that makes sure CouchDB is a long-term success. It makes sure that > individuals don’t burn out, it helps with more diverse ideas making the > project better, it helps get us more stuff done overall. Long-term, it > doesn’t matter if 2.0 is delayed by a couple of more weeks, but it does > matter if the people who help shipping 2.0 leave the project right after, > because it was such a burden to do that they lost interest or simply burned > out. > > * * * > > Best > Jan > -- > > > >> >> -- >> ,,,^..^,,, > > -- > Professional Support for Apache CouchDB: > http://www.neighbourhood.ie/couchdb-support/ >
