Your Process Isn't Sacred

When I started my Creative Writing degree, I was a bit of a perfectionist. I'd write, rewrite, tweak, fiddle, throw it all away, write it again, etc. until I would, finally, feel comfortable turning in a piece for class critique. I'd hand it over proudly, certain that I'd squashed every typo, found every kink in the wording, resolved (or purposefully unresolved) loose ends in the story.

Then the week of my critique would come around and, in a single hour, I'd hear about dozens of gaping holes in my story's internal logic, misspellings that I somehow hadn't caught and get asked questions I hadn't even considered before. Those critiques were some of the most painful I've ever endured. I'd simply waited far too long to have a friend give my story a proper read-through.

There's a natural instinct amongst creators to avoid sharing our work - be it a design, a new proposal, or a Gantt chart - until we feel it's in a "good place." I can't count the number of times I've been asked about something I'm working on, only to respond with, "It's not quite there yet, give me a couple more days." Once in awhile, that's actually true - my work isn't ready to share because I literally started designing/typing/charting five minutes ago and have very little to show. Most of the time, though, it's because my inner perfectionist wants to squirrel away my work until I'm 100% satisfied, to not share my wandering, imperfect process with anyone. It's the same feeling I get when we invite people to our apartment and we haven't cleaned recently. Things are messy and I'm a little embarrassed.

The problem is that, while making our apartments pristine for guests is probably a good habit, not including our peers in our processes is a surefire way to produce bad product work. Without constant eyes and minds on our features as they develop, it's all too easy to wind up with groupthink or, arguably worse, solothink. You wind up making a lot of assumptions that, hey guess what, mostly turn out to be incorrect, because you're too worried about your messy process being judged and your unfinished work being critiqued.

Worse, an opaque design and development process also sews distrust - whereas including others regularly during the messy parts of your process reinforces a sense of teamwork, isolating your process creates schisms. No one will know what you're cooking up, won't be able to help you make it better, and will, as a result, not trust the outcome. When we lack a cohesive story and context, we tend to make up our own.

What I finally realized years ago (thanks, Creative Writing class critiques) is that everyone's processes are messy. Sure, the artifacts of that messy process have varying levels of fidelity (for instance, there's a visual difference between a quick wireframe and jumping straight to code), but believe me, no one is on a beeline toward a solution. We're all wandering, using each other as reference points to help our own paths eventually straighten out and merge together. When one part of the product is off the grid for a period of time, every other product area suffers as a result. We can only do our best work when we have clarity and full vision, when we can see our peers' processes and borrow (or outright steal) the bits that are relevant to our own work.

Next time someone asks what you're working on, show them. No excuses, no caveats. Just, "Here's where I'm at, these are the problems I'm trying to solve, I'm kind of getting hung up on this one part at the moment. What do you think?" Accept the feedback and suggestions, mull them over, listen for repeat pieces of feedback, have spirited debates. Soon, that feedback loop will be even more sacred to you than your process ever was.