• This week kicked off with the creative presentation on the single malt Scotch whisky project I’ve been working on for the past few months. It went very well. It was, as ever, extremely gratifying to see the creative realisation of something that until that point has only been an idea, and equally gratifying to see it positively received by the client.

    Now: an impatient wait until 2026, when it eventually launches. But patience is a pretty crucial part of the whisky-making process, so it seems only reasonable that it’s also a part of the whisky-branding process.

  • I finished the first batch of work on the travel startup project, and everyone seems very happy. I think we got to some great insights about how people think about booking holidays, how to carry that through to a modern travel app that does something novel and useful, and how to monetise it.

  • So, a nice week of tying up loose ends and things coming to a close, which is always satisfying.

  • But things are starting, too. Work kicked off properly on the liqueur brand I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. It’s a fun one, a fairly neat and self-contained project but with lots to get stuck into – and a great project.

  • An experience this week (very much unrelated to the projects above!) made me think about directness of feedback and straightforwardness of interactions, especially when something about the work is wrong.

    I think people often conflate two similar but very different behaviours: directness and friendliness. Because offering clear negative feedback – i.e. being direct – often feels confrontational, and can often be met with defensiveness, it feels like to be direct is always to be unfriendly. But it’s not the case at all.

    In fact, I think it’s possible to be all four combinations of friendly/unfriendly and direct/indirect, and I’ve worked with people who occupy each of the four quadrants that this implies:

feedback-square DIRECT FRIENDLY UNFRIENDLY INDIRECT “Going Dutch” To the point; tear apart the work but then go for a pint afterwards. “The Brilliant Arsehole” Tear apart the work and the people who made it. “It's crap and so are you.” “The pass-agg” Avoid clear criticism of the work, but treat the people who did it with coldness and hostility. “Frightfully British” Dance around the issue; avoid criticism, but maintain friendly relations.

I think of the “friendly–direct” combo as being very Dutch, because every Dutch person I’ve ever worked with has been that way. They’re very happy to tell you exactly what’s wrong, but with a smile and a slap on the back afterwards. This, for me, is always the aspiration.

The upper-right, “friendly–indirect” quadrant is the centre of gravity of British culture, I think, especially in the creative industries. It’s one that I personally have to work hard to escape from. We allude to problems without stating them clearly; we euphemise; we’re generally a high-context culture. But we’re also polite and friendly and rub along well with one another.

The bottom-left, “unfriendly–direct” quadrant is a common one, the preserve of many a domineering egotist (and sadly there are lots of them about, and they’re overrepresented in positions of power). It’s unpleasant, but at least you get feedback.

The most pernicious is the bottom-right, “unfriendly-indirect” area, which I’ve found blessedly rare but sadly not nonexistent. Here, feedback is uselessly indirect, but comes delivered with coldness or passive aggression. It occurs when people think they’re being direct, but don’t have clear feedback; their attempted directness just manifests as unfriendliness. It’s to be avoided at all costs, in the people you deal with but most importantly in yourself.

Perhaps it warrants an adaption of a common phrase: “if you haven’t got anything clear to say, don’t say anything unkind.”