You can't handle the truth

Having been involved in the startup space for more than a decade, I'm often confused with the responses I get to the feedback I deliver.

The dance often goes like this "Can I get feedback on X?". Where X can come in many forms... from a one minute pitch or investment deck to a grant or competition application. It could even just be a simple question about a marketing message or branding. When I get asked this, my brain immediately goes into hold my coat mode.

You want feedback? Sure thing, one pile of detailed and direct feedback coming right up. But when I deliver said feedback, I am sometimes met with a degree of shock. Or, what is more often the case, the person getting the feedback is shocked/annoyed/angry and I don't even notice.

A few years ago I saw an entrepreneur ahead of me in the street who I'd mentored in the past. He looked like he was going to pretend he hadn't saw me and try and cross the road. But we'd locked eyes. We both knew what he was contemplating and we both knew it was too late. Just 30 seconds into our interaction he said something like: "you know for two years I've thought you were a prick. It's only the past month I've realised the feedback you gave me was from a place of wanting to help". I'd spent years thinking he was delighted with what I'd told him.

I've wanted to write about the topic of feedback since I launched this website, but I've also been conscious of trying not to become a walking stereotype. The last thing I want to do is become the website version of The Rain Man. A lot of people have written about Autism and truthfulness like they're intertwined, that we can't lie, that we're always truthful. That we are walking human truth bombs.

I'm not writing this from a place of scientific evidence, but from my own personal experience as an Autistic adult and specifically in the startup scene, where I'm reasonably well known for being vocal in my opinions. So, from my opinion, this is absolute nonsense. For me, my directness (or as some people would put it, my honesty) when it comes to feedback simply comes from a place of literalness, just like this piece I wrote a while back.

When someone asks me for feedback it normally has the prefix "honest" hanging in the background. Now, firstly, as someone who deals in literalness it has always confused the hell out of me. Is there a dishonest feedback? And if there is why hasn't someone told me about it and is there a course I can take or a book I can read to find out more?

The closest I've found is the 'feedback sandwich'. Or depending on how you talk you might know it better as the praise-criticism-praise model or if you lurk on Urban Dictionary corner, just the plain old shit sandwich. First popularised in the '80s by Mary Kay Ash and many others, it's really been positioned as something designed to deliver negative feedback wrapped up with a nice bow.

No one really likes to hear criticism (RSD anyone?) so I understand that there's some degree of logic to dressing up criticism with praise. But in the startup scene where people's livelihoods are on the line... where their time is often the only currency they have, I think it's important to get straight to the point.

I believe it's vital to give honest feedback. Because, to me, doing anything other than providing direct, honest feedback, in my literal way of thinking, is doing a disservice to the person asking for it in the first place. On the flip side, I've realised over the years that many people take it as a personal attack on them or as me being abrasive or rude, when in my head it's a sign of my deep desire to help.

For a long time, before I started understanding this part of my life, it confused the hell out of me. Why would someone ask if they already know what they want you to say? It feels like when many people ask for feedback, what they're actually asking for is the bread but not the filling. What kind of maniac just wants a bread sandwich?

If you ask me it's a confusing world. You want the real truth? That suggests there's a fake truth? As the old quote (that no one seems to agree on its origin) says: "The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable".

So if you're ever asking me for feedback, instead of asking for honest feedback, maybe ask for feedback with a side of positivity. I can do that... it might still make you miserable though.