Stop Overfeeding the Feedback Machine*
Why excessive collaboration is quietly draining profit, morale, and brand clarity—and what leaders can do instead
For years, companies have tried to make creative work cheaper, faster, and more predictable. They’ve outsourced it, automated it, restructured it, centralized it, decentralized it, and rebranded the same teams under new org charts with new promises. And yet, one of the most effective levers for improving both profit and morale remains mostly untouched:
Stop overfeeding the feedback machine.
Not because creativity should be rushed.
Not because collaboration is bad.
But because much of what we call collaboration is indecision with a process badge.
The real issue isn’t feedback—it’s intention
Most organizations don’t treat feedback as optional. Creative work is adaptive. It evolves in motion. In many ways, it’s like building the plane while flying it. The unspoken assumption is that because discovery is part of the process, iteration should be unlimited. That the work will eventually find its way through enough rounds of review. But this is where things break down. Feedback only works when it’s moving the work toward something specific. When that “something” hasn’t been named, when the decision is still pending, feedback doesn’t clarify direction. It fills the vacuum.
This isn’t just too much feedback.
It’s feedback without intention.
When no one decides, feedback takes over
In well-functioning systems, feedback refines a decision that’s already been made. In less functional ones, feedback becomes a substitute for making the decision in the first place. The work isn’t being shaped toward a clear outcome. It’s being pulled toward something that hasn’t yet been articulated. And in the absence of a decision, feedback becomes a free-for-all. This is how teams end up chasing micro-adjustments.
Move this two pixels.
Can we soften that word?
What if this were slightly more playful?
Not because those things matter most, but because when strategic questions go unanswered, people reach for the smallest levers they can pull. Pixel-level feedback feels concrete. It feels productive. It creates motion without requiring commitment. But it’s motion in search of intention.
Every feedback cycle produces cost
This is where the impact becomes operational. Every feedback cycle has a real, measurable cost, not abstract “creative friction,” but actual, salary-backed hours. A single cycle often looks like this:
A creative director revisits the brief.
A project manager updates timelines and tasks.
Traffic rebalances the pipeline.
Copywriters take another pass.
Designers revise layouts or systems.
An editor reviews.
An art director reviews.
Files are re-exported, re-versioned, and re-shared.
Another meeting gets scheduled.
Then it happens again.
And again.
Each cycle may feel incremental. Responsible. Even careful. But taken together, they form a quiet multiplier effect. Hours stack. Context resets. Momentum erodes. The work doesn’t just take longer—it gets more expensive every time it goes around the loop. This is why perfection at the cost of momentum is expensive. Not philosophically. Operationally.
None of this shows up cleanly on a spreadsheet. But it shows up everywhere else: delayed launches, rising internal costs, exhausted teams, and brands that require enormous effort to say very little. When these costs are named, the response is often a resigned, That’s just the way it is. But “the way it is” is simply what happens when systems are allowed to run on inertia instead of intention.
This isn’t about catching obvious errors
Reducing feedback cycles does not mean eliminating review altogether.
Catching a typo matters.
Flagging work that’s clearly off brief matters.
Correcting factual errors, accessibility issues, or brand violations matters.
That’s not the problem. The problem is when feedback shifts from quality control to pixel policing, from clarity to preference, from direction to drift. Quality control has a clear finish line. Pixel policing does not.Once feedback loses its intention, no amount of iteration will ever feel sufficient, because the work isn’t converging on a decision. It’s orbiting unresolved uncertainty.
How creative teams become ambiguity sinks
When decisions aren’t made upstream, uncertainty flows downhill.
Unclear priorities.
Competing incentives.
Unresolved risk tolerance.
Vague definitions of success.
Rather than being resolved where they originate, these questions get worked out inside creative workflows. Each new version becomes a stand-in for a decision. Each round of feedback becomes another attempt to name what the organization hasn’t yet committed to. Over time, creative teams become organizational shock absorbers. They absorb ambiguity so the rest of the system doesn’t have to. Not because they volunteered, but because someone has to keep the work moving.
When everyone weighs in, no one decides
At the center of this dynamic is a structural failure organizations rarely confront directly:
When everyone is a stakeholder, no one is accountable.
Projects that require approval from dozens of people aren’t collaborative. They’re structurally unempowered. Without a clear decision owner, feedback proliferates. Opinions are offered without ownership. Concerns are raised without resolution. “Alignment” becomes a polite way of saying we haven’t decided yet. What looks like rigor is often just risk avoidance with better optics.
Why this feels unavoidable
This behavior didn’t appear out of nowhere.
Public rebrand failures.
Social media backlash.
Permanent digital scrutiny.
Screenshots that live forever.
In this environment, caution is understandable. Leaders want more eyes, more perspectives, more assurance that nothing will blow up on launch day. But caution has a failure mode.
When it turns into paralysis, risk doesn’t disappear, it gets displaced. And more often than not, it lands inside creative workflows, where feedback becomes the default response to unresolved fear.
Input is not authority
One distinction matters more than most organizations are willing to enforce:
Input is not authority
Consultation is not decision-making
Alignment is not consensus
Broad input can be valuable. But decisions must be narrow. Someone, or a small group, has to own the call. Without that boundary, feedback becomes infinite. There is always one more tweak, one more perspective, one more round “just to be safe.” The result isn’t better work. It’s safer, flatter work. Produced slowly, at great cost, and with diminishing returns.
This is a clarity problem
Creative teams don’t slow organizations down. Organizations slow themselves down inside creative workflows by deferring decisions and letting feedback absorb the consequences. The leaders who get this right don’t eliminate feedback. They anchor it. They make decisions early enough to give feedback a target. They create intention upstream so iteration can converge instead of spiral.
In a business world obsessed with efficiency, automation, and optimization, the most overlooked efficiency remains painfully simple: The cheapest thing a company can do is decide.
*This essay reflects patterns I’ve observed over time, across different organizations and roles, rather than any one engagement.