In short: Imagine a person with four ropes, one on each leg and arm attached each to one horse. Every horse is pushing in another direction. What can you do?

  1. Get killed by being pulled in all directions

  2. Cut three ropes and go in one direction and piss everyone else

  3. Cut all four ropes and build a new one that makes everyone go in one direction.

The cowboy film metaphor

When service creators, service design practitioners struggle with feedback that goes in many different directions I often use an image I stole from old cowboy movies. In such a moment it feels as if you are the person lying on the floor with ropes attached to each of your hands and feet, and four different people on four horses go in four different directions.

I feel this image is really strong as it shows the pain of the situation we are in and it helps show what are the different things we can do.

An illustration showing how competing feedback can feel - like being pulled in every direction

Follow every direction or letting each rope kill us

If you follow every direction at the same time, your arms and legs will all end up in another place while your body will stay in the middle. Not really the end result we wish for ourselves.

An illustration showing what happens when you follow every feedback - your project gets destroyed

Going in one direction or cut all ropes but one

If you cut three ropes and let one of the horses bring you in it's direction, you don't die right know. But the guys on the other horses might run after you to beat you up once you arrive at the destination.

So that can work, you get one stakeholder happy and all other pissed.

An illustration showing what happens when you follow only one feedback direction - the others will hunt you back later

Synthesizing or putting all the ropes to create one strong one

If you cut all four ropes, you can tie them together to create a longer one that then all four horses can take into one direction.

Here the magic, is to take out the parts of each rope that aren't valuable and keep only the best parts of each rope.

An illustration showing how good feedback synthesis feels - like everyone pulling in the same direction together

What this means

Okay, enough Western movies, let's say that without metahpors.

If you follow every feedback you'll be overwhelmed, and in the end nobody will be happy with the result. Instead our work is to help people come together to see which parts of each feedback we'll keep, and how we'll bring it all together to go in one direction together.