More times than I can count I've watched fellow designers and product team members lose a room (include remote ones) before they even make it through the introduction of their presentation. The work is often good, there's deep thinking behind it and it's important information being shared. What the room heard first though was something along these lines: "this is our first ___" or "this is still pretty rough..." along with the "we didn't get as much time on this as we wanted," and by the time the first frame comes up the room was already setup to look at the "roughness" and or shortcomings.

They will always find it, because you can find roughness in anything if someone sets you up and asks you to find it.

I recognized the move because I've done it myself often. Somewhere in my twenties I learned to walk into a room and lower that ceiling on my own work before anything else could, and it took a while to notice that the ceiling stays lowered even if I tried to lift it back up in a scramble.

An apology at the top of a presentation is not humility, it's planting the seed or setting instructions for that room. It's not establishing trust in you or your work, it's establishing that perhaps you shouldn't be trusted. I say all of this acknowledging that this reflex has a respectable origin, you want to be honest and set the stage for what's to come ... but sometimes the intentions can be more harmful than useful.

For some of us, Design education runs on critique. If you were once an art student like me you remember those critique sessions on your life drawings, screen prints, paintings, potter, etc. You pin the work up, the room takes it apart, and the fastest way to survive that is to name the flaws before anyone else does. Getting there first reads as self-awareness. It also takes the sting out, because a flaw you announced is a flaw you already knew about, and a flaw you already knew about is not really a failure in your mind. Every designer I know who came up through a studio or a program similar learned this also, and most of us learned it well enough that it stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like honesty.

The problem is that the room changed and the habit came along with us. A critique exists to improve the work, so volunteering its weaknesses is useful there. A client review or an executive readout exists to make a decision, and the people in it are not looking for the work's weaknesses so much as looking for a reason to trust the person presenting it. When you open by discounting yourself, you have handed them the one thing they were not sure how to ask for.

Power makes this all worse. The more senior the audience, the stronger the pull to pre-empt whatever they might say, and the less they need your help doing it. I have never seen an executive respond to "I know this isn't perfect" with reassurance. hIave seen a great many respond with a list of issues they quickly find.

This is the part I got wrong until I had a Partner at the firm (at the time an SM) sit me down after a presentation. He told me I was brought into that room to be the expert and I should never apologize or set myself up to apologize for my work, now at the time I was a junior designer so this idea frankly scared me, but I took it to heart from that point forward. Not apologizing is not the same as pretending the work is finished, and it's not the same as hiding what you are unsure about. It is a question of what job the honesty is actually doing. Naming a real constraint is framing the situation, and there are plenty of valid and meaningful moments to do that. "We designed against the current data model, and if that changes this direction might change with it." tells the room something they need to know to make a good decision. Naming an open question is rigor. "We have two ways to handle the empty state and we want your read on which fits the roadmap, we suggest this one..." invites exactly the kind of engagement that gets work adopted while still positioning you as that expert. Both of those are honest, and neither one asks the room to think less of what is in front of them. In Vol. 22 I wrote about the way an audience reads confidence as information, and this is the same mechanism running backward when you pre-empt the room to find the issues. If the person who knows the work best seems unsure whether it deserves attention, the audience has no reason to be more generous than the author has been.

What I do now is mostly a matter of sequence, which is a smaller change than it sounds and a harder one than I expected.

I open with what the work is for. Not the process, not the timeline, not any of the caveats ... but the decisions the room is being asked to make and the problem the work is trying to solve. That takes no time and it puts the audience in the position of evaluating something rather than evaluating me. I name decisions as decisions and lead with my best foot. "We chose to put the filters on the left" is a sentence that can be disagreed with, and that's is fine, because a disagreement is a form of feedback and engagement to take in. "We kinda ended up with the filters on the left for now" is a sentence that can be torn apart. I put the open question at the end, where they read as the natural edge of a thought piece of work. Same topic, different approach, new uncertainty and now a completely different vibe in the room. And when the work really is rough, because let's be honest sometimes it needs to be, I try to say what it is rough around and why that doesn't matter to today's decision. "The visual polish isn't there yet and that's ok, it doesn't need to be, we want to focus on the flow" is not an apology, it's just the scope and phase the project is in.

I'd love to say the reflex is gone, but it's not and it won't be ... this is human nature. Every so often I'll catch myself "positioning" my work with those "apologies." I tend to catch it mid-sentence or shortly after and try to course correct but often that seed is already planted. I'm faster at navigating it than I used to be and better about prepping before it can even happen to follow that sequence. It's all about self improvement and setting yourself up for success against work you know can be successful and that's why this is something worth working on.