How to apologize

apology101.markdown

Chances are your head's spinning right now. That accusation of bias caught you off guard, you got kind of defensive, and now all hell has broken loose. You're feeling attacked on all sides. You're a good person at heart, and having all these people treat you like the antichrist is pretty upsetting.

You need to say something, but you're probably not in the best headspace to write copy right now. So to help you along, here's my 100% guaranteed-or-you-money-back scandal defusement apology template:

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What we [said|did] was offensive, and we are sorry.

Recently we [CONCISE ACCOUNT OF WHAT YOU DID]. Someone pointed out that this was offensive, and we made things worse by reacting badly instead of listening carefully.

What we did was offensive, and how we handled the feedback was wrong. We apologize to all the people we hurt.

We want to learn from this experience. We welcome your thoughts: please tell us how we can do better, and don't hold back.

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Here are a few of the things this template doesn't say:

• "Some people were offended"
• "We're sorry if you were offended"
• "May have been construed as offensive"
• "We made a good-natured joke that was misinterpreted"
• "All in good fun"
• "We had good intentions"
• "We apologize to anyone who was offended"
• "I know some people who weren't offended"
• "A lot of that was out of our control"
• "Our feelings were hurt by the reaction"
• "We're a great company, check out our products"

Now is not the time to tell your side of the story. Communication has shut down, and whose fault that is is completely irrelevant. The only thing you can control right now is what you say. It is in your power to defuse the situation, but to do that you must take full, complete responsibility. No provisos, no weaseling. This may seem difficult and unfair. But ask yourself: is defending yourself really more important to you right now than fixing the problem?

Good luck.

@avdi, I believe I replied to your observation in my reply to @catamorphism, but in case I wasn't clear enough I just want to reinforce this: I think your template is useful for someone who understands what they did wrong. If they didn't understand yet, and they put out an apology using your template, it means they're just being phony. In that case, no one won.

I basically agree on the matter of intent: it has no place in a sincere apology.

I do think that the closing argument of this essay is weakened by encouraging people to offer an abject apology when they don't agree with what they're apologizing about. This is trading an apology that is phony in letter, for one that is phony in spirit.

I believe that the right thing to do when you aren't ready to offer a sincere apology is not to offer a weasley one, or a fake one, but to try to open up the dialogue and figure out where people are talking past each other. In Geeklist's case, maybe this is on their blog, maybe it's through a Reddit or HN post. Maybe it's a Google Hangout! But it's not what we got, and I don't want them to tell me they regret something until they do.