The question was terrific. The process, horrific.

What was supposed to unite our country has left it even more divided. The flag referendum process got not one, but at least 12 major aspects wrong in its execution. Even the Warriors don't make that many mistakes!

First of all though let's give credit where credit is due. The flag change debate has been a topical issue for many New Zealanders for many years and John Key and the National Party were brave enough to put the question to the people, despite such an issue always being political suicide.

HAGEN HOPKINS/GETTY IMAGES WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND - OCTOBER 12: Silver Fern (Black, White and Blue), by Kyle Lockwood, flies on top of the Wellington Town Hall on October 12, 2015 in Wellington, New Zealand. The Flag Consideration Panel has narrowed down to the five flags which will then go to referendum later this year. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

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* Hugh Jackman: Time to ditch the flag

* Flag voting papers stolen



Before we get into the 12 things the flag process got wrong, let's eliminate the irrelevant:

* This is a flag vote, not a John Key vote

* $26 million is just 1 per cent of the $2.2 billion spent last year on "heritage, culture and recreation", and just 0.03 per cent of the Crown's annual expenditure.

With those sideshow arguments out of the way, let's focus on the 12 flaws in this process so that Government, business, and individuals can all learn from them for next time.

1. The no‐designer design panel

This is like asking your parents what tattoo to get.

2. No prize money

Even the smallest colouring‐in competitions offer prizes to increase participation. With a budget of $26 million, it was crazy that a small slice of this wasn't set aside to incentivise our very talented, but often underpaid, creative community to contribute.

The design panel was paid so why not the flag designers?

3. No social voting

It's 2016. YouTube, Facebook and every other half‐decent website have voting buttons for content. Yet we were never given the opportunity to engage with the designs by giving a thumbs‐up or thumbs‐down.

This is Marketing 101, and would have helped the cream rise to the top, e.g. a proper silver fern flag, and the duds sink to the bottom, e.g. the awful Koru design. It would also have helped the flag consideration panel create greater engagement and hear the voice of the nation more accurately.

Before any of you jump the gun to the comments section, this is not the official referendum vote I'm talking about. This is an informal and online pre‐voting system that would help the committee create a shortlist based on people's preferences.

Votes would be limited to one per IP address, and a proper "designer design panel" would then use their expert judgement to account for any obvious vote stacking or joke voting for Laser Kiwis.

Kyle Lockwood's design fell at the final flag referendum hurdle. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

4. Rushed process

When you rush a critical design process through pre‐meditated deadlines like this it can quickly become a tallest dwarf competition, and that's exactly what's happened here. We're left to choose between boring Thorin and the slightly less boring Gimli, which leaves most of us thinking "dwarves are boring, where are the elves?"

Good design takes as long as good design takes. You can't always force it within a set timeframe. Design concepts need a certain amount of socialisation and storytelling time before a clear consensus on the winner starts to emerge. This usually takes a lot longer than a few months too.

Every business knows that. Every Government should too. Instead, we were given a few months to get comfortable with a design for a lifetime.

5. No deadline extension

Design processes often don't go to plan. In those situations great leadership and flexibility is required to ensure the right result, not the right deadline, is met.

When it was obvious how poor this process was going, and that the 40 designs on the long list were not up to the awesomeness of our country, I wrote to many of the organisations involved and suggested they show the courage to extend the design deadline to achieve a better result and salvage the process while they still could. None replied.

There were plenty of designers who didn't enter a single design, but complained more than their fair share when the disappointing long list came out. That was completely their fault. They knew the rules and had the same opportunity the rest of us did.

However, extending the deadline another month or two would have not only given this design community no further right of complaint, but would have resulted in far richer design submissions to choose from.

6. Bias/favouritism

Twenty-five per cent of the 40 long list designs chosen (five each) were from designers Kyle Lockwood and Sven Baker.

We're lucky to have such passionate and talented Kiwis contributing their time for free but out of over 10,000 designs, to have so many come from so few does seem to strongly suggest either judging bias, or judging laziness.

Those 40 flag designs were also essentially just three ideas: ferns, korus and stars.

Many interesting and innovative ideas never got a look in. There was a dismal lack of variety chosen versus the creativity shown in many other Commonwealth countries' final designs ‐ especially Canada, Jamaica and South Africa, who now have iconic flags recognised as three of the best in the world.

All of the five process failures listed above would have helped prevent this narrow talent pool of options from occurring. Instead, we got an uninspiring list and a significant 10 per cent of voters sending in informal votes.

7. No design iteration

Anyone who has worked in any business environment knows that no creative agency ever nails a logo first up.

Every design presented goes through a process of creative tension, debate and many rounds of improvements. Elements are borrowed from different designs and melded together. Colours, lines and dimensions are changed.

This is a key part of any basic design process so why was it missing for this design process of national significance?

8. No fern on black background

The famous silver fern used by the All Blacks and Cameron Sanders' stylised fern.

Somehow the silver fern flag design we wave the most didn't make either list. Instead, we got a mediocre rounded-leaf version from Kyle Lockwood in the long list, and an ugly KISS‐version from Alofi Kanter which made the short list but got just 5 per cent of first preference votes and was quickly eliminated.

If you dig a bit deeper you'll find the NZ Rugby Union blocked the use of its fern design in the process but there were others that never surfaced, like Cameron Sanders' stylised version that somehow disappeared off the face of the debate.

9. Vote counting not explained

This one is a real shocker. The voting packs didn't contain any information on how votes would be counted! All we were told was to rank the alternate flags, 1 to 5.

It's critical every voter knows the implications of their votes, but only a few curious voters would have found the link explaining the choice to use preferential voting.

I contacted the Electoral Commission about this massive blunder before voting closed and warned them about a possible backlash if the design that got the most first votes didn't end up winning.

The response from their senior legal counsel: "Thank you for sharing your views, which have been noted." The end.

It did of course come back to bite them, with the flag getting the most first votes ending as the runner-up and plenty of people and papers asking how the most popular flag came second.

The method you use to calculate the favourite flag in a referendum can vary, but these kind of junior research/communication mistakes by not even telling us are inexcusable.

10. No randomisation of flag designs

In any research you always randomise options to avoid any bias, since many people are often drawn to the first or last items shown in any list. Not this research though as you can see in the image above.

The blue/black design was always shown first on all brochures and even the voting return forms. It was always given the best possible chance of being chosen.

11. Full referendum results not published

We were asked to rank the flags 1 to 5 but we were never given those full results. We were only given the first count vote tables, not the full table of results showing the 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s and blanks allocated to each flag design.

That might paint an entirely new picture on which designs were most liked and disliked.

The Koru got just 3.4 per cent of the 1's votes, so almost certainly got the majority of the 5's (hate) votes too. It should never have been picked and wasted a space that could have been taken up by a much better design. There were many!

12. Finally, the most important question hasn't even been asked!

We're spending $26 million and won't even find out what percentage support a change of flag, only the results from two this‐versus‐that votes.

Do 40 per cent support change? Is it 50 per cent? Is it 60 per cent? Who knows? Not us. Not anyone actually.

Imagine if the asset sales referendum asked us which asset to sell off first, but never asked us if we supported the idea in the first place. Mental, right? Yet this is exactly how the flag referendum has been done.

ANOTHER CHANCE

I'm just your average proud Kiwi who wants to see us be anything but an average nation.

We had an amazing opportunity and I believe we blew it big time. The process failed us. The people who designed the process failed us. As a voter, that's what annoys me the most, especially as most small businesses don't even get this stuff wrong.

Sometimes in life you have to have the courage to say you got the question right, but the process wrong. This is one of those times.

Don't hold your breath for any admissions from any of the organisations involved though. We'll have to wait for the next bold leader to raise the question again when the time is right - and get it right having learnt from the many mistakes made this time around.

Don't believe the propaganda that we won't get another chance for 50 years either. We're world leaders when it comes to seeing better ways and embracing change. When we want something to happen, we make it happen. This is New Zealand.