Short definition

Rewriting contradictory feedback or sources until the contradiction disappears into a balanced phrasing.

Full definition

In everyday usage, to smooth means to make uniform, to soften the rough edges — of a surface, a curve, a speech.

In the articles on this blog, smoothing refers to a specific operation on a body of customer feedback: take what one trade says, take what another says, look for a phrasing that holds both. The result is a reasonable, consensual sentence — "simplify while making the data reliable" — that has lost the information the opposition carried.

Usage in the field

Used for summarizing customer feedback, preparing steering committees, writing meeting minutes and using AI for summaries.

Synonyms and variants

"Smoothed summary", "diplomatic average", "written-up compromise".

Not to be confused with

• Distillation — Distillation — work that turns a kept source into a reworded, linked, usable idea. It keeps one idea per card; smoothing melts several ideas into one.
• Summary — grouping feedback that says the same thing. It becomes smoothing when it absorbs feedback that is in opposition.
• Trade-off decision — a decision that settles between two options knowing what it sacrifices. Smoothing avoids settling by making the alternative disappear.

Examples

"Smoothing over means rewriting contradictory feedback until the contradiction disappears."

Ambiguities / debates

In statistics the word has a neutral, even positive meaning — smoothing a series to see its trend. Here it refers to a loss.