At it's core he correctly identifies being "too involved" as part of the issue because this makes you emotionally attached to a project and clouds your judgement.

But thats not really the core of the problem – at least not in my experience having run agency myself and I don't think the essay have any useful conclusions. Saying we should not be emotional is easy to say when it's your company.

The real issue is if designers (novice or experienced) feel like their design abilities are being questioned (and so their position threatened). And so the real trick is to make sure there is a clear understanding of what direction the critique is aimed.

If there is any confusion you ned up with designers who take critique of the discussed solution with a critique of them as designers. And so I have always tried to make two things clear to the designers I had.

1) They are there because they are good enough. And so whatever discussion we are having is not about them but about what they produced.

2) The point of critique is always to improve the result never to discuss any individuals design abilities.

Chances are if you survived the first 3 month of your employment you are there because you are good enough.

Getting people to a position where they feel they can trust their own intuition without judgement of them as people is what removes adrenaline. Sure you might get into a heated debate about something (and thus adrenaline will flow) but you aren't debating each other you are debating the project at hand.

Of course this require quite a lot of work up front and a level of honesty in an organization that sometimes simply arent possible.

But if you want to make your designers think more like astronauts you better make sure that you built a proper spaceship for them to travel in.