• Goals
  • Describe feedback.
  • On an ongoing basis, get feedback that help you get better results, reduce drawbacks, and increase your enjoyment.
  • Give feedback that causes others to get these same benefits.

Feedback (What)

Feedback is the return of information that helps an actor (person or group) improve their results, reduce drawbacks, or enhance other rewards by providing insight into their actions and guiding adjustments.

Feedback feels great, feels empowering, and it usually results in improvements or growth.

Examples of Feedback

Nonfiction Book Author.

1. Feedback Examples: Information that helps the author write more accurately or more clearly. Information that helps the author get more text written per day. Information that helps the author get more book sales.

2. Growth: This is when the author applies the feedback and reaps the associated rewards.

Context: A company has a product on the market.

1. Feedback Examples: Information that helps the company increase the ratings of their product. Information that helps the company get more people buying their product. Information that helps the company improve the product for its next generation. Information that helps the company reduce the costs of getting the product to their customers.

2. Growth: This is when the company applies the feedback and reaps the associated rewards.

3. Context: A person is learning chemistry.

   1. Feedback Examples: Information that helps the learner become better at balancing chemical equations. Information that helps the learner grok (deeply understand) chemical bonding. Information that helps the learner decrease their stress levels when studying and taking tests.
   2. Growth: This is when the learner applies the feedback and reaps the associated rewards.

Rationale

Here are some reasons why it is worthwhile to be skilled at giving and receiving feedback.

4. Feedback is the fuel that feeds growth and improvement. It is like gasoline on a fire.

5. Feels great to get feedback; it provides a path to making things better.

6. Skilled giving and receiving of feedback dramatically improves trust, collaboration, and bonding.

==== Cruft ====

• A writer gets information that describes how they can be a better writer.

• A coder gets information from (https://stackoverflow.com/) that helps them improve their code and also helps them improve their knowledge of python.

• A web developer gets information that helps improve their next version of the current web site.

• A chemistry student gets information that helps them to better understand seminal concepts and helps them to better solve problems.

• A marketing team gets information that helps them make their marketing more effective and thereby drive up revenue.

• A guitar player who is super frustrated gets information that helps them drive their frustration to zero and improve the playing so that they can overcome the source of the frustration.

Quality in Feedback

Feedback has high quality when the following criteria are met.

7. It is super useful to the actor (person or group) receiving the feedback.

8. When feedback comes from another person, the receiver of the feedback feels like the giver of the feedback cares about them. The feedback is welcome by the receiver.

9. Feedback is based on observations. It is free of judgement of good and bad. It is information.

10. It can be acted on. The person getting the feedback has path forward. It is actionable.

Sources of Feedback

Feedback can come from three places.

11. Self. One looks back at their recent experiences and figures out how to improve. This is called Reflections. Super useful. I do this multiple times every day.

12. Others. One can get feedback from other people. This can also be quite useful. However, unskilled people provide judgement, so I wrote this note about Asking For Feedback

13. Real World. This is best explained by example:

    1. You putt a golf ball. It goes in the hole, or not.
    2. You write a novel. It sells well. Or, it is bust.
    3. You write computer code. It works. Or, has issues.
    4. You teach. Your students learn really well. Or not.
    5. You design something. It works. Or it has issues.
    6. You build a math model and then get data in the real world can compare. You math model predicts the real world data really well. Or not.

    The real world will tell you if things are working or not. The next step is then to figure why things are working or why they are not. The result is your feedback. Note this skill takes time to develop.

Examples of Feedback

14. Writing.
    1. You used headings to structure. Keep this up.
    2. Your spelling of Kirchhoff’s circuit laws on page 22 is wrong. In the future, check the spelling and usage of main ideas.
15. Running a meeting.
    1. You started the meeting by describing the results we need to get. Keep this up.
    2. You did not ask any meeting attendees if they had any agenda items. In the future, do this.
16. Chemistry
    1. You are here asking for my help. This is smart. Keep doing this in your classes, in your job and in your personal life.
    2. The work on your test (right here) shows that you’re struggling on balancing equations. In the future, go through the following five steps on every problem. Let’s practice this together. The teacher then gets the student to go to the board, and then then teacher patiently guides the student until he gets the idea of attacking and crushing this kind of problem systematically.

Notes

• Quality feedback is not common. Most of what we get is judgement that tells us if someone else thinks our performance or product is good or bad.

• Effective learning involves (information) => (practice) => (feedback) => (growth) and (measurement). Collectively, these actions are called a (growth cycle)

how-to-get-great-feedback effective-learning