
The Feedback Fallacy - ejp
https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy
======
smacktoward
When I hear people talking up their policy of

 _> “encouraging harsh feedback” and subjecting workers to “intense and
awkward” real-time 360s_

... I can't help but think how much a review there sounds like a capitalist
version of a Maoist "struggle session" (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session)).

The point of a struggle session wasn't to build people up; it was to tear them
down. A culture where the way you move up is by tearing your colleagues down
is generally a dysfunctional culture. Everybody involved ends up losing sight
of things outside their four walls (such as, you know, _what customers want_
), because they're spending all their time squaring off against each other
internally.

I would suggest a healthier, more sustainable culture could be imagined by
contemplating these words from the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation,
chapter 27:
[http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=27&a=Stephen+Mitchell](http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=27&a=Stephen+Mitchell)):

 _What is a good man but a bad man 's teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man's job?_

~~~
on_and_off
So far, all of the people I know that have been boasting about their "I gave
brutally honest feedback" only mean "I will tear you down at every
opportunity".

It is always "brutaly honest when it comes to put people down, but weirdly
enough, these same person never have positive feedback to give.

Even if it was the case, it would not be worth it. Even as a foreigner weirded
out by the "everything is awesome" way of speaking in California, tearing down
your colleagues is not how you build a healthy team.

~~~
noneeeed
"People who are brutally honest generally enjoy the brutality more than the
honesty." \- Richard Needham

------
endymi0n
How the author seems to get and present such a distorted view of the original
Netflix culture slides (which we modeled quite a lot of our original culture
from) is completely beyond me. Nowhere did anybody say that feedback should be
a one sided activity, here's the original source for your reference:

[https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/11-11Com...](https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/11-11CommunicationYou_listen_well_instead_ofreacting)

The "Communication" slide (p.11) even _starts_ with the skill of listening
rather than talking well.

We're living an open, candid, two sided feedback culture in our company and
it's by far the best thing that has ever happened to my personal development.
The impact on my own perception and management style has been tremendous.
Maybe I'm biased by being a founder, but on our most recent anonymous employee
survey, structured feedback got an average 8/10 on satisfaction.

I take that just like the original ideas of Scrum or Agile, transparent
Feedback culture has apparently been bastardized enough by toxic companies
living the letter but not the spirit that it's apparently starting to get into
a negative perception... that's a pity but won't stop us from giving and
getting transparent feedback regularly.

~~~
agoodthrowaway
Having worked in a large company that is famous for its feedback culture, I
think the type of feedback culture you refer to is hard to scale. While I
think it helps people improve, I’ve mostly seen how feedback is used to hurt
people.

~~~
lumost
+1 to this, at scale it's really important to channel feedback on useful
topics. Learning that everyone hates working with your authentication system
is really quite different than everyone hating the lone maintainer who keeps
it alive in their "spare time".

------
0xBABAD00C
> The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that
> of their own feelings and experiences

Side note, but this strikes me as extremely wrong, based on 35 years of living
among humans. Humans have unsurpassed abilities of self-deception, cognitive
dissonance tolerance, and building monumental mental models to hide the truth
about themselves from themselves.

As one economist put it, your 'self' isn't the CEO, it's the PR department.
You produce a PR-approved spin of your own experiences and feelings for your
internal, conscious consumption.

~~~
bena
I think the error is including experiences.

I am the sole source for what I'm feeling. Whether I admit that or not is
another story, but if I think I feel sad, then I feel sad.

Now, whether that emotion is justified is another story and whether the
related experience should induce sadness can be up for debate and if I'm
interpreting the situation correctly and all of that.

But we can't argue that I'm not feeling sad. I would probably have said that
"The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that
of their own feelings and perspectives"

~~~
nitwit005
> but if I think I feel sad, then I feel sad.

Our sensitivity to our own emotions doesn't seem to be that great. People talk
about happiness sneaking up on you, or having a realization that they're
unhappy in a relationship. Presumably the feelings were there, but they
weren't conscious of it.

I suspect if I did have dials in my head that displayed the level of each
emotion, I'd go insane trying to move the needles. There may be some logic to
the arrangement.

~~~
bena
This doesn't actually go against what's being said.

Unexamined feelings are still felt. I'm still the only one who can tell you
with 100% accuracy what I'm feeling.

Even if you're technically wrong about what you're feeling, there's no way for
me to verify that you're wrong. You are still the sole arbiter of absolute
truth on that matter.

Because people love to read into things that aren't there. Apparently, I have
a very threatening face when I'm concentrating on something and I look kind of
angry. I'm not. And it's kind of exhausting to have people try and tell you
what you're feeling when they have no clue as to what's actually going on
inside of your head.

------
borramakot
> Adding up all the inaccurate redness ratings—“gray,” “pretty gray,” “whitish
> gray,” “muddy brown,” and so on—and averaging them leads us further away
> both from learning anything reliable about the individuals’ personal
> experiences of the rose and from the actual truth of how red our rose really
> is.

I don't understand this comment. How does averaging noisy signal, even
systematically noisy signal, result in something that is noisier than any
individual signal? I would have assumed the average would converge on (real
signal + systematic error).

~~~
whatshisface
The author is arguing that the real signal is zero and the systematic error is
large, so you will always end up converging on a repeatable but useless value.
Technically, taking only one sample could have gotten you closer because there
is a 50% chance that the random error would have gone in the opposite
direction to the systemic error, although the author is wrong to phrase that
like it's some kind of advantage, because the other fifty percent of the time
the random error will make the total error even worse.

~~~
borramakot
They say later that

> When a feedback instrument surveys eight colleagues about your business
> acumen, your score of 3.79 is far greater a distortion than if it simply
> surveyed one person about you—the 3.79 number is all noise, no signal.

Which implies to me that they believe there is signal there, but that it goes
away when aggregated?

~~~
itsdrewmiller
I think by "surveyed" they don't mean "asked one person for a score" but
rather got some overall information from one person including their
qualitative feelings and perceptions. There is signal in those as they discuss
elsewhere in the article, but the quantitative rating allegedly has no value
even when averaging. That's the charitable reading, anyway.

------
rb808
Agreed feedback is tough. One of the problems is that it depends a lot on the
setting and team. A person in one team might get some kind of feedback, but in
another team the same person could get the opposite advice.

The other problem in our industry being relative inexperience of many people.
When everyone in the team has had < 5yrs experience who is really qualified to
objectively describe what a person is doing wrong? I know when I was a an
inexperienced manager I gave "constructive feedback" that I now recognize was
wrong.

------
klenwell
I like the simple actionable advice near the end in the "Explore the present,
past, and future" section.

The authors' biographies just below that caught my attention:

 _Ashley Goodall is the senior vice president of leadership and team
intelligence at Cisco Systems and a coauthor of Nine Lies About Work: A
Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World_

Cisco Systems is the kind of giant multinational conglomerate that I would
expect to be a (to put it euphemistically) corporate shithole. The kind of
place where this kind of forward-thinking management gets lip-service but in
the end, for the most part, it's the same kind of Gervais Principle Hunger
Games hierarchy we've come to deride and deplore in these type of threads.

Is this not the case?

~~~
ehmish
Ever since I read McKinsey's "in search of excellence" I've been a bit
skeptical of these sort of "to run your company better just follow this one
weird trick" pieces. The book when I read it was quite convincing, but when I
read the results of the companies cited as "excellent" by the book later on,
about half had gone bankrupt or otherwise ceased trading!

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Excellence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Excellence)

~~~
Ididntdothis
GE and Jack Welch come to mind. For a long time they were held up as an
example of good management but somehow this didn’t result in a long term
healthy company.

~~~
whatshisface
If you're hearing about good anything, you're hearing about good marketing. ;)

~~~
beckingz
All conversation is a continuation of psychological warfare.

------
chadcmulligan
managers spend way too much time on trying to get inside their employees head
and fiddle around imho, they really don't have the skills or training. if they
spent this time on actually helping do the work in terms of what's needed and
wanted so everyone could just go home then the world would be a much better
place.

~~~
Cougher
Yes. They'd hire someone like Wayne Dyer to develop treatment plans at a
psychiatric hospital. My favorite personal example was when my employer hired
a management engineering consultant company to help people who spent their
time in meetings to trim fat, i.e., fire people who did the work. One of the
ways that was used to help us dumb people understand what a quality product is
was to ask us which restuarant has a higher quality product: a gourmet
steakhouse or McDonald's. The answer? It was supposed to be a 'gotcha' of
course. People inevitably answered the "gourmet steakhouse", but our brilliant
teacher laid down some truth that day: McDonald's is of equally high quality
because they do very well at providing a consistent product throughout all of
their franchises. I told her that there's a difference between consistency and
quality. A consistently low quality product is still a low quality product.
Management just didn't get it. This was at a time in the early 90s when my
employers touted themselves as being a "World Class Hospital". What kind of
claim is that when American hospitals were world beaters?

~~~
perl4ever
This is such a cliche about consistency anyway. Who says they are consistent?
The whole thing about franchising is they are independent businesses, and
McDonald's isn't harmed if a given one does terribly and goes out of business.

Certainly after some critical mass, you don't have to be as consistent to
retain customers. We all know how first impressions matter at any job.

------
bradb3030
The best I can recommend for managers: [https://roadmap.manager-
tools.com/product/basics/1](https://roadmap.manager-
tools.com/product/basics/1)

------
HelloMcFly
Hey, we're in my territory!

Something to note is this premise is disputed by A LOT of experts in this
domain. They've been challenged to a debate on this by Marc Effron (not my
favorite guy but does generally have grounded thinking in his work) with
proceeds benefiting charity but no uptake yet. They have also not shared their
data in a way that enables replication or outside validation (or hadn't lest I
checked). They is a pretty robust history of peer-reviewed research that
doesn't come to the same conclusion.

I think they are on to _something_ here but I think they are taking too far.
For their "Source of Truth" section, most of what they say is true,
particularly about rating and assessment of employees. Extending that to say
suggestions on future behavior from others is also value-less is wrong. The
former is problematic because it's treated as a source of objective truth that
personnel decisions are made against, the latter is clearly a single
subjective data point people can reflect on and potentially integrate into
future behavior.

For "How We Learn" section, much of the words written are true but the
conclusion goes beyond what I have seen data justify. Yes, we get better
faster at the things we're already better at. Should that mean focusing on
strengths is often a better coaching direction than weaknesses, yes. Does that
mean we shouldn't do the latter or that it is value-less? No. It _does_ mean
we have to find ways to make weakness-oriented feedback happen in a repeatably
non-threatening way.

On the "Excellence" section I'm again in agreement with most of it, but have
fewer overall critiques. I should think more about this. I still say the
conclusions are not natural endpoints for the points he makes.

Then, interestingly there is a table near the bottom. I find it interesting
that many of those things you should "Try" rather than "Instead of" are indeed
types of feedback and modern organizational development professionals espouse.
Language really does matter, that's a great table with great suggestions, and
most of those are feedback prompts.

All that said, I truly like Marcus Buckingham and find his work to typically
be evidence-based (to the extent work like this can be) and on solid ground.
Here is a brief video of him that is on a related topic that I think everyone
should really take to heart if interested in this topic.
[https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/rwtb/performance-
management...](https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/rwtb/performance-management-
is-two-things/)

------
meddlin
In my limited experience as a developer, managers and supervisors need to
first open their mouths before we can determine if the feedback is good or
not.

------
scarejunba
Maybe this is some problem on a large institution level. For me, every time
something I'd done was not correct or I'd failed, it felt very valuable to me
that someone noticed and told me and how they wanted it to be. It reinforced
in my mind what was good and that what I thought was not was, in fact, not. I
always felt way better coming out of an interaction like that.

The worst feeling is when I feel something is going poorly and no one will
tell me they think that about my thing.

------
ummonk
The part about pain isn’t actually necessarily true. When I was recovering
from surgery, they would ask “on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst
possible pain, how much pain are you feeling?” I imagined how excruciatingly
bad the worst possible pain would be and rated my pain a 2. When my pain went
up to a self-reported 3, the nurses were surprised to find me crying from the
pain...

Not everyone interprets the scale the same way...

~~~
tomnipotent
> Not everyone interprets the scale the same way...

That's the exact point the author was making with this example. A doctor
cannot normalize pain ratings across patients, and has to rely on each patient
scoring their own pain relative to their own experiences. Your 2/10 could be
7/10 for someone else - all that matters is that you have a measurement stick
to compare pain for yourself, so that medical staff know that your 3/10 is
more than your 2/10.

~~~
ummonk
The problem is that my 2/10 is rather distressful and doctors assume it isn't,
because they assume that self-reported pain ratings map consistently to
subjective levels of distress across patients.

------
purplezooey
The recent Malcolm Gladwell book also talks about how poorly we size up
others. Oh and I really like "Excellence is idiosyncratic.", very true.

------
stephc_int13
Feedback is dangerous for many reasons, but mostly because the signal/noise
ratio is mediocre.

The problem with noisy feedback is the instability of the closed-loop system,
and it can quickly become erratic and ultimately counter-productive.

Thus, we should only use feedback when the signal is clear and loud, mostly at
the extremes, when performance is outstanding or catastrophic.

------
russnewcomer
Paraphrased \- How should giving feedback work? > Precisely how it will be
received most effectively. \- How is that? > You must learn that for every
person. Here are some ideas.

This is something that I feel like many in engineering have to grow to
appreciate (or at least I did, and I see some of the same markers in many of
my peers that I had.) not just about feedback and interpersonal relationships,
but about everything. There are likely many things that you have an intuitive
feel for, but just as many you have to calmly, slowly, and carefully consider
yourself, your actions, and their consequences, if you want to be more
effective or be better.

In the past, I coached jr. high and highschool boys basketball. Some players
got lots of leeway to make mistakes before getting subbed out during games,
because they were capable of learning from those mistakes themselves, and
coach feedback didn't help their learning process. Other players would make
mistakes and immediately get subbed out, mistake pointed out, discussed,
correct action proscribed, and shortly subbed back in. They needed the outside
feedback to process "that was a mistake, I shouldn't do it again." Some
players goofed off in practice and got to sit on the sidelines. Some players
goofed off in practice and got to run laps. I had several discussions with
parents about why their son got "special treatment" when really it was about
me trying to give effective feedback. And I'm not saying I was awesome at
this, or always adjusted my approach for every kid in every situation, but
when I could, everyone's results were better.

A larger rant I have on this and any topic that circles back to effectiveness
is how to respond to "What is the best thing to do in X situation?"

For example, today in a team meeting, my group was discussing way to improve
performance in one of our systems. In the past, I've seen caching greatly
improve performance over database optimizations, so I'm optimistic about a
better caching paradigm, whereas one of my team members is looking at a
longer-term code maintenance and simplicity perspective that says, do fewer
things better, so optimize our database calls. Long slog to figure out which
is better, but we can't just generalize from past experience. What should we
do? Precisely what is needed. How do we know that? We'll have figure it out.
We have some general guidelines, but we'll have to figure out how to apply
them to this situation.

I have two kids. The older one would usually go to anyone when he was a baby
and be happy, smile, coo, play, for 10 minutes or so before he would get
worried about where mom or dad were. The younger one usually senses that mom
or dad might be handing him off, and gets upset and takes 5 minutes before he
calms down. But sometimes the older one would cry going from my wife to me,
and sometimes the younger one will happily go with the church nursery lady.
Why? I don't know. We'll figure it out.

Generalization is great, generalization is helpful, generalization is not
right in every case. With people, if you really want to be effective in
feedback or anything, you have to figure out how to have an approach that you
are generally successful at, how to generally alter it when you need to, and
then laser focus that flexibility for the people, relationships, and
situations that you really care about.

------
sT370ma2
This is an excellent article that deserves careful study.

