Six Feedback Killers

Our experience working with leaders over many years has led us to the realisation that feedback is a perennially challenging feature of organisational life. Leaders and consultants seem to spend a great deal of time speaking about feedback, saying how important it is, and creating systems and methods for effective feedback. Yet, most of us seem to go to great lengths to avoid both giving and receiving feedback. We have discovered that no matter how good a feedback system is, and no matter how good people seem to get at following the rules for doing feedback the right way, feedback still seems to be plagued by a number of persisting challenges. We have come to recognise some of the most prevalent of these as the six feedback killers. Our approach to Deconstructive Feedback acknowledges that these are normal human tendencies that we cannot overcome through best practices, but that we can learn to think about and engage in a more generative way in order to make feedback a useful learning experience for all involved in the process. So… let’s find out a little more about these six killers.

Three Killers when Offering Feedback

Overconfidence

Overconfidence is a common cognitive bias which has been hypothesized by the American social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger (1999) as the eponymous Dunning-Kruger Effect (illustrated above). Dunning and Kruger essentially argue that people with low abilities of task-mastery (or understanding) often overestimate their abilities. When we first learn something it feels like a big ‘a-ha’ moment, like a big change, and so we sometimes feel very certain or confident about what we know or can do, then over time we realise the limitations of our knowledge and begin the arduous process of building deep understanding. In this sense: the more we know the more we realise that there is to know. In our experience, zealous feedback is often delivered from the “Peak of ‘Mount Stupid’”. People learn something new or recognise something different and speak from a place of unfounded confidence rather than deep understanding.

The Fundamental Attribution Error

The Fundamental Attribution Error, also sometimes called a correspondence bias, was first named by the influential social psychologist Lee Ross (1977) based on the classic demonstration study by Jones and Harris (1967). The error describes the commonplace and biased tendency to overemphasise dispositional or personality-based explanations for observable behaviours and underemphasise contextual ones. When we behave in ways that don’t work for us we assume that our response was a reasonable response to the situation; when others respond in ways that we do not understand (or disagree with) we tend to blame them and attribute their behaviour to some sort of psychological defect. This sort of double standard, which can be experienced as a highly unfair lack of willingness to take personal responsibility, is very prevalent in the ways that feedback is given.

Retrospective Coherence

Once something has occurred and we review how it came about, everything seems to make sense. Looking back we have a crystalline clarity which transforms complex interactions and random emergence into a linear cause and effect explanation for whatever happened. This is a phenomenon which the complexity theorist Dave Snowden and others refer to as Retrospective Coherence. This is often very different to the experience of being involved in an evolving situation, and is certainly not the case if we are trying to predict what will happen next. In the complex world we live in it is not possible to be certain about the future impact of our actions; we can never know how others will understand and respond to our gestures. However, we are quick to forget this when giving feedback to others. Feedback is often delivered with a sort of unequivocal clarity and certainty as if the way that things went was the only logical way it could have and that everyone should have seen this coming.

Three Killers when Receiving Feedback

Identity Threat

Recognition is a mutual process, we can only come to recognise ourselves fully through the ways that we are recognised by others (Honneth, 1996). As a result anxiety is often provoked when we have a sense of being misrecognised by another’s feedback. This can feel like a threat to one;s identity, i.e. one’s understanding of oneself and one’s position in a group. This anxiety is associated with a risk of exclusion and potential annihilation. This threat triggers powerful emotional reactions and unconscious defenses which can make feedback very difficult to metabolise.

Diversity of Perspectives

Feedback givers and receivers rarely see the situation in the same way (if they did, then feedback would probably not not be required). However, both feedback givers and receivers tend to behave as if they have a monopoly on the truth, and - as a result - they can often become intractably attached to their point of view believing it to be objectively true. Feedback can serve to amplify the difference between perspectives and thus can feel very untrue and unfair, leading to increased disconnection, antagonism, and defensiveness.

Unclear Relationships

Often feedback is delivered in a way that is naive about the impact of context and of the nature of power relations in groups. We tend to give feedback as if we are all equals, but this is - of course - not the case. Feedback always occurs within a constantly shifting political landscape. As a result: when receiving feedback we are unlikely to be able to distinguish its intentions and discern whether the person offering feedback is trying to:

• help (coaching)

• assess (measuring); or even

• punish (power asserting).

Unfortunately, given the other killers at play when receiving feedback, we are often already on the defensive and are likely to interpret whatever they say as a potential danger.

A Different Way

Through our research and experimentation together with leaders across a wide range of industries and geographies, we have devised a radically new way of understanding the social processes of feedback. This is what we call Deconstructive Feedback. We have developed our approach through taking our clients and our own experience seriously, and using a wide range of theoretical sources to make sense of these experiences. These have included:

• Kegan & Lahey’s Deconstructive Feedback (subsequently developed by Berger);

• Complex responsive processes of relating (drawing on the work of Stacey, Mowles, Griffin, & Shaw);

• Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg);

• Cynefin & Sensemaking (Snowden);

• Stratified Systems Theory & Levels of Work (Jaques & Stamp); and

• Psychoanalysis & group analysis (Klein, Bion, Foulkes, Nitsun, Stacey, & Dalal).

If you would like to understand more about our radically new approach to working with these challenges and disrupting and re-imagining feedback, please checkout Complexity Guys’ groundbreaking new Deconstructive Feedback IN-DEPTH Course.

References

Honneth, A. (1996). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Jones, E. E. & Harris, V. A. (1967). "The attribution of attitudes". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 3 (1): 1–24. Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77 (6): 1121–1134. Ross, L. (1977). "The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process". In Berkowitz, L. (ed.). Advances in experimental social psychology. 10. New York: Academic Press. pp. 173–220.