The other day, I asked for feedback on some writing and quickly regretted it.
I’d been working on the copy for our Certified CAPED Consultant workshop event page. It was one of those pieces where it was a struggle to find just the right words for what I wanted to say. But I’d had what felt like a breakthrough and shared it on our #needsreview Slack channel.
I asked for feedback. Turns out I really wanted affirmation that I was going in the right direction. I was tired and not in a great place to receive critical feedback well.
Spoiler alert…I didn’t get affirmation.
Peter was also tired and not in a great place to share feedback well. What he shared felt to me like, “So, can you tell me more about your decision to make it bad?” (It wasn’t that passive aggressive, but it landed that way.)
We quickly spiraled into a debate that wasn’t useful or motivating for either of us.
I know, you might imagine that, as people who teach other people how to give and receive feedback well, we’d be really good at it. But we’re also human. Which means we don’t always have the capacity to bring our best capabilities to the table. (Hat tip to our friend Jake Calabrese for that helpful distinction.)
The feedback approaches we teach usually prevent feedback from spiraling into debate. Occasionally, though, we have to catch ourselves in the spiral and apply what we teach to get out. This was one of those times.
Here are three techniques we’ve used to avoid or escape feedback that turns into debate (and what we did the other day to get out of that spiral)…
Strategy 1: Get Clear on Who Decides
One big reason feedback turns into debate is that it’s not clear who actually owns the decision about what to do. When authority is unclear, the default is consensus. To make a decision, we need to agree. So, we try to argue for our position.
But when the person doing the work owns the decisions about the work, feedback is just opinions or advice about how to make better decisions. You don’t have to agree, which frees you to offer and accept the feedback as a gift.
In this case, we’d already decided I was the owner of the piece. However, I was behaving like we needed to decide together, which had both me and Peter digging in our heels. To get us both back in the right frame of mind, I finally typed in the thread, “Thank you for the feedback to consider.” That reduced the stakes. Peter could offer feedback in an open-handed way. I could consider it without feeling like I needed to fight with it.
Strategy 2: Use the Humanizing Work Feedback Process
Even when it’s clear who decides, it can still be hard to ask for and offer feedback. Enter the Humanizing Work Feedback Process. We created this approach to overcome the psychological barriers that get in the way of giving and receiving feedback well.
When you want to get feedback on a thing, share a little bit of context, share the thing, and then invite people to give feedback in three ways in a particular order:
First, clarifying questions. Which should actually be questions clarifying what was happening there and not advice or opinions in the form of questions.
Second, kudos. What do you like about it? We want to make sure we highlight what’s good, so we get to keep what’s good and not go straight to what might need to change.
And then opinions and advice very clearly framed as offers of opinions and advice and not things to debate or things that must be done.
Peter and I ended up in a debate about that event page content because we weren’t really following our own process. He framed something as a clarifying question, but it really came through as kind of backhanded advice or opinion.
I tried to answer the question that was actually being asked, but I also felt like I needed to push back on the advice because it was unclear what this was. It felt like I needed to answer the question, but it wasn’t really a question. It was advice.
Once we noticed and reset to the process, the conversation became much more useful.
Strategy 3: Move from Debate to Experimentation
What if you’re working on something where the people you need feedback from also have a say in decisions about what to do? In other words, you need to come to consensus.
In that case, it can be really hard to avoid debate. Feedback isn’t just take-it-or-leave-it. It’s an attempt at persuasion.
We had a case like this recently. Peter was working on the graphical branding for our CAPED Consultant certification. It felt high-stakes and was going to be around for a long time, so Peter, Angie, and I wanted to get to a result we all agreed on.
What started as a normal feedback session on a draft graphic turned into a debate about a detail, and we couldn’t resolve it. We were each making claims about how we thought things might work in the future, and we didn’t agree. Voting didn’t seem like a good way to end the debate—we wanted to all be happy with the outcome. But continued debate wasn’t going to do it.
So, we used strategy #3: move from debate to experimentation. When you can’t resolve a debate, especially when it’s a debate about something complex and unpredictable, see if you can design a short, safe experiment to get more data. In this case, we said, “Let’s try option A for a while. If we see such and such an outcome, we can switch to option B.”
The eXtreme Programming pioneer Ron Jeffries used to describe a variation on this. When he was pair programming with someone and they couldn’t agree on how to implement something, he’d try to find a way to say, “Let’s try your way first.” If they were right, he’d learn something. If they were wrong, they’d be more open to trying his way next. It’s an elegant way to end a debate and move to an experiment with more upside than downside.
Did I Actually Regret Seeking Feedback?
At the top, I mentioned that I’d asked for feedback and regretted it. That regret was only temporary. After we got back to our usual feedback process, I was able to hear Peter’s opinions and advice and use them to get to a much better piece of content than I would have created in isolation. Feedback isn’t always easy, but it’s worth it!
Next time you need to get feedback, give this a try. Want a handy reference guide for this process? Download our Early Feedback Process guide. And let us know what you use it for and how it goes!
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