Getting early feedback on an idea used to make me feel uncomfortably vulnerable, so I’d avoid doing it. But using this feedback approach has almost completely erased that concern for me. We’ve seen the same on our team and with our clients. It’s been a huge breakthrough. Getting early feedback was always awkward and rarely that useful. Now it’s pretty easy and generating great results.
We all know early feedback on work can be useful, but it’s hard to do. We want to show people things when they’re all polished and when we feel proud of the product. Not to mention, most people don’t know how to give feedback well. In this episode, Richard and Peter introduce an approach to getting feedback that solves these problems and makes early feedback low-risk, productive, and encouraging.
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Episode transcription
Richard Lawrence
We all know we should get early feedback on our work. It can save multiple days wasted developing an idea that should have been discarded. And the right comment early on can trigger an “aha” that points us in the right direction, something we never would have thought of on our own.
Peter Green
But most of us hesitate to ask for feedback on early drafts of a thing. Waiting longer just makes intuitive sense. After all, the more complete the work is, the more likely our reviewers will understand and appreciate it. The less explaining we’ll have to do. The more confident we’ll be that it represents our best thinking. The better we’ll look.
Richard
Right, because competence is a core human motivation factor. We want to be seen as thorough and good at our jobs, and sharing something that is clearly not done (yet!) requires a certain level of vulnerability that’s sometimes hard to muster.
Peter
Yes, and on top of all that, giving good feedback is a skill that’s in short supply. Especially when the work isn’t fully developed, reviewers might have a hard time providing helpful comments. Even when reviewing completed work, most reviewers are likely to lean towards one end of a feedback spectrum. At one end, reviewers “tell it like it is,” assuming their opinion is the truth. You may appreciate their directness, but you often leave wondering if they value anything that you did.
On the other end, reviewers limit their comments to positive encouragement and compliments, holding back useful criticism out of a fear of damaging the relationship.
Richard
(Don’t get us started, by the way, on the terrible advice to use the “feedback sandwich,” which research shows can lead to worse outcomes than no feedback at all.)
Peter
Well, Humanizing Work Community, don’t despair! We’ve been using a structured approach to asking for and receiving feedback on early drafts of work in progress, and it’s been nothing less than fantastic for us and our clients. In today’s episode, we’ll walk you through the process and share some tips for how to make it work for individual, team, synchronous, and asynchronous feedback on very early drafts of work. But first…
This show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company.
Richard
Humanizing Work exists to make work more fit for humans and humans more capable of doing great work. And, to that end, we do training and coaching in three areas:
- We help leaders lead empowered teams and individuals more effectively.
- We help product people turn their ideas into good visions, good experiments, and good backlogs.
- We help teams collaborate better to produce meaningful outcomes on complex work, including setting up systems for good feedback.
So, if you or your organization would benefit from better leadership, better product management, or better collaboration, and if you find our vision for human-centric work compelling, we’d love to hear from you. Visit the contact page on humanizingwork.com and schedule a conversation with us.
Peter
Ok, to explain how this feedback process works, we’ll share a recent example of how we used it at our company. Here at Humanizing Work HQ, we are in the final stages of launching a new leadership offering, and we’re really excited about it. A few early clients that have used it had really good results. So, stay tuned to our socials and our newsletter for more info on this offering. To help the right people find this new offering, we were doing a lot of writing, trying to clarify what pains, gains, and jobs it did for a few different target markets. We were doing things like writing landing pages, event pages, and other copy.
In the past, one of us would often take the bulk of the assignment to do a specific page or article. And, once that person was pretty happy with it, they’d share it for any feedback. Then we’d all chime in from our own favorite spot on the feedback spectrum from direct to complimentary. That process was never very satisfying or effective, for all the reasons we described at the beginning of the episode.
Richard
The creators of the content, in the old way, had spent a lot of time on the copy, and wanted people to like it. But they also wondered if they were focusing on the right things or being clear in their writing, so they wanted feedback. Those giving feedback always felt like they had to do this high wire act of being encouraging while also being honest.
This recent round of reviews, using our new approach, though, was just the opposite: fast, generative, helpful, encouraging. We were doing this live on a Zoom session with four people: one writer and three reviewers providing feedback. So, we’ll describe the process in that context, and along the way, we’ll give you tips for how to use it in different situations, including asynchronously or just one on one.
Peter
We’ve created an overview of the six steps of the Humanizing Work Early Feedback Process. You can download a PDF of that on the episode page. If you want to pause the episode now and download it, it might help you if you like visuals as much as I do.
Ok, here’s how we did it.
To kick off the review process, we reminded everyone of the six main steps: Context, Content, Questions, Kudos, Comments and Conclusions.
Richard
Step 1, Context. Here, the person who created this draft of the content would provide a bit of context for what the reviewers were about to see, like:
“Here’s where I’m at in the writing process. These are some of the decisions I’ve made, so far. Here’s something I’d like you to particularly focus on, here’s a thing you can ignore for now. You’ll notice this placeholder text over here– I haven’t gotten to that spot yet.” Etc. Things like that.
This context-setting helps reviewers know where to focus, what not to worry about, and how this draft fits into the bigger picture.
Peter
Step 2 is Content. Here, the creator shared the link to the content so reviewers could read through it. And even though any of us could have gotten to the copy earlier, since it was all linked in our shared Notion database, we intentionally didn’t jump the gun. We wanted the context to influence our processing.
Once the link had been shared, everyone muted their audio and started reading. We agreed to use the Zoom reactions to indicate when we’d finished reviewing it, so everyone could take as long as they needed to review without interruptions.
Different reviewers used different approaches to capture their ideas as they read the copy. For example, I grabbed a blank notebook page and added three headers evenly spaced on the page: Questions, Kudos, Comments. I found it useful for me to capture notes to myself in those three categories as I reviewed the content, so I didn’t forget them later.
Richard
Once the last person clicked their reaction over to “ready,” we moved on to Step 3, Questions. The creator would ask everybody else, “What was unclear to you?” or “What could I clarify?” This is a risky step for anyone new to the process because it’s really easy to ask a question that’s actually an opinion masquerading as a question. And that’s not the purpose of this step. Here, we’re just making sure that we all have a basic understanding of the context and the content before moving on so we’re talking about the same thing. Good clarifying questions often sound like “When you used this term, it was unfamiliar to me. What did you mean by that?” or “What other structures did you consider before picking this one?”
If you notice someone asking a Trojan Horse style question, where there’s an opinion hiding inside, like:
Peter
“Hey Richard, did you consider taking a narrative approach vs. bullet points here?”
Richard
If that happens, you can remind them that we’ll get to opinions in step 5.
Peter
Maybe for that question, I could reframe it to be more neutral, like “What approaches did you consider when structuring this part?” But the intuition to ask the question is probably pointing to an opinion I want to offer about what structure I think would be best, and that fits later.
Richard
About half the time when we use the process now, there are no clarifying questions, because we’ve been doing this for a while, and we’ve gotten better at setting context.
Peter
If there are no questions, we move on to step 4, Kudos. Here, the creator asks “What did you particularly like about this draft? What stood out to you?” We do this before asking for advice or other feedback because it meets the need for a sense of competency before hearing the ways the content could be improved. It’s not just “softening the blow.” Instead, these should be honest reflections of what reviewers appreciated about the work.
Richard
And I found that the discipline of looking for what’s good in the work as its own thing rather than just as a way to be nice helps me highlight things I genuinely like but I might not have mentioned because I assumed the creator knew it already. I’d think, “Of course they know it’s good, or they wouldn’t have done it.” In the process, we’re starting to learn more about our colleagues and what they value through this step, which is creating some more alignment in our work.
Peter
Next, Step 5 is Comments. Here, we invite reviewers to frame their feedback in a very specific way. First, their feedback is either an opinion or advice. An opinion is what they thought about the work, while advice is what the reviewer thinks they should do next. It’s ok to share an opinion without advice for what to do about it.
Then, there is a sentence structure we invite people to use fairly strictly. That’s as follows: “Richard, I have an opinion about the way you’ve described the target customer’s pain in this section. May I share that now?” Or if it’s specific advice, it would be framed similarly: “Richard, I have some advice about how to tighten up that third paragraph. Is it ok to share that with you?”
Richard
Asking permission feels awkward the first few times. Reviewers assume they already have permission to give feedback—that’s why we’re having the meeting. But asking permission each time and giving a pointer as to what the opinion or advice is about– it does a magical thing. It shifts the power in the room. The creator gets to decide to receive the feedback and knows the focus of the feedback so they can mentally prepare to receive it well. And framed as an opinion or advice, the feedback no longer feels like an invitation to debate. Instead, it’s just new information that the creator can choose to act on, or not.
During this step, it’s super-important to stay out of argument or debate about the merits of the opinion or advice. When the reviewer shares it, the creator should make sure they understood the feedback, asking clarifying questions. But they don’t need to explain why they agree or disagree. It is, to quote The Dude, “Like, just their opinion, man.” The important thing is to make sure that the advice or opinion is heard and considered. This meeting isn’t a decision-making meeting, so don’t let this step get derailed into a debate. Then, once everyone has shared their opinions and advice, we move on to the last step, Conclusions.
Peter
Now it’s time for the creator to summarize their conclusions based on the feedback. This could be specific actions they plan to take, or major themes they want to mirror back to the reviewers, and maybe an expression of appreciation for the reviewers’ time and insights. In one recent use of this on our team, the Conclusions step highlighted that the creator had mis-heard or misunderstood some of the advice. The reviewer that shared that advice asked a clarifying question “Hey, is that specific revision based on my advice on this section? If so, that’s not what I meant. May I clarify that now?”
Richard
During this step, the creator doesn’t need to commit to a specific action based on the feedback. So, it could just be sharing themes that they heard, and committing to consider them in the next draft. Or it could be a commitment to schedule another discussion to debate the merits of two possible paths highlighted in the Comments section. It’s pretty common that much of the feedback is immediately actionable by the creator, so they simply say “Yeah, I’m going to do all of those things,” “I’m still considering this suggestion,” or “I don’t think I’m going to act on this piece of advice yet, I want to think more about it.”
Peter
So that’s how the process worked as we used it to review the web copy on a Zoom session with four people. If you want to use it in a 1:1 context, most of this will be exactly the same. The main thing to consider there is that in 1:1 conversations, it’s much easier to be pretty casual about sticking to the order of the steps and the rules of each step. That may be ok, depending on the level of trust, but it’s probably worth having the agenda in front of both people and working through it fairly methodically. We like doing that with team meetings too, since it provides a visual placeholder for when different things will happen in the overall discussion.
Richard
We often just do this as a conversation, with the creator taking notes. But other times you may want to capture on sticky notes, a Miro board, or a google doc the key kudos and comments. We find that this is particularly useful where there’s a large group or multiple work items being reviewed or both, and you don’t want to lose track of useful ideas.
Peter
Finally, we’ve done asynchronous versions of feedback, but usually only after we’ve reviewed an earlier draft live and someone wants to share their update based on the first round of feedback. A few tips to doing this well….
First, if you’re using Teams or Slack, start a new post. Provide the context first, then a link to the content review. Then immediately add three new posts directly below called Questions, Kudos, and Comments. In each of those three posts, be the first to respond with the prompt, like “What can I clarify?” “What did you like?” and “What opinions or advice do you have?” This creates a simple structure of threads for people to reply, in order, to each of those sections.
Richard
Like many asynchronous team things, it’s best if you can run a few live feedback sessions before going to async, just to get the hang of things. You’re much less likely to need to facilitate aggressively if everyone already remembers the rules and has practice playing by them.
Peter
We think this process can supercharge a number of different categories of work.
Richard
Let’s go through a few examples:
- Use it on design projects to get early feedback on initial concepts or prototypes.
Peter
- Use it in research to get feedback on the question, methodology, or thesis statement.
Richard
- Use it on marketing campaigns to get input on initial concepts, target audience, key messages, or copy and creative assets.
Peter
- Use it on org change ideas to get early feedback from employees and stakeholders on where resistance might lie and how to improve the proposal based on that resistance.
Richard
- Use it for a presentation to get early feedback on the key focus, the story telling, the visuals and the structure of the presentation.
We could keep going. There are dozens of additional applications where getting early feedback would be valuable, but where we might be hesitant to do it, since the work isn’t really done yet.
Peter
Getting early feedback on an idea used to make me feel uncomfortably vulnerable, so I’d avoid doing it. But using this feedback approach has almost completely erased that concern for me. We’ve seen the same on our team and with our clients. It’s been a huge breakthrough. Getting early feedback has always been awkward and rarely that useful. But now it’s pretty easy and generating great results.
Richard
If you want some help applying this feedback approach in your context, reach out to us at humanizingwork.com/contact. And if you try it out on your own, let us know how it goes and any questions that come up. So far, we’ve mostly used this when we were there facilitating, so we’re curious to hear how you experience it. Thanks for tuning in!
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