Tag Archives: personal

Questions On Feedback

Personal,

I’ve become quite obsessed with feedback over the last year and a half maybe. Mainly because I believe it is really hard to get useful feedback, and especially create a culture around giving feedback. For those who like podcasts I can highly recommend episode 1 of the podcast “Worklife” by Adam Grant which is called “How to love criticism”. The episode talks about a company called Bridgewater Associates who has taken this to the extreme. Now, I am not sure if every workplace can have, or should have, a culture like that, but I believe we still can learn a lot from it. And after listening to that episode myself I got myself a new obsession, feedback.

So far feedback is turning out to be as hard to specify as I expected, and even though I’ve read a lot I still have a million question about it. So I did an experiment and just wrote down a bunch of questions I could think of around feedback. Some I have clear thoughts about, others I have no idea. If you have any thoughts on them I’d love to hear it. Otherwise, maybe this list of questions will get you thinking as well. But let me ask you this; Can you remember the last time you got some really useful, maybe even unexpected, feedback?

  • Why is feedback so hard to get right?
  • What does good/bad feedback look like?
  • How do we measure quality of feedback over time?
  • What is the best way of asking for feedback?
  • Are people so good at self reflecting they don’t need it?
  • Are we too afraid to give feedback as it might affect how others think about us for it to work?
  • Are we too afraid of receiving bad news for feedback to work?
  • When is the best timing to give, or ask for, feedback?
  • Are some areas of expertise, or communities, better at working continuously with feedback?
  • How do we ensure that feedback is not a one-way dialog, and that feedback ends up being a power play from the givers perspective?
  • How do we build a culture for lowering the threshold for giving feedback?
  • Is it possible to receive actionable feedback from strangers?
  • Where would you even go if you wanted feedback on a personal project, or started out doing something new?
  • How do we teach how to receive feedback?
  • How can we learn our body not to go into a flight or flee position when receiving negative/constructive feedback?
  • Does more trust in a relation equal more feedback, or at least lowering the threshold for giving?
  • How can we make someone hungry for feedback?
  • Is a request for feedback really just a request for getting a recognition of something we do correct and want to hear it from others?
  • Maybe feedback isn’t that important after all?

Sometime I just Want to Write

Personal,

Do you every feel like you just want to write something? Doesn’t matter if someone reads it or not, just to get some thoughts down on a paper or a computer? I usually write for three reasons. Things ends up here when I feel like I have done something smart and want to have it more easily available the next time I end up with the same issue. Things end up in OneNote or a PowerPoint whenever it is something I want to share at work. But the third setting I usually write is different, that’s when I don’t manage to sleep because I am either irritated or to excited about something. Writing usually calms me down, and sleep comes more easily afterwards.

For some reason I wish I wrote more. It feels calming when I do, like now, and it doesn’t have to be to calm myself down because of irritation or excitement. Most of the time however, stuff ends up in my personal OneNote, in the “Draft” section. But why? I’ve never been much of a perfectionist, but when it comes to writing and putting stuff here, for some reason it stops in a draft pahse unless I really take the time to do the write-up. I think that’s a shame, not because what I write is super interesting, but because I clearly have done some work when I look back at the drafts. Too often it feels like what I am writing is not “new” enough. It has nothing to do with the fact it is not good enough, but I notice I find myself thinking “someone has already written about this”. I do hope to put more out, I think all of us has our own perspectives on stuff we write even if it is not ground breaking. It doesn’t have to be, and that is fine. By putting it out there for everyone to read, and not kept in the dark, it might inspire or teach someone else something.

As with everything we get better when we write, so by writing this maybe the next piece I write becomes just a little better, or at least the bar for finishing it and publishing it gets lower. Writing is fun and at some point I hope to be able to tick of all these things:

  • Write a children’s fairy tale. I’ve already drafted one called “The Snail Princess” as my daughter loves snails, worms and spiders.
  • Write more “kåsseri”, I have no idea what this is in English, and google translate didn’t help me, but it’s basically a more humouristic type of short essay. Again, I have a draft for this called “Analogization”.
  • Create a bad guy for a thriller. Doesn’t have to end up as a book or anything. I just really want to see if I am able to create a character like Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes. Let’s be honest, a good bad guys is very often more interesting than the good guy!
  • Write more here. I think I to often think this space has to be work related. I think it’s because it started out as that, but that doens’t mean that’s all it can be.

Time to get even more average, and put out more average content, mostly for me and if someone else finds it interesting that is purely a bonus.