Have you ever gone an entire year at a job believing things were going well, only to sit down for your annual review and hear something you never saw coming? The frustrating part is rarely the feedback itself. It is the timing. Whatever went unsaid had usually been noticed months earlier, sometimes by more than one person, and none of it reached you until the review made it official. Feedback delayed long enough stops being feedback and starts being history, useful for understanding the past but useless for changing the outcome. This newsletter has been running on a version of that same delay. Eighteen issues, one direction only, with the occasional text saying nice read this week, but nothing close to an honest, thorough read on what is actually landing and what is not.

A feedback loop only works if it closes. In systems thinking, a loop left open, where the output of a system never makes it back to the person steering it, cannot self-correct no matter how well-intentioned the person running it is. That is precisely the position eighteen issues of one-directional publishing puts a writer in: reasonable guesses about what resonates, no reliable signal to confirm or correct them, and a growing gap between what gets written and what a reader would actually value. The workplace version of this is well documented. Gallup research on performance reviews has found that only a small share of employees, roughly one in seven, strongly agree that the reviews they receive actually inspire them to improve. The review is not the problem. The distance between the moment worth noting and the moment it finally gets said is the problem.

Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, who spent years studying negotiation and difficult conversations at Harvard, make a related case in Thanks for the Feedback: most people assume the hard part of feedback is giving it well, when for most of us the harder and more avoidable skill is asking for it and actually taking it in. Avoiding the ask feels safer in the short term. It only feels that way because the cost of not knowing is invisible, while the discomfort of hearing something unflattering is not. Over a long enough timeline, the invisible cost is the more expensive one.

Which is why this issue works a little differently than the eighteen before it. Instead of a close, this one ends with a genuine ask, three questions, and a request to simply hit reply.

Three questions worth sitting with this week:

1.    What one issue has resonated with you the most, and why? (For a quick list of previous issues, check out www.viewthewiderlens.com/archive)

2.    What's one thing you wish I'd cover that I haven't yet?

3.    How likely are you to share this newsletter with someone else, and what would make that a yes?

Three questions, and all you have to do is hit reply:

1. What one issue has resonated with you the most, and why?

2. What's one thing you wish I'd cover that I haven't yet?

3. How likely are you to share this newsletter with someone else, and what would make that a yes?

Three things worth your time this week:

📚  Read

Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. Co-authors of the Harvard Negotiation Project's work on difficult conversations, they make the case that receiving feedback well, not just giving it, is the underdeveloped skill.

🧠  Concept worth knowing

The feedback loop. A systems-thinking term for the process by which the output of a system is routed back as input, allowing it to self-correct. A tight loop corrects quickly. A loop that stays open, as an annual review or a one-directional newsletter both do, can run a long way off course before anyone notices.

📊  Stat worth sharing

Gallup research on employee performance reviews has found that only about fourteen percent of employees strongly agree the reviews they receive actually inspire them to improve.

Zoom out. See what’s possible.

— Chuck

SOURCES

-Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen (Portfolio/Penguin, 2014)
-Gallup, “Give Performance Reviews That Actually Inspire Employees” — gallup.com/workplace/236135. 14% strongly agree reviews inspire improvement; 29% fair, 26% accurate.
-Feedback loop, systems thinking definition — general reference, no citation needed unless a specific source is added.