A Few Frameworks I’ve Learned on How to Give Feedback
Feedback is a gift.
Year Up, the organization I work for, embraces that concept from the “Friday Feedback” ritual embedded in our learning communities to the Anytime 360 tool our staff has adopted for each other.
Feedback Guidelines
These are the feedback guidelines our organization uses. We use these with our program participants, and our participants use them with their peers and us. If I remember correctly, the guidelines were used by Teen Empowerment before us.
Good feedback, which gives accurate information in a usable way, is a precious gift.
When giving feedback:
• Be aware of timing.
• Be specific.
• Be caring.
• Be selective.
• Be balanced.
• Be honest.
When receiving feedback:
• Be receptive, not defensive.
• Listen.
• Remember.
• Use your judgement.
• Use it.
Take the gift of good feedback and use it for your own growth.
For staff-to-staff feedback we have a modified version:
Feedback Frameworks
Plus/Delta: At Year Up, positive and constructive feedback is efficiently combined into what we call the “Plus/Delta.” When we share a “plus,” we might say, “I like…” and for a “delta,” we’re encouraged to use a phrase like, “it would be better if…” The Plus/Delta is simple and can be graphically displayed: +/Δ. An alternative I’ve seen another nonprofit use is “glow” and “grow.”
- Plus: “I like how you kept the virtual meeting engaging by using the whiteboard tool.”
- Delta: “It would be better if next time we had a longer break when doing remote workshops.”
I Like, I wish, I wonder: I picked up and adapted this framework when I informed and was part of a train-the-trainer program for the Designing Your Success program. The “I like” and “I wish” are essentially equivalent to “plus” and “delta” respectively. “I wonder” surfaces unanswered questions and other ideas. The phrases can also be graphically communicated: +/Δ/?!.
- I like: “…the food — it was great to have a healthy lunch!”
- I wish: “…we had more time to cover the last concept.”
- I wonder: “…how the presentation would be received if you changed your opening slide.”
ABCD: This post was inspired by a framework I discovered tonight. These days I lurk and fave on Twitter rather than contribute and engage — and I fortunately discovered this tweet. I can see how Mary Robinette Kowal’s Guide to Manuscript Critiques could be used in other contexts. She uses the clever analogy of testing your writing to running a clinical trial, where the most important thing is to get an accurate reporting of symptoms. She categorizes the “symptoms” and the ways to decode the readers’ reactions as ABCD:
Awesome – Don’t fix this.
Boring – A pacing issue. Fix by tightening, adding stuff to make the reader understand why it’s important, or both.
Confused – Order of information problem.
Disbelief – You’ve violated their sense of how the world works.
What’s ironic about my personal WriteMarch challenge is that I’m writing and publishing without getting feedback at all! I generally would agonize, drag out writing, and share my posts before I dared hit “publish.” Now I’m translating real-time what comes out of my private world into public words.
Perhaps you will use one of the above frameworks to give me feedback in the comments. 😉
This post is part of my WriteMarch series, a commitment to write daily for a month.
