Feedback Canvas

Don't wait evaluations. Ask for feedback now.

In Agility there is a meeting where the team can evaluate what went well, things that stood in the way and what we can do differently to achieve better results. It's called Retrospective meeting. Most of the time issues on this meeting are addressed to the team and rarely to a specific member. With this in mind how can a specific member knows whether he/she is in the right path? How can one evaluate the quality of ones participation on that team? And, maybe the most important, how can he/she could improve?

Here is a quickly explanation about Feedback Canvas:

What is it?

According to [HADDAD, 2013] Feedback Canvas is:

a tool to organize the collective feedback process and create a suitable context for everyone to collaborate with their perceptions about the work of a team member.

We notice this canvas is really a interesting tool to give quickly feedback and more collaborative than "one-a-one" feedbacks.

It's basically a board where a group of pre-selected people leave their feedbacks towards an action/participation of a specific person. I made some modifications on the model but I'll explain later.

How does it work?

There's 5 steps to implement this canvas: Pre-game, Competence Rating, Strengths, Improvements and Actionable tasks.

Pre-game

Let's say there's a person who wants a feedback. Let's called her Arya ;). She invites a group of people who works or worked with her to join the Feedback Canvas session. Five is a good amount of participants of a Feedback Canvas session. In our example, Arya sends 5 invites, specifying the place, date and which ability/action/competence she wants feedback from.

Competence Rating

On the meeting day, people get together and the first task is to establish which competences are important for a good feedback. Once everyone agreed with the competences, the participants should rate them using a scale (explained below). In [HADADD, 2013] proposed model there's seven levels of rating. In our experiment we use only five. Something like here:

Example of Feedback Canvas

Each person (Arya as well) will rate all competences according to the scale. It's important that Arya uses a different color to vote from the others participants to visualize the difference of self-evaluation and how others see her work.

The images on the scale are explained here:

Dreyfus Models

One thing that was modified from the original process is that each person should individually write down the ratings into a post-it and deliver it to the feedback facilitator so that he/she compiles all ratings on the board. This was made to eliminate influence from others people’s ratings.

Strenghts

At this stage the participants raise positive points, always taking into account facts, so that Arya knows exactly what she is doing right.

Improvements

Here the participants raise points of improvement always taking into account events of the day-to-day.

Actionable tasks

In this last stage, participants help to create the actionable tasks which will help Arya to improve her in that competence.

Example of a Feedback canvas filled. Purple squares are from Arya and Orange squares are from the team.

Conclusion

At the end of the session, Arya will know how people see her work and wich actions she can take to become a better professional. The idea is this process can be done any day whenever someone finds feedback necessary. An important thing to point out is this model totally depends on the proactivity of each person, since it is not mandatory and the process starts from the person itself.

References:

HADDAD, Matheus. Feedback ao invés de avaliação de desempenho., 2014