Feedback and How to Avoid a Punch in the Head
My two young were boys gripped with excitement, watching football on the TV. The game wasn’t quite over but it was time to leave the house. My older son turned the TV off, while my younger son wanted to keep watching. The feedback was instant. Disappointed that the game had abruptly vanished, he smashed his older brother in the face.
This happens with kids. Highly emotional, they’ll react from the heart directly. Not really thinking about the consequences of their actions. The result was an escalation of conflict that didn‘t resolve the situation. Although the feedback was instant it didn’t provide any motivation for my older son to behave differently in the future. It resulted in a punch up with both sides focussing on the conflict. What either of them wanted or would like to have in the future was forgotten. All in all a lose-lose.
This is one extreme, the other is no feedback at all. I’ve worked on projects where the team wasn’t given the opportunity to meet, review or give each other structured feedback. The result is then misunderstanding and bottled up tension which reduces the team motivation, leads to lost opportunities for improvements and more unhappiness.
Compare this to how we code. The aim of continuous integration and automated test and deployment is to try and get feedback as fast as possible. The…
