Some Feedback About Feedback

New research digs into the fallacies about ‘open feedback’

In The Feedback Fallacy, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall wonder (paywall) how should we give and receive feedback, and they question the inherent goodness of feedback, and the unexamined premises that underlie our obsession with it.

To be clear, instruction — telling people what steps to follow or what factual knowledge they’re lacking — can be truly useful: That’s why we have checklists in airplane cockpits and, more recently, in operating rooms. There is indeed a right way for a nurse to give an injection safely, and if you as a novice nurse miss one of the steps, or if you’re unaware of critical facts about a patient’s condition, then someone should tell you. But the occasions when the actions or knowledge necessary to minimally perform a job can be objectively defined in advance are rare and becoming rarer. What we mean by “feedback” is very different. Feedback is about telling people what we think of their performance and how they should do it better — whether they’re giving an effective presentation, leading a team, or creating a strategy. And on that, the research is clear: Telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning.

They lay out the problems behind feedback. First:

Humans are unreliable raters of other humans. Over the past 40 years psychometricians have…