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I often talk about iteration. In iterating something… I even think that sometimes I mention this word too often.
If I had to define a top 3 of words that have the most meaning and importance to me, feedback would be one of them. I want to believe that at the heart of the iteration model is feedback. I also believe that we human beings evolve because we are given feedback and because we give ourselves feedback.
I am a nag. I often ask a small group of people what they think of this and that. Examples:
Email from March 11, 2015 – Sent to 45 people
Subject: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Email from June 6, 2014 – Sent to 60 people
Subject: CustDev Naming – Tourism Project – Help Request
Examples of friends who do it too:
Email of April 2015 from Ricardo Martins of Origamind to his contacts
Subject: What do you think of this video and what does it convey to you?
This result is very powerful. SUPER POWERFUL! It helps immensely whatever we are doing….
There is one big catch. We usually don’t like to receive feedback… Why?
I myself have on a few occasions been very saddened and discouraged by the feedback I have received, calling into question many of my assumptions. It is hard to hear that my baby is ugly. But there you go, if it’s hard it’s pretty good!
How can we maximize the value of feedback?
1) Ask open-ended questions – We have one mouth and two ears. We should ask and listen. Have some questions prepared to let the people giving feedback talk freely.
2) record via audio/video – It’s so interesting and there’s so much juice in the feedback we get that sometimes we don’t have time to write down everything they tell us. It’s better to record. I use opinion to do this.
3) Don’t ask family and friends for their opinion – I don’t like to be “patted on the back”. I like real, genuine feedback. What I’ve learned over time is that often family and friends, because they only want our good, don’t tell us everything we need to hear. Getting feedback from people we don’t know is very powerful, because it gets out of our comfort zone and it’s real, it’s raw.
I always appreciate feedback, no matter how bad it may seem to me. It’s a privilege to make other people’s time available to help us grow…
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