Feedback is information. This information is fundamental to learning and adaptation in the pursuit, attainment, and maintenance of goals. Broadly speaking feedback can be understood as data about deviation from or adherence to a standard or goal state. This is true whether we’re talking about a frog regulating body temperature or a factory worker chasing production quotas.
Feedback is also a process. As such, it involves the monitoring, interpreting, and acting on feedback content. The process is not as straight-forward as this statement might indicate. The wide-ranging nature of our goals (physiological, psychological, work-related, personal, conscious and nonconscious, etc.), the potential for goal conflicts, the volume of incoming information, and the organizational systems in which goals operate, all complicate the feedback process.
Despite general awareness of these complications, we tend to treat feedback as if it were a simple cause and effect progression. The manager provides the feedback and the subordinate improves. If the employee fails to improve, while some initial attention may be directed to the message content and/or delivery style, focus shifts quickly back to the motivation or ability of the subordinate. Rarely do we examine the feedback process itself or the organizational systems in which these processes operate.
To be clear, there are employees with motivation or ability problems just as there are managers who are unable to provide actionable feedback. Not every situation can be remedied. Nor am I suggesting that there is some yet-to-be discovered secret sauce that will make feedback an easily executable and flawless process.
What I am saying is that feedback processes are complex operations functioning within complex organizational systems. This makes me wonder sometimes if organizational practices have kept pace with the over one-hundred years of feedback research. Are we stuck in a nineteenth-century mindset trying to manage twenty-first century workplaces?
More and more, jobs today rely on the intellectual capacity of the employee to define at least some portion of the work itself. Output measures may not exist or, at least, they evolve as efforts shift from imagining the work, to designing and developing something that can be produced. It’s not unusual today for managers to be geographically separated from employees. Many employees work on several, matrixed teams with little clear line-of-sight management. Due to the highly technical and creative nature of the work, managers may only understand the work they supervise at an abstract, general level. I could go on but you get the picture.
This is the environment I reflect on as I read about feedback research and theorizing. Reflections in this web log will likely be more expository, at least initially, as I sort through the multiple perspectives on the topic. Feedback research arises out of a variety of orientations, so I have no blue print or no set plan in terms of how content might flow. Initially, I may jump around. One time looking at it from a learning perspective, later one from the perspective of communication. As things move along, I hope to generate charts or models to assist me (and any reader) in visualizing the content and concepts discussed. I suppose only time will tell. Right now I’m not asking for feedback.