Got feedback?
Are you getting enough feedback? How detailed is it?
One of the key premises of “deliberate practice” is that its practitioners — think Tiger Woods or Yitzhak Perlman — thrive on continuous, fine-grained feedback. It’s not enough for Woods to think that he hit a bad shot, or for Perlman to think that a phrase of Bach he played wasn’t fluid enough. They want to know exactly what went amiss so that they can improve it.
(If you’re new to the topic of “deliberate practice,” you might want to start here.)
Hard as it is for anyone to perform at the level of Woods or Perlman, in a sense those two men have it easier than many businesspeople, who often don’t know ahead of time what their feedback is going to look or feel or sound like. For many people in business, feedback isn’t nearly as easy to discern as a sliced 3-iron or a flatted quarter-note.
Sure, sometimes you can tell when you blow a sales call. You can tell when the prototype of your new product doesn’t work. And you can certainly tell if you miss a revenue number. But do you know why?
We’re often left to guess. We pick up all the messy pieces and try to figure out what went wrong, even though we often don’t know — can’t know — all the factors in play.
Given these realities, we may never be able to enjoy feedback as instant or granular as musicians and athletes get. So what do we do? What feedback can we get? And how can we put that feedback to use?
I have some ideas of my own that I’ll lay out in a separate post. But right now I’d like to round out my thinking about this by hearing from you:
What do YOU do to collect and use relevant feedback in YOUR work?
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Photo by Marcin Wichary, used under a Creative Commons license.
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I try to keep the lines of communication open during the project, constantly asking questions, doing my own litmus tests to see if I am on track. As a writer, I don’t like to share uncompleted work but there are ways to cross some t’s before “D Day.” Call the client, ask and re-ask for direction, ask questions when they arise, not after, ask if there is anything new that you may have overlooked, etc. Good results depend first on you. It doesn’t always guarantee success but it sure helps!
Currently transitioning a company’s website from text to video. Just made a short one of the principal introducing the business, to be placed on the homepage. After finishing an initial cut, I uploaded it to the company’s shared drive, then sent out an e-mail to the thirty-odd employees asking for feedback. Nine responded, most with only one point of criticism, a couple with merely “good job.” Although, I did receive one very detailed, very helpful critique from someone whose opinion I’ve come to value.
In business, my experience has been that there are two challenges with feedback: getting any; getting quality. Which, now that I think of it, has been my same experience with love-making.
You get at a key issue, Bert: deliberate practice — or whatever you want to call constant, purposeful improvement — requires steady feedback. But if you’re not getting *any* feeback, or if it’s too sporadic, how can you improve?
My working hypothesis is that you have to give *yourself* feedback. That is, you must come up with ways that you can monitor yourself, quantitatively and qualitatively. What do you think?
(I’ll leave the love-making analogy alone!)
[...] Got feedback? by Tim Walker on Hoover’s Business Insight Zone [...]
@Tim,
In doing deliberate practice the last few months to get better at video production, most of my improvement has come from self-monitoring.
My project initially was to create customer testimonial videos, so I searched through YouTube to find the best ones with the highest quality production values. Along with that, I did search engine research, finding informative resources about the topic. Armed with best-of-breed examples and how-to guides, I started making my own, evaluating each one after completion, then using the research to figure out what new technique/piece of equipment/software, etc. was necessary to step up my production toward the examples. Some aspects were quantitative (outputting in HD parameters), while others were qualitative (choice of camera angles).
The key to my relatively rapid improvement has been, week to week, pushing myself to learn and implement something new that addresses an existing weakness. To use business-speak, I guess you’d say I’ve been best practice benchmarking. To use Kanye West-speak, I’ve been getting better, faster, stronger.
Sounds like a great approach, Bert. I especially like the combination of qualitative and quantitative elements.