Feedback Fallacy
The belief of the necessity of feedback is based on three beliefs all of which are wrong.
- I am a source of truth about you
- Learning for you is filling up the empty vessel
- Excellence can be defined in advance in isolation from the person being excellent.
All of those above mentioned beliefs are wrong. Starting with the third one, excellence can’t be defined in advance from the person being excellent. For instance, if you look at Sarah Silverman, you may think she has rude and sort of weird way as a standup comedian. Umer Sharif and Chris Roc could be something else, and Jerry Seinfeld has different style.
What you realize is you can’t extricate the excellence from the person being excellent. Excellence is interwoven with the person being it.
Secondly, learning is insight and insight is as brain scientists say “a feeling of knowingness generated from within.” Learning, neuroscientifically, is building new buds on existing branch. Therefore, learning for you is taking existing patterns within you and helping you find some new flash of insight, some new bud that helps you with the existing pattern that lives within you.
Hence, what do you need from me? You don’t have to need me to tell you where you are failing to match up to some pre-existing measure of excellence, you basically need my reaction. I tell you what; I am not a source of truth about who you are. I am not a source of truth about what you should do. I am basically a source of truth about my reaction to you. For instance; I can tell you why I fell asleep in your presentation and then your job is to take my reaction and weave into some insight that can build upon what you already know and what worked for you in the past. Let’s put feedback aside and instead, let’s give them what they truly need is instinctive and considered reaction to what really works.
Feedback lit up a fight or flight response in sympathetic nervous system, which impairs learning rather than impelling it. Secondly, it imagines, learning is a question of telling you what you can’t do rather than helping you understand in more detail what worked for you. And thirdly, excellence is the same for everyone where as the lesson from the real world is that excellence is profoundly and wonderfully different for each of us.
