One aspect I looked at this week is feedback in our lives, more specifically, feedback in the workplace. My goal was to understand why we are so hesitant to give and receive feedback. Without feedback, a workplace or its employees cannot be successful. Feedback isn’t just a ritual of the modern workplace. It’s the way in which organisms have adapted to survive. According to Tom Stafford, feedback is the essence of intelligence. The words organism and organization share a Latin root. Feedback enables the organism to flourish, in the same way, it enables organizations to succeed. An organism relies on feedback from its environment in order to understand how to adjust so that it can survive. The same is true for an underperforming department that faces being shut down if they don’t find a new way to operate. In both cases, feedback is what keeps organisms and organizations, alive and functioning.

Research has found roughly 87 percent of employees want to “be developed” in their job, but only a third report actually receiving the feedback they need to engage and improve. This is because in our culture feedback conversations are not seen as pleasant, rather they are experienced as a threat to our existence. Different companies have devised a range of tactics to repair their feedback systems. There is the popular sandwich model, one criticism in between two compliments. The hope of this is to not threaten the employee while still offering guidance. There are other methods such as the start, stop, continue method. However, a lot of research argues against all of these approaches. Instead, we just need to develop a culture of asking for feedback.

Modern humans base their decisions on many of the same social impulses that our ancestors used millennia ago. When neuroscientists conduct brain scans of people exposed to social threats, the resulting images look just like the scans of people exposed to physical threats. No matter if we’re giving a speech to thousands or in a battle with a lion, our body’s response is the same.
Feedback conversations, as they exist today, activate this social threat response. In West and Thorson’s study, participants’ heart rates jumped as much as 50 percent during feedback conversations. Similar spikes have been found during some of the most anxiety-producing tasks, such as public speaking. Even if people hear the information being given to them, they most likely won’t fully take it in, because social threats can create cognitive dissonance. People have been shown to more often reject information they don’t agree with when they are in a threat state because their goal is self-preservation. All in all, if feedback conversations are going to be productive, we must begin with the goal of minimizing the threat response.