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The Feedback Fallacy

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Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#41

Post by tomnipotent »

ummonk wrote: post #36

The part about pain isn’t actually necessarily true. When I was recovering from surgery, they would ask “on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst possible pain, how much pain are you feeling?” I imagined how excruciatingly bad the worst possible pain would be and rated my pain a 2. When my pain went up to a self-reported 3, the nurses were surprised to find me crying from the pain... Not everyone interprets the sc…

> Not everyone interprets the scale the same way...

That's the exact point the author was making with this example. A doctor cannot normalize pain ratings across patients, and has to rely on each patient scoring their own pain relative to their own experiences. Your 2/10 could be 7/10 for someone else - all that matters is that you have a measurement stick to compare pain for yourself, so that medical staff know that your 3/10 is more than your 2/10.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#42

Post by on_and_off »

smacktoward wrote: post #7

When I hear people talking up their policy of > “encouraging harsh feedback” and subjecting workers to “intense and awkward” real-time 360s ... I can't help but think how much a review there sounds like a capitalist version of a Maoist "struggle session" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session ). The point of a struggle session wasn't to build people up; it was to tear them down. A culture where the way y…

So far, all of the people I know that have been boasting about their "I gave brutally honest feedback" only mean "I will tear you down at every opportunity".

It is always "brutaly honest when it comes to put people down, but weirdly enough, these same person never have positive feedback to give.

Even if it was the case, it would not be worth it. Even as a foreigner weirded out by the "everything is awesome" way of speaking in California, tearing down your colleagues is not how you build a healthy team.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#43

Post by chadcmulligan »

managers spend way too much time on trying to get inside their employees head and fiddle around imho, they really don't have the skills or training. if they spent this time on actually helping do the work in terms of what's needed and wanted so everyone could just go home then the world would be a much better place.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#44

Post by dredmorbius »

ehmish wrote: post #4
klenwell wrote: post #3

I like the simple actionable advice near the end in the "Explore the present, past, and future" section. The authors' biographies just below that caught my attention: Ashley Goodall is the senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco Systems and a coauthor of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World Cisco Systems is the kind of giant multinational conglomerate that I…

Ever since I read McKinsey's "in search of excellence" I've been a bit skeptical of these sort of "to run your company better just follow this one weird trick" pieces. The book when I read it was quite convincing, but when I read the results of the companies cited as "excellent" by the book later on, about half had gone bankrupt or otherwise ceased trading! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Excellence

Good to Great suffers similarly:

Steven D. Levitt noted that some of the companies selected as "great" have since gotten into serious trouble, such as Circuit City and Fannie Mae, while only Nucor had "dramatically outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay". He further states that investing in the portfolio of the 11 companies covered by the book, in the year of 2001, would actually result in underperforming the S&P 500. Levitt concludes that books like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the future."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great#Response

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#45

Post by hinkley »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #11
smacktoward wrote: post #7

When I hear people talking up their policy of > “encouraging harsh feedback” and subjecting workers to “intense and awkward” real-time 360s ... I can't help but think how much a review there sounds like a capitalist version of a Maoist "struggle session" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session ). The point of a struggle session wasn't to build people up; it was to tear them down. A culture where the way y…

I would be ok with harsh feedback if that were acceptable also upwards and taken seriously. But most of the time it only goes down or sideways. Feedback up the chain is not being taken seriously.

Horizontal aggression.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#46

Post by itsdrewmiller »

borramakot wrote: post #17
whatshisface wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is arguing that the real signal is zero and the systematic error is large, so you will always end up converging on a repeatable but useless value. Technically, taking only one sample could have gotten you closer because there is a 50% chance that the random error would have gone in the opposite direction to the systemic error, although the author is wrong to phrase that like it's some kind of advantage, be…

They say later that > When a feedback instrument surveys eight colleagues about your business acumen, your score of 3.79 is far greater a distortion than if it simply surveyed one person about you—the 3.79 number is all noise, no signal. Which implies to me that they believe there is signal there, but that it goes away when aggregated?

I think by "surveyed" they don't mean "asked one person for a score" but rather got some overall information from one person including their qualitative feelings and perceptions. There is signal in those as they discuss elsewhere in the article, but the quantitative rating allegedly has no value even when averaging. That's the charitable reading, anyway.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#47

Post by jSully24 »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #43

managers spend way too much time on trying to get inside their employees head and fiddle around imho, they really don't have the skills or training. if they spent this time on actually helping do the work in terms of what's needed and wanted so everyone could just go home then the world would be a much better place.

“...if they spent this time on actually helping do the work in terms of what's needed and wanted“

Is what good managers do.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#48

Post by chadcmulligan »

jSully24 wrote: post #47
chadcmulligan wrote: post #43

managers spend way too much time on trying to get inside their employees head and fiddle around imho, they really don't have the skills or training. if they spent this time on actually helping do the work in terms of what's needed and wanted so everyone could just go home then the world would be a much better place.

“...if they spent this time on actually helping do the work in terms of what's needed and wanted“ Is what good managers do.

sadly, they are rare in my experience

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#49

Post by peisistratos »

smacktoward wrote: post #7

When I hear people talking up their policy of > “encouraging harsh feedback” and subjecting workers to “intense and awkward” real-time 360s ... I can't help but think how much a review there sounds like a capitalist version of a Maoist "struggle session" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session ). The point of a struggle session wasn't to build people up; it was to tear them down. A culture where the way y…

Struggle sessions aren't analogous, as they were held against class enemies (out-group). More akin are the self-criticism sessions that Maoist cadre held. Communist cadre criticized themselves. Which, if you want another analogy stretching backward, would be confession in the Roman Catholic church.

Tangentially, struggle sessions only arose to prominence during the Cultural Revolution. The main criticism of class enemies were the Speak Bitterness sessions of the 1940s, where communist cadre would facilitate a village's peasants criticism of its landlords. Despite the notion that communist cadre were instigating violence, most of Mao's letters were to cadre who were taken aback by peasant's (sometimes fatal) violence toward long hated landlords, Japanese collaborators etc.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#50

Post by _y5hn »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #48
jSully24 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“...if they spent this time on actually helping do the work in terms of what's needed and wanted“ Is what good managers do.

sadly, they are rare in my experience

They get told to fuck off.. Sort of employees own fault.

Cooperation require peers to do well, as well.

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