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Rarely a day goes by that I don’t look out of my window to notice a car travelling east down my quiet little street. That is unremarkable, you might think — except that the street is one-way, running west. The street doesn’t function as a cut-through, so my guess is that these drivers aren’t flouting the rules. They’ve just failed to realise they’re making a mistake.
And why would they realise? I’ve noticed something curious about one-way street signs in the UK. If you’re driving the right way, you will notice white arrows on a blue background indicating as much.
But if you’re driving the wrong way? Nothing. If you miss the No Entry sign at the start of the street, there are no “stop, turn around, this is potentially a disaster” signs. Instead you must notice subtle clues — like the alignment of the cars parked on the side of the road, or perhaps the expression on the face of the oncoming driver. This is a curious design decision, it seems to me. Of two drivers heading towards each other down a one-way street, surely it is the one driving the wrong way who is most sorely in need of feedback.
Yet perhaps the one-way street is a good preparation for life, which many of us must navigate like a series of one-way streets. When we’re doing it right, we can expect regular nods of empty approval: “This is great.” “Good job.” “So useful.” When we’re doing it wrong? Silence, rarely but rudely punctuated by the crunch of a car crash. It is unusual to get a focused note of timely, specific and usable criticism before things go too badly wrong.
Sometimes the signs are in front of us, but we avert our eyes. In 2019, two researchers at Chicago’s Booth school of management, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach, published an article presenting several studies of the effect of feedback on learning, in which subjects were offered two plausible answers to a difficult question, and invited to pick one. In most cases, this was a guess, and a toss-up.
After 10 answers, the subjects were either shown all the answers they had got right, or shown all the answers they had got wrong. Logically speaking, since these were all binary questions, that amounts to the same thing. But Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach found that the emotional framing mattered. When people were shown their successes, they learnt — and did better on a follow-up test with tweaked but related questions. When people were shown their failures, they did not improve.
The researchers suggest that people don’t much care to contemplate their errors, and so are quick to move on and forget — especially in an experiment such as this, when the consequences of further errors are trivial. When shown their successes, they pause to savour the moment. This may help to explain why so many of us are faced with the one-way-street problem: everyone is happy to share a friendly word of reassurance, but few people are keen to offer criticism, even when specifically requested.
So what to do? One tactic is to ask for advice, instead of feedback. A Harvard Business School working paper written by Hayley Blunden and colleagues finds that when people ask for advice, it tends to prompt more useful comments: critical, actionable and focused on the potential for future improvements.
A second approach involves a neat two-step, demonstrated by author and psychologist Adam Grant. I interviewed him on stage a few months ago, and we had a great time. Afterwards, he asked me for marks out of 10 for our performance. Oh, nine and a half, I suggested. (There’s always room for improvement, right?) In a flash, the eager follow-up question: “What would have made it a 10?” Clever. If he’d just asked for my comments I’d have told him — truthfully — that I thought he was superb. But having persuaded me to admit that there was some fractional room for improvement, I then had to think about how.
Sensible organisations will try to make constructive feedback a routine matter. This column is read by several colleagues with the aim of preventing typos, non-sequiturs, libel and clichés. My Cautionary Tales podcast episodes go through a paper edit, and then a “table read” in which the team will identify confusing passages and suggest ways to enliven the storytelling. Because these sessions are focused on a piece of writing, not a person, and suggest improvements at a safe moment, they tend to be simple, straightforward and even fun.
But constructive feedback of a more general nature remains elusive. One idea I’ve played with recently has become popular in tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons — it’s called “stars and wishes”. Running a good game requires a huge variety of skills and plenty of quick thinking, and nobody is ever perfect. So after running a game I sometimes ask the players for their “stars”, which are moments which they particularly enjoyed, and “wishes”, which are things they’d like to see in the next session. Wishes open up a friendly space for constructive, actionable ideas. Not everyone responds and not every response is useful. Still, I learn a lot more when I ask than when I don’t.
I’m not sure how your boss would respond to a request for “stars and wishes”, but the spirit is the right one. If we want timely, useful criticism from others, we must be clever in how we ask for it. Otherwise our colleagues will be as tactfully uncommunicative as those non-existent signs for those driving the wrong way down my street.
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