an industry around delivering good feedback, such as the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) framework, and these things are useful guide rails for giving feedback. In particular, I think they’re the sort of thing you can actively practice for three months (e.g. spend time proactively framing every piece of your feedback this way) and reflexively deploy without much effort from that point onward. However, I see them get misused in two different ways.

First, often folks never really get comfortable with them and end up viewing them as “too heavy to apply quickly” so they start pocketing more and more feedback rather than delivering it. This is often net-negative because these trainings trying to help deliver better feedback result in folks getting significantly less feedback. If this seems surprising, then draw the Econ 101 supply/demand chart, and model the impact of the price of delivering feedback going up: the supply will naturally go down at any given point on the line.

Second, I see folks reject feedback because they don’t like how it was delivered. Essentially, they become feedback lawyers who fixate on the weakness in how feedback was delivered rather than trying to understand the content within the feedback itself. This lets someone feel justified in ignoring feedback because it wasn’t properly formatted, but doesn’t accomplish anything other than discouraging future feedback. Again, if we look at the impact of this behavior, it’s just shifting the demand curve on the Econ 101 chart down, once again resulting in less feedback.

The advice I give to people is that feedback recipients are obligated to extract the kernel of insight from feedback, even if it isn’t well delivered. Other approaches might feel better short term, but they don’t work.