The Story I am Telling Myself
Over the last 18 months, I have been working closely with schools to dive deeply into systems of feedback and build the capacity in leaders to give and receive feedback skillfully. To the extent that there are common themes, schools and school leaders agree that we need:
Clear, consistent and simple systems that help people provide feedback and attention to those they work with.
Ways to discuss hard things, and address problems or the perception of problems.
To reflect on, unlearn, and re-imagine the way we give feedback, and also the way we receive feedback or seek it out.
To name the tension we are managing in schools: people are craving the attention associated with feedback, but when feedback feels critical, both parties shy away from doing it regularly.
So, as I have thought about L+D’s focus on storytelling, I thought it might be helpful to name something that is both simple and clear, but also not openly discussed:
Most of what we think of as feedback is just stories we make up about other people or their work, and we are usually more wrong than right when telling ourselves those stories.
Feedback: Objective information that a colleague can share with others. This is information that can be seen, heard or observed objectively. A simple example might be: Today, four parents called to complain to me about how the morning carline was working.
Judgment: Sense making (i.e. making up a story) that a person responsible for providing feedback makes up in their head about the feedback. A simple example might be something like: Carline this morning was a nightmare, and it was because of the way we lined cars up in the firelane.
Educators aren’t the only ones who are conditioned to conflate these two distinctly different ways of engaging with others. When we share both feedback and judgment as one thing with the intention of being helpful, we implicitly reinforce the idea that there is one true story about reality. This is what Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie called The Danger of a Single Story.
Why do we need to separate feedback from judgment, and why do we need to allow for multiple stories?
First, we live in a world marked by adaptive challenges that wouldn’t even exist in a world where there was only one story. A real life example of this is the challenge of adding diversity in the school environment. This type of challenge is fraught because of the complexity associated with the many conflicting stories, judgments and getting to a shared goal or common understanding of reality is an ongoing, moving target. Our tendency to mix judgment and feedback makes it even harder to face these types of challenges. People addressing adaptive challenges experience this as conflict with others or between others, when in fact, they are simply telling or being exposed to different stories about the same observable data. The more complex and adaptive a challenge, the more diversity of thinking is needed to solve it, and diversity only thrives in environments that can tolerate the dissonance of multiple truths meeting each other in a container that doesn’t require or encourage one to assert dominance over the other.
Second, separating feedback from judgment shifts the role of sensemaking to the person who is receiving the feedback, where it belongs. This is critical because they’re the one responsible for actually doing something with the feedback, and it also minimizes the chance that they will feel judged inaccurately and therefore reflexively defend themselves.
Third, this becomes even more important when you add positional power or institutional authority to this dynamic. People resist feedback when the feedback giver asserts a single story – theirs – as the single truth. When it feels like that story is being imposed upon them by people in power, they defend. There is no learning in defense. Further, when an institution operationalizes single story judgment as a practice or policy, it inadvertently also operationalizes human resistance to being controlled. We should avoid this because it doesn’t yield the positive impacts people want, and the human need to defend is stronger and lower on Maslows’s hierarchy of needs than the human need to grow and self-actualize.
When separated, feedback and judgment can be used intentionally to build agency and choice, and when a school can operationalize agency, choice, and the human connection built through skillful exchange of dissonant ideas, we have the opportunity to create a culture of learning. This culture, when tended, is the soil capable of growing creativity. Creativity capable of rising to even the most complex and adaptive challenges.
If you are reading this as a school leader, how might you use this information?
Train feedback givers on how to separate their judgments from their objective feedback, and help them build a deep and practiced skill set in how to share both in a way that empowers the feedback receiver to decide how to proceed. Agency should always be the goal of great feedback, not control or compliance, and this separation between judgment and feedback allows the receiver to focus on what they can control, using the information contained in the feedback to make choices.
Train receivers to ask for others’ stories, and then wonder with their supervisors about the different stories that revolve around their work.
Make different stories about the same data visible, so that communities can wonder together about the diversity of thinking around a shared experience. It is human nature to fear what we do not understand and like any other irrational fear, the best cure is skillfully facilitated exposure to differences that people choose to engage with.
Provide language and sentence starters to punctuate this point:
“The story I am telling myself about _____ is _______, what do you make of ________?
Here is what I am thinking about _______, how do you see it, and do you see any ways I might be seeing this inaccurately from your vantage point?”
Given that ___________ (insert facts), why do you think this is happening, and what do you think needs to happen next?
Now that you have heard the feedback (facts only), how are you feeling, what are you thinking, and what is helpful as you decide how to proceed?
Even though I am probably wrong, is it helpful to hear what my brain does with what we are hearing?
What do you think will happen if you do nothing about ___________ (insert feedback).
You don’t need an advanced degree to observe that if there are thousands of people, there are thousands of stories. It is human nature to believe we are right, and that our judgments are helpful, and while this might be true, it is less true than we think.
We could all stand to become better skeptics of our own story – and in doing so, build cultures of learning, agency and creativity to replace old systems of control, compliance and majority-driven group think. We would love to hear the story you are telling yourself.
