As soon as possible but not too soon

This is the third part of my epic on feedback. In the first part we looked into why feedback is so important. The second part discussed why feedback should be candid but nice. This time I will write a bit about timing. Why is timing so important? Because we still have some problems inherited from the times we where welcome dinner for animals that mostly died out today:

Do you remember the Greenpeace advertisements on the greenhouse effect in the early nineties (or where it the late eighties?)? They showed us a frog in a glass bowl. First they spilled some boiling water into the bowl and the frog of course immediately jumped out of the bowl. - Cut – Then again: the same start position, a frog in a bowl of water. Now they put a small gas burner under the bowl. No reaction from the frog. – Cut – Then they said that if you gradually heat up the water, the frog will actually get boiled (and the parallels to humanity and the greenhouse effect are obvious). Well, I don’t know if the frog thing is actually a fact or myst, but timing is VERY important when it comes to feedback.

Studies show that the farther away the feedback you get is from the actual action the less probable it is people realize the connection between the events and therefore will learn from it. Another example (from the great book “The fifth discipline” which in my opinion everybody should have to read) that you might have run into already: You might on some of your holiday trips have had the following problem: You take a shower and the water is much to cold. So you turn up the temperature a bit. Well it still is cold. Then again, you turn the temperature a bit up. Same result, it is too cold. Next action, you turn the temperature up again, this time a bit more. What happens: the water after a few seconds comes out boiling. So you take the counteraction (jump out of the shower and turn down the temperature a bit, nothing happens, you turn it down a bit further and ….).

So what happened? There was just a time lag between your action (turning up the temperature) and the reaction/feedback (water gets warmer). You just didn’t know. Another “real” example from the fifth discipline book: headache. Sometimes when people have bad headache they take some aspirin. Well of course aspirin takes some time to help. But often people get frustrated that the headache doesn’t get away fast enough, so they take another aspirin, which of course is the wrong reaction. The examples are numerous…

Why is fast feedback so important for us? Because we are biologically optimized on short term threats. If some wild animal tries to take you as little snack it is not a very good thing to worry about your next Christmas presents. So in the wild, we always prioritize short term threats over long term effects. That’s why we just don’t see connections if the time between action and reaction is to long. The funny thing, it is even difficult if we get told, that there is a connection (remember the example greenhouse effect).

So try to give your feedback as soon as possible. But then again not too early. Remember my last posting. If your feedback hurts it will not work. So, if you are in an emotionally heated debate it is not a very good time to give feedback. If you want to give the feedback in front of some fellow workers and therefore embarrass the feedback receiver it is not a good time to give feedback. Then it is much better to wait. But not too long. Always remember the goal of your feedback. You want to receiver to accept and react on your feedback. So try to optimize your part of the game…

That ends my three part feedback blog series. Of course there is some much more on the topic I can’t write here. Giving and getting feedback is tough and a thing we can optimize for our whole live I guess. And in my opinion it is important enough to do so!

Ciao Alex