I’m becoming increasingly obsessed with the whole concept of professional feedback because, done well, it’s the fastest way to learn and grow and advance. A lot of this is sparked by playing around with Rypple and trying to figure out how to make the best use of that system — but the basic idea of soliciting regular, lightweight, specific, and concrete feedback strikes me as a fundamentally solid idea. It’s sort of the personal development version of “release early, release often,” in a way, with a dash of “given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow” thrown in for good measure. Um, to possibly stretch the metaphor.
Anyhow, the problem is that it turns out that asking for and giving feedback can be difficult. Asking a good question is a lot harder than I thought, and giving useful and constructive feedback is complicated by a whole variety of factors. I generally learn by reading, so I’ve started digging around and reading as much as I can about feedback. I figured I’d start linking to the interesting stuff I find, in case other people might find it useful as well.
A bunch of this first batch are from the Rypple weblog, which is a good place to poke around — there’s lots of interesting stuff over there.
- Good vs. Bad Questions (Rypple)
- How to avoid dead-end questions (Rypple)
- How will I be perceived if I ask for feedback? (Rypple)
- Good feedback, bad feedback (Rypple)
- The double meaning of ‘feedback’ (HBR)
- Find the gold in toxic feedback (HBR)