Give feedforward instead of feedback
These are the three things we typically focus on when we give feedback:
Here's what you did wrong
Here's what you should have done
Don't do that wrong thing again
Notice how it is completely focused on the past, and specifically on the wrongs of the past and preventing those wrongs. It is clear who is to blame for what happened - us who did the wrong thing.
We don't even realize that we're doing this. It's how most of our teachers taught us. It's what we expect conductors to do when leading musicians. Tell us what we did wrong.
Sure, we can improve by knowing what we did wrong. We also dwell on the past and we are distracted by the blame we feel. We feel uncomfortable and have an urge to come up with a defensive response. All this inhibits us from focusing 100% toward the future and on getting better.
An alternative to feedback is feedforward, an idea I first heard from Marshall Goldsmith a couple years ago:
Instead of articulating what we did wrong in the past, feedforward focuses attention on how you can do it better in the future. Feedforward is suggestions and ideas that are offered with the sole intention of providing insight into what can be done in the future. Blame or judgment for what happened in the past does not exist in feedforward.
For the receiver of feedforward, Goldsmith encourages them to "just say thank you." He says that we don't get to judge the quality of the feedforward because it is aimed to help us improve. We can choose to take only the ideas that work for us. Also, if all we need to say is "thank you", we can focus on actually listening to the suggestion without the distraction of needing to respond.
Goldsmith says feedforward works because of several things:
We can change the future, but not the past.
It works because helping people be right is more productive than proving them wrong.
It focuses on solutions, not problems.
People don't take it as personally. It doesn't put anyone down.
***
A few days after I learned about feedforward, I attempted to implement it into my orchestra at Oberlin to see what would happen.
I was going into a recording session for a piece that was challenging for the orchestra. We did not have live audiences, so our recording was going to be the performance. I had 45 minutes to record a performance of the 8-minute work.
What I usually would have done is to identify a list of spots I want to rehearse before I attempted a run-through. And that run would reveal more spots, which I'll fix and hopefully will get to run the piece once more at the end of the rehearsal segment.
Sounds like a pretty normal plan. Instead of doing that, I decided to try feedforward:
I asked the musicians to take their music and partner up with someone else in the orchestra. I instructed the musicians to each share with their partner a challenging spot where they want to do better. Their partner's task was to offer feedforward - suggestions and ideas on what might help them do better. The comments were to be future-oriented - what they can do going forward. They were asked to not focus on correcting mistakes from the past. The receivers of feedforward were asked to simply say "thank you." Then the pairs would reverse roles and repeat the process.
I gave them 3-4 minutes to do this. During these minutes, a part of me was afraid that I was wasting precious rehearsal time with this activity. I knew what the issues were, probably better than the musicians. I knew what needed to be fixed. Wouldn't it be more efficient if I just took the reins and rehearsed those spots?
After the feedforward exercise, I went straight into a run-through without rehearsing my spots. I was curious to see what would happen.
To my surprise, all of the spots I had on my initial list were non-issues. These were challenges the orchestra had every rehearsal previously. We always had to stop in those places. In this run, those spots were all markedly better. I didn't need to rehearse anything. We started the rehearsal at a higher bar than we left things in the last rehearsal - just after 4 minutes of feedforward.
***
I was so intrigued by this experiment. Was the improvement because of the feedforward or did we just get lucky? Could it be that those 4 minutes spent on feedforward were actually more efficient than the 10 or 15 minutes of me rehearsing all my spots one by one?
I thought more about maybe why we didn't just get lucky:
The feedforward brought the challenges to the fore for the musicians. This allowed them to anticipate those problem spots before they went into the run-through.
The feedforward didn't make them feel apprehensive about the challenge spots because it didn't focus on how they made mistakes in the past. It gave them motivation with specific action steps they could implement immediately in the run-through.
The feedforward also made them realize that they are capable of producing solutions for their own problems. Instead of waiting for the conductor to say what to do, the exercise probably made them realize that if they can give suggestions for their peers, they probably are fully able to help themselves too. It gave them the opportunity to be independent-thinking musicians who regained some control of their work.
In addition to bettering our performance, I realized that we also created a space for increased musician autonomy and control.
I wonder what else we might discover when we choose feedforward instead of feedback more often?
More on feedforward from Marshall Goldsmith.
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