The Skill That Builds All Others

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Episode Transcript

When I was training as a mixed martial artist, feedback was how I got better a coach or training partners, pointing out how I telegraph my jab, or showing me a better way to set up a triangle choke. When I was writing poetry and essays, it was an editor marking up a draft or seeing readers in a workshop furrow their brows in confusion. Deadlifts, public speaking, meditation, being a better partner, leading a team at Cisco in every single domain where I improved feedback was the mechanism.

And the feedback came in many different forms. Sometimes it was literally words said directly to me. At other times it was someone standing beside me and showing me something. Sometimes it was me noticing I was getting better or worse at something, and then course correcting or doubling down based on those noticings.

At other times, it was just me observing other people who were great at something, even by watching their YouTube videos and trying to mimic some element of what they do. All of that, all of those forms are feedback. Many people claim that learning is the skill that builds all other skills. I understand where they’re coming from, but I believe feedback sits deeper than learning.

It’s the process for how we learn. Learning is great and needed, but we can’t learn if we haven’t learned how to learn. That’s the prerequisite, but that can feel super abstract. I call it feedback literacy, and to make it less abstract, I’ve poured through the research, tested my ideas with thousands of people, and mapped out what I see as the five most important elements of it.

Seeking feedback, receiving feedback, processing feedback, using feedback, and giving feedback. I first started noticing the skill by looking backward across my own life. And eventually expanding my curiosity to others. Why do some people who want to grow personally or professionally make progress while others don’t?

I believe feedback literacy is one of the primary roots. I first encountered the term in some great academic papers, one by Paul Sutton and Wendy Gill, writing about how students engage with feedback in educational settings, and then sticking with the teacher student relationship, David Carless and David Boud, refined the idea further.

But I kept thinking all of this lives entirely in the student teacher relationship. What about the manager and the direct report, the athlete and the coach, the parent and the child, two peers, the pianist, the baseball player, the Pokemon card collector, and on and on. Feedback happens everywhere human beings are trying to get better at something is basically everywhere.

So I started expanding and developing my own framework. Tested it with hundreds of my colleagues at Cisco and, in workshops with a range of folks from 13-year-old middle school students to MBA students, some with over 20 years of ex of work experience. Eventually, it frustrated me that if feedback literacy is a set of learnable skills, perhaps the most important set of learnable skills for anybody who wants to improve in anything, why aren’t there any tools really available to help people develop them?

So I went for it. Later this year, i’m launching the feedback deck. It is 50 evidence-based cards, 10 cards for each of those five components, designed to make these skills accessible, maybe even fun to learn for anyone. I’ve added a link in the show notes where you can sign up for the wait list, but you don’t have to wait.

Start today by asking this: which of these five areas do I find the hardest? Seeking, receiving, processing, using or giving feedback. That question alone might shape how you grow next. See you next week.

Show Notes

• ​The 2010 paper on feedback literacy​
• Learn more at feedbackliteracy.com