About

“Withholding feedback is choosing comfort over growth. Staying silent deprives people of the opportunity to learn. In healthy relationships, honesty is an expression of care.” - Adam Grant, Psychologist

Helping develop the people we care about

A healthy feedback loop builds awareness and helps people improve. We have a responsibility to develop the people we care about.

But when we receive feedback, a flood of neurochemicals activated in the amygdala (where emotions are predominantly processed) limits our abilities to activate other parts of the brain typically used for higher/executive function – reducing our ability to process / think logically.

As a result, we can make irrational choices, give feedback poorly, and break the feedback loop.

Feedback Sense Check is a questionnaire-style web flow to help you manage your emotions before giving – or after receiving – feedback.

It’s for anyone working in an organisation to build empathy, maintain a healthy feedback loop and help people develop.

Biases and perspectives in feedback

When we perceive, we take in sensory information and mesh it with what we know about the world, which can sometimes be based on limited or exceptional information; hence biases. This is why perspectives often differ - not only do we collect different sensory data from literally different perspectives but we also add our own unique perspective to this process to create ‘our truth’ on what happened.

This is what feedback aims to reveal. How our perspectives differ.

And there is no ‘right’ way to look at something but there can be learning for both of you.

Why I created Feedback Sense Check

“I’ve given feedback badly, too many times. Once I gave feedback at 4pm on a Friday while I was feeling grumpy – it landed badly and caused someone I care about to feel bad over the weekend. I came up with the idea for Feedback Sense Check in 2022 to avoid that kind of situation. It’s a logical friend to help manage emotions and give feedback in a better way. It started as a side project, before collaborating with Simon and others at Thriva.” - Tom Hiskey, design manager

Built during Thriva Maker Day

v1 of Feedback Sense Check was built in one day, 9 March 2023, by some of the amazing team at Thriva.

The team

• Aaron Conway – engineering
• Alex Callard – engineering
• Bryony Watson – engineering
• Ela Tuns – engineering and content
• Emma Buckee – illustrations
• Simon Meekings – content
• Tom Hiskey – content and design