There are two ways to gather feedback. You can either request feedback, which is active feedback; or you can observe what people do, passive feedback. Active and passive feedback are most useful in different situations. They have their own sets of pros and cons. However, both must be applied to make a truly informed decision.
What Exactly is Active Feedback?
Active Feedback is feedback which is solicited. This could be as simple as putting a feedback link on your web page, providing a phone number for someone to contact you, calling them, or meeting someone face to face. You engage them, and because you’ve engaged them, they are aware that they are giving feedback.
Active Feedback is a conversation, not an observation. As such the feedback runs both ways. How you respond to feedback tells them how much you value them. It is important that you consider how you respond to feedback.
Active feedback is Qualitative. You get an impression of their desires. You must interpret what they are telling you in order to understand their needs. Even then, it is not statistical evidence. The only way for it to be statistically significant is if your participants are a large portion of your whole.
Why Would I Want to Solicit Active Feedback?
Active feedback gives guidance and direction. You’re not forced to interpret statistics to figure out what people want, they are telling you what they want. You can then interpret this and apply your own wisdom and knowledge to refine what they say to what they really mean.
Active feedback encourages clarification. You’re not stuck with a single sentence, statement, or data point on a graph. You can ask questions and refine ideas. This tight feedback loop allows you to rapidly refine an idea.
Active feedback can be gathered at any stage of any process. It is very easy to apply active feedback early on because you don’t need to have anything built or refined to solicit active feedback. You can call a friend up and share an idea with him, then refine the idea based upon his.
Active feedback builds empathy. The first step of empathy is recognizing the value of different positions. By actively soliciting feedback you are becoming more empathetic. You are trying to see their perspective. This builds empathy for the individuals or groups you’re soliciting feedback from.
Active feedback is information rich. If you’re soliciting feedback in person you are receiving huge swathes of information. You can see their body language, you can watch them tap their fingers in impatience, grimace at a statement you made, or smile with delight. Nonverbal communication is informing you what people are really thinking.
Why Wouldn’t I want to Solicit Active Feedback?
Active feedback tends to be self selecting. Only the people who really want to give you feedback will give it to you! Because of this your group of participants will not be as large as your entire customer base. Another important point to remember is forced feedback is not good feedback.
Active feedback is vulnerable to the Observer Effect. If someone is aware they are being observed, they change their behavior. It then becomes necessary to put the participant at ease, which may be impossible in some situations.
Active feedback is highly time intensive for you and for the person you’re soliciting feedback from. You may have to spend hours with each participant!
Active Feedback is rarely statistically relevant. Though there is huge value in qualitative results you cannot rely on them for quantitative results. If your sample size of participants is not a large part of the whole then you will not produce statistically relevant results. Because of the nature of observing feedback different people observing the same thing often come to different conclusions about what was observed!
People don’t necessarily know what they want. You must get past a participants proposed solution to uncover the actual problem they are trying to solve. This requires you to look deeper than the surface to get your insights and observations. You must also deal with the fact that people don’t always say what they mean. They may not want to look stupid or hurt your feelings, so people will avoid saying things. It isn’t malicious, it’s just human nature.
How Do I Gather Active Feedback?
There are many ways to engage individuals or groups in active feedback. Different methods are more applicable for different situations. I’ve broken these into two groups. One on one techniques which involve only the person soliciting feedback and the feedback giver, whom I call the participant; and group techniques which involve the person soliciting feedback and multiple participants. In each of these groups of techniques there may be an “observer” who is present but does not speak.
First let’s consider the some one on one methods.
Techniques for Gathering Feedback One on One.
Active Listening is the most crucial skill for gathering feedback one on one. You must show that you are fully engaged in discussion. You must listen to what they are saying. You must understand what they are saying. You must ask questions and seek clarification. Finally you must determine how to act upon what they are saying. The simplest way is to ask them how they would solve the problem they’re talking about, and then discuss from there. Valuable insights will be gleaned by harnessing someone other peoples creative juices.
Some techniques you could use are Non-directed Interviews, Contextual Inquiries, User Tests, and even customer support requests can gather active feedback. Some other techniques could be performance conversations and the more traditional “One on One” meetings.
Techniques for Gathering Feedback From a Group
Group discussions can be hard. Especially in regards to gathering feedback. In order to be effective there must be an openness between all parties involved. The meeting facilitator must foster an environment where everyone feels comfortable joining in the discussion. As such the facilitator must not reject any opinion that is brought forward. Instead they can ask questions to help everyone engage in critical thinking.
Criticism must be constructive. In order for it to be constructive criticism must be directed at the idea, not the person who brought the idea up. It is foolish to ban negative words. Doing so restricts communication without truly improving attitudes. Instead try to remember to remain objective. This means that facilitators and participants should actively detach themselves from their ideas.
An interesting method for gathering feedback from customers is Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction allows people to post ideas, report issues, and ask questions publicly. Then someone from your company or some of your other customers can chime in to answer questions and refine ideas. By having active channels of discussion open all the time you can easily gather active feedback from your customers.
For internal teams, I strongly suggest performing Agile Retrospectives. Retrospectives allow team members to discuss problems they encountered, propose solutions, and review triumphs. In order to be effective, Agile retrospectives must happen regularly! This allows you to observe the triumphs and defeats the team encountered and work within the organization to encourage triumphs and discourage defeats.
Concluding Thoughts
Active feedback is absolutely critical in both product development and team management. If you do not actively solicit feedback you are not going to meet your customer or teams needs. You will fail them when they need you most.
Like this post? Why not considering buying the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. This book is chock full of practical ways to improve your Agile Retrospectives and solicit active feedback. Or, pick up Performance Conversations: An Alternative to Appraisals which has practical tips for soliciting and giving feedback in performance conversations.
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A solid read. Thanks.
This article got my mind working on this daunting task. My challenge is asking for user feedback on broken links (or missing links) on a beta search engine. Granted, these users will be annoyed or turn-off at the time and I am trying to figure out how to gain their empathy.