Feedback Revolution - Improving the Mercy Me

You can read my review of feedback revolution in order to understand a brief summary of the book before reading on.

Actually, I like this title a lot and to honestly say the truth, I stole it from a title's book I read half through (only the first 4 chapters out of the 10) before I had to return it back to the library's expiry date. Regardless, you can always find it on Amazon .

Why I am bringing this topic in here? Because, after all, I am connecting the dots of what was said in the last paragraphs of my previous blog post, that in order to support the tasks, while keeping the people free to do whatever they want, we cannot let them do what they want without giving them some feedback, but not any feedback, but constructive feedback, or to fit whatever fits more, a new revolutionary way of approaching the way of giving feedback to others. I really wish I could give a review for that book, but because I didn't have the whole time to finish it completely, I still give it a thumbs up for anybody especially to understand what feedback is all about, as it has a lot of valuable information with little noise on the background. To say the least, the author did the best as he could to write a good thoroughly book about feedback, and I applaud him.

If you read my executive paradox review book, I stated that book really gave the big picture or the whole forest of what leadership is all about. Now, this book, "Feedback Revolution", although it sounds like a big topic and can seem like the big picture of a whole forest, in terms of relatively to the leadership strategy, it is a "tree within a forest", yet a very important one. If I just have the time, I may just look at it again for more inspiration, but I think I got enough inspiration, as to tell you the truth, that author gives really nice examples and brainstorming ideas you can relate that you would not think if  you focused specifically on just the subject at hand. The first chapters give the context of giving the right feedback while the latter chapters tell you a paradigm how to give feedback on the precise cultural norms, generation gap,  as well guides to social technological tools that aid you to assimilate with the mental networks of another individual on that particular environment/situation. The perfect example the author represents feedback is how in the old days coaches that screamed, yelled, snapped behind the background of the sidelines were ineffective with the ones that gave asynchronous response-time constructive feedback while on an open loop for also receiving and giving new corrected feedback for the goal of the personal growth of the other instead of our own ego desire. To bottom it all up, they know and understand how sensitive it is to give feedback to others, given that the whole thing about feedback, is shaking the mental networks of others, or making them lose a "part of their own self". Especially for mercy people. I can attest that to myself having a mercy girlfriend [1]. Mercy people are the most sensitive to gain any feedback back to change their own self. They may be the most reluctant and the most slow changing types by default nature. A cure for that is give a dozen of positive feedback to sugar coat the negative one (and keep the negative one as bitter as dark chocolate as it is as long it has a guide for "their situation" how to change that path - while still being flexible -  to one you assume to be a positive one). Does it work? Yes and No. Some people are not ready and you have to move on. But did you tried your best? Yes, that is all that matters. In one of my last youtube videos , I discussed in the last minutes of that video about someone in my past work experience a supervisor that I worked with that had a lot of back and forth feedback giving to technically anyone he talked to (not only his team, but his stakeholders, other independent teams, even up to the higher management staff). His recipe was basic: He could always bring up some positive stuff while bringing his own situation down and back it up with facts. He could keep the ongoing discussions going if people could give feedback back with people giving back facts and forth. However, that is not how our organization worked. It was all hierarchical and showed social status. They would not give constructive feedback backed up by facts. And just for that, I think that was the main reason he left on that organization. Instead, empowerment was entitled by following norms, establishing yourself into a "tribe". Its like those organizations that go back where nomadic people lived in. It was definitely not by giving good reason. When you gave a reason, the crowd goes silent. When you showed "social respect", they would mingle you.

In fashion industry where people sell clothes, feedback may be the weakest variable and the most money wasted resource for not handling it properly I have ever seen in my entire life. It may on some occasions have wasted like 50% or more of the staff costs for training due to turn over in general (I am not kidding). Many people leave because a fashion industry to say the least is "cosmopolitan" in general. Lets not kid around. Fashion (as it is one of the industries I have worked of) is all about clothes. Clothes show individualism. The core of mercy is all about showing their own individualism, what "me" represents. It is no wonder that most of the business sales scientifically come by "women" because they focus more on "me" than men do because they are active on mercy mode while men to a less extent. Since you cater for your customers, your employees need to understand and feel like the customers too. For that reason, the fashion industry (and when I mean "industry", I mean all aspects of it, from managing the production to selling/marketing online/offline) has a lot of employees that live or practice to be in "mercy" mode. And given that "mercy" mode does not like to get feedback back and likes to do most of the stuff from experience and "on the moment", how much do you think it disrupts the balance of the feedback revolution and the different modes of communications we have to integrate in our life? Quite a lot to say the least. They would in such sense be more weak in aspects of social technological tools as those are not in par to how much concrete the environment as the mercy mode is and the "feedback environment" would have been more like broadcasting or a dead end instead of a constant loop. It is a challenging world in the fashion environment because many people focus on the strategy and technology of how to optimize things but little on the content and service they give to the customers which is a main influence on how employees do things internally. A good example is that on one occasion, I tried to give feedback back to one of my supervisors on something that I didn't agree in a bitter way (which I think she looked like a very outgoing Exhorter individual, but with a big focus on mercy mode on the background). Things didn't go that well with that. My feedback was rejected, and as you know, there is no way to get along with mercy people with reasoning, its only getting by their side of their shoes (fashion wise, no pun intended). Now, you see, mental symmetry shows a solution on how to give the correct feedback based on the personality of the individual. However, I did not chose so, because I already had a big weight felt already by how the organization was doing things so far. It was definitely one of the breaking points for why I left on that organization. Although the right thing was to babysit them and not leave an organization (path of patience [staying] versus path of suffering [leaving] can be seen on point one of this article), you cannot do that when they treat you in an inferior way when you try to practice it.

There are a lot of positive traits for us as individuals. I, well, am so good at analyzing that this blog speaks to itself. I may be even lucky I stumbled mental symmetry as that not only brings one of the greatest topics to talk about, but it also makes me to achieve the path of being the ultimate analyzer (I am not saying I "achieved" the ultimate, but taking that path strives you to - and even if I do, I may stray occasionally away from that path often). Not going off topics, others are also good at understanding the shoes of others. The list can go on and on. For this topic, we are going to focus on people that give constructive feedback. Constructive feedback is lived in the empowering mode. It is where the perceiver reads the mercy mode and focuses on repetitive sound proof experiences (high level mode) and not the perciever mode that collaborates and organizes the facts and transfers them to the teacher mode (where the server mode) can see them through its low level view. It is here where we focus the main responsibility of the perceiver mode, not the aiding action of the perceiver mode to the teacher mode. There is one mode where the perceiver aids at creating new facts and another mode where it sees already produced facts and resonate on them.

When we talked about being agile the right way in my previous blog, I mentioned the importance of keeping an open environment. However, it cannot be open if tasks are focused and people are frozen. And as I discussed above, a fashion industry (which by far is the best example on this case) that focuses on apparel, luxury, and cosmetics, products that represent to enhance or express our individuality, will be focused mainly by mercy people and will detriment  the empowering mode due to their personality nature (feedback hierarchy instead of feedback revolution). Now you would ask: Why would a mercy environment that lives within people will create an environment that is anti-supportive for people to thrive on? It would not if the environment was static and not ever changing. It would if it was ever changing. In agile methodology, there is a push for people to change things constantly. As discussed in my previous blog, it would only work if people were "adults" and not "children" that respected instead of abusing the agile methodology. And that requires more feedback than you can ever imagine, some of it being very rough. So instead of taking feedback which is hurtful for the mercy individual, they just close the doors of feedback, keep employees the freedom to either be children or adults (with no accountability if they are childish), and as an alternative, backlash them if they don't follow doing the task you were given to them and treat them always with doubt on all occasions or circumstances (i.e. don't give positive feedback, keep them on their "ropes") as who knows what dangerous thing they would do next. Does that solve the problem to bring deliverables? Yes. Is it fast and does that make the community happy? Is that maintainable in this competitive environment where other "rival sports" team found giving feedback correctly, practice the agile methodology with positive results? No.

My previous boss I worked with told me how emotionally our supervisor was with all the stress and responsibilities she had while being agile when I tried to give some bitter feedback. I understand how emotional it is, but in the upper management world, it is not about a game of our own achievements, but the outcome of the staff to be retained. A staff being ostracized due to how the organization worked things out, a staff that is less motivated than it used to due to the negligence of the minimum proper attention of placing their proper responsibility and accountability, or the talented people who got fired because they were not properly placed in the right responsibility is a cost that it ought-fully rights deserves the right to bear within the upper management to take responsibility more than his own contributions, as the costs of hiring and training new staff is staggering compared to how much fraction the responsibilities and tasks of a leadership role anybody can attain and learn with a little bit of effort. However, exceptions can be made in the fashion industry, as a fashion industry is one of the most sensitive environments in the world. At the same time, the most sensitive environments in the world, has produced one of the most innovative and cultural shifts on how to manage this tension in a more appropriate way. Zappos, a huge apparel e-commerce that focuses currently and within the past mostly on shoes, is shifting its internal organization to a holocracy (you can watch this youtube video to understand more about it). And holocracy is creating a flat hierarchy to the most extreme possible way you can ever imagine. It is where in order to gain value in the organization, you have to act like an adult and treat others like adults. Zappos actually want this as an end result but have not figured out yet what is the correct paradigm to follow. For now, it is in an experimental stage. Even if you say "Hey, mental symmetry will solve their problem", it will not if they don't apply it in the current context of their environment. Even of the many articles I have placed in here that have context of the paradigm of mental symmetry, it still has so much more food of thought that I did not imagine a year ago that I would talk today about "feedback". Another example is the "American Next Top Model" (and its clones) shows. The creator and main panel judge of the show, Tyra Banks , is one of the most influential in giving constructive feedback. In this online article, it even mentions that her constructive feedback on her twitter page made her to have more than 10+ million followers (just go to her twitter page if you don't believe me). The "Feedback Revolution" book talks about it extensively. She really deserves that award, as you can imagine, the show American Next Top Model is all about contestants that show their own individuality with fashion. Most likely, they are driven by a mercy boost cognitive skill. That means that on the other hand, they are very sensitive on taking feedback back. Tyra Banks tries to alleviate their sensitivities by making her feedback enough "digestible". She is empowering to others by being funny and caring while giving accountability by being brutally honest to others when contestants fail something that they ignored it for too long, something that they are blind that the rest can see, or their overconfidence lost their grip of their natural talents. That act may feel like a shock in a working environment but being commanding at the right timing may not be so shocking as much as if you do it too late or accumulate your feedback in big pieces of chunk instead of small pieces of chunk that they feel that you just snap instead of stretching. So we see two revolutions, one in the internal organizations like Zappos, and another one in a TV show "American Next Top Model". Although fashion in general gives little to no value to the essence of my HPLR ethics, ironically, it presents one of the biggest social revolutions of our cognitive mindsets to be more better than what our ego controls us what to do. When I talk with other workers that work in IT that are not related with the fashion industry, their background of their work environment is more stable than from what I heard and experienced in the fashion industry. It seems that when things are at its worst or encounter the worst [3] (like when Newton did his own original work due to the plague in 1665 closing all universities[2]), the best things come out from them. Fashion industry is one of the most interesting hallmarks that I coincidentally stepped in through my past, not for its negative externalizations it may do to an extent, but the new social paradigms it tries to originate.

So to end the topic of this discussion: what can you do to provide the best positive feedback? We all live in the mercy mental mode no matter what. When we don't show it, it runs subconsciously in our mind. So we have to handle it in its worst case scenario:
1. How to give the proper feedback to a mercy individual?  (Understand mental mercy networks)
2. How can we more elaborately shift the mental networks to new ones that we know we are giving the long term positive results for their own end?  (Understand the sensitivities of current context)
3. How can we measure our confidence level and how can we improve our confidence level that our feedback brings long term positive results to them? (That means back it up with facts & accepting feedback back)
4. How can we balance our feedback to be both empowering while both commanding? (Read the situation)


And that is folks, how to be better at feedback. And as always, this article is just a beginning, of what can feedback be more expanded within our curriculum of our life.

[1] From my experience, a small tiny bitty feedback about something irrelevant can make them turn things all 180 degree of their previous mood, showing that mental networks are a living thing, that if you give feedback, is almost the same as hitting someone with physical brute force.  However, however, we live in "Earth" where there is no harm in the "internal" world as much there is in the "external" world (brute force is irreversible harm and non-replace-able in the case we get very injured for our "own" living). Many people may snap and confuse that words are the same as brutal physical action, and if you compare the two, in most cases, the former is less detrimental than the latter. Now people take any brute force to very extremes, when in the past, teachers used brute force at pupils for not doing their homework, but for most cases, they used the limits to not make the life of those pupils physical health and ability irreversible. What I condemn though about that past experience is the social status used with brutal force. It still exists today with just face to face and non verbal communication or hiding the "Big Elephant" in the room. In any case, I still support that we should not use brute force, as that slippery slope of a small slap can become a habit to something worse and unwanted.  Although "words" doesn't hurt us much that can influence us in changing our mental networks, different things can be said though if the world is "mirrored". And if there are "rules there" like the laws of physics we have in the external world, what "rules" are for the internal world we must follow in order to breath and swim afloat the water? Yes, it is a cliffhanger, but is good for food for thought.  
[2] As in this online scholarly page, Isaac Newton said "All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in my prime of age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since."
[3] That fits a lot with the allegory of Socrates that I mentioned in this article.
(Notice that he mentions he married his "childish wife" so he can "use" and "communicate" people. Sounds ironic that thousand of years ago it hits us back again in the fashion industry)