Approaches to feedback — George Lockett

I'm thinking about feedback this week, and the giving and receiving thereof.
Thanks for the Feedback is a great book on the subject that I found useful particularly for framing the issues and offering some useful models/heuristics.
In the intro, they talk about how they set out to write a book about giving feedback. But of the people they surveyed, everyone thought they were brilliant at giving feedback and that, coincidentally, everyone else was terrible at giving it.
So they focused the book on receiving feedback well. Although, obviously if you understand the dynamics of that, it should make you better at giving it, too.
A key thing there is that 'feedback', by their definition, is not solely the explicit stuff. You receive 'feedback' from lots of little things in your personal life.
The core model that's stuck with me is that feedback tends to trip us up for three reasons:
Truth. We disagree with the substance of the feedback or think that it's based on incorrect information.
Relationship. We see the feedback as a proxy statement about our relationship with that person on the whole. So, some small criticism from a partner -- even if fair and kindly delivered -- might trigger a defensive response where we think that it means they don't like us.
Identity. 'If this is true, what does it say about me and the stories I tell myself?' If I consider myself a good communicator and someone says something which suggests that, in a particular instance, I have not been that, it shakes one of my pillars of identity, even (especially) if I think it's true.
So, we tend to react badly when feedback knocks against those things, often exacerbated by the way the feedback is framed or delivered (often badly). The book provides a bunch of tools for catching yourself when doing that, and turning yourself towards finding something useful even in badly framed feedback (or knowing when you really can ignore it).
Separately, I've been thinking about feedback specifically in an artistic context. Hannah Nicklin's book introduced me to Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process, which is a structured conversation designed to help get to good feedback on artistic work.
Separately again, I've been thinking a bunch about how these two styles of feedback model differ when it comes to giving professional peer feedback (e.g. giving feedback on writing as a writer) and how that differs further when doing so with broader considerations that craft and artistry -- e.g. the commercial considerations of doing so as part of running a live game.
The things learned from Thanks for the Feedback are fairly generalisable -- ways of taking feedback better and considering how to frame your feedback for people while being mindful of those major pitfalls.
Another aspect of the book I didn't mention above is that it divides feedback types into three: Appreciation ('This meal is delicious!'), Evaluation ('The sauce is a little salty.'), and coaching ('Try adding a little brown sugar to your sauce to balance the salt.')
Problems most often occur when people are looking for one kind of feedback and get a different one -- they want appreciation and encouragement, and they get an honest critique. Neither are 'wrong', they're just situational. (As I mentioned in [What are we really talking about])(https://www.georgelockett.com/shards/2022/4/30/what-are-we-really-talking-about).
So, above all, understanding the purpose and nature of the feedback you're giving is key.
The Liz Lerman process is about quickly creating a rapport and trusting environment to get feedback on an artistic work in progress, trying to cut to the meat of useful feedback and avoid traps of defensiveness.
It does this by offering a specific conversation flow that wards off unsolicited opinions (and opinions on things that are not important at that stage) and focusing on targeted questions and overall effects/impressions, which are more useful.
That's not the same as a peer-feedback system.
My thoughts on all this are rather tangled and I'm out of time for today, so I may take this forward as an experiment in resketching tomorrow.
Or I may not. Let's see.