Making sense of feedback

Sometimes it’s really obvious what someone means when they comment on our work, and it’s really easy to see what we need to do in response.

If you’re told that the Helvetica font you’ve used is the wrong one, and that you need to use Times New Roman instead, you can jump straight in and fix that.

However, there’s a whole lot of other feedback that doesn’t make sense immediately, or isn’t obviously actionable. What do you need to do there?

Making sense of feedback refers to all the things we do to turn someone else’s comments into something we can action. Sometimes it’s about taking a moment before you act on the feedback to really think it through. Other times it’s a deliberate strategy that might take you several minutes or even a few hours.

It’s something you can learn, and you probably already have some strategies in your repertoire. Here are a few strategies that some people say work for them.

Talk about the feedback

If there’s something that just doesn’t make sense to you in the feedback, you might need to talk about it with someone. This might be the person you got the feedback from; however, in some contexts, that isn’t feasible, such as if the feedback is from an anonymous source or someone who is very busy.

Many people find it helpful to engage in feedback sharing, where they have a trusted colleague, peer, friend or family member who they discuss feedback with. Is there someone in your personal or professional network with whom you would feel comfortable sharing feedback you have received?

Get a second opinion

Sometimes you’ll get comments on your work that just don’t seem right. They might seem overly critical when you thought the work was actually okay, or overly positive when you think there are serious problems. They might contain suggestions that are wrong, outdated, or more likely to hurt than help in your opinion.

It’s often helpful in these situations to get a second (or even third) opinion by seeking more feedback. When you do this, you might want to prime the new feedback provider to comment on the same areas that your existing feedback comments on.

Make a table

Researchers often produce ‘revisions tables’ when responding to comments on their work from anonymous peer reviewers. These tables split long text comments into specific critiques, one on each row, and then have a column with what the person will do or has done about it.

For example, you might receive a comment on your work that it ‘Does not adequately address the disputed definitions of key terms, and contains errors in the dates of several references’. This is actually two pieces of feedback, all in the one sentence. A revisions table for that information might look like:

For each of those comments, you would write in the Action column what exactly you plan to do in response. Sometimes, your response might be that you do not intend to do anything at all. If you aren’t going to do anything, it’s worth writing a note about why.

And before you start rejecting too many difficult comments, remember that while someone else’s feedback comment may be wrong, it still represents how someone could interpret your work, and could still help you improve things.

Put conflicting information together

If you take the approach of making a revisions table, you might end up with conflicting information. Someone might have praised you for your concise writing, but someone else might have said it was too brief.

It is intrinsically hard to reconcile this information at the best of times, but having it spread all throughout a document makes things harder. Consider grouping together the conflicting information and discussing with a colleague.

Map the feedback against criteria and standards

When producing your work, you probably have some understanding of what a good end product might look like. This should be informed by any explicit criteria or standards that are relevant to the work. For example, if you are a student working on an assignment you might have access to a rubric, or if you are an employee writing a grant application you might have access to the evaluation criteria for grant proposals. It can also be informed by conversations you’ve had about what makes for good work, or examples of good work that other people have done.

Even if your work is not going through a formal evaluation process, there may still be standards, such as industry standards or good practice guidelines. The feedback you have received might explicitly reference those criteria or standards; however, if it doesn’t, it is worth conducting a mapping exercise. Doing this will help you see the connections, any areas where you might be particularly strong or weak, and importantly, any areas where you do not have any feedback information.

Make it easy to act on the feedback

Finally, it’s one thing to have a document with what you’re going to do, but if that document isn’t something that’s easy to use when you’re doing the work, it might be easy to ignore.

If you are working on a document, consider how you might be able to embed your action items within the document itself, perhaps as tracked changes or comments, or by highlighting the sections you are going to change. If your feedback relates to a presentation that you gave which used a slide deck, consider embedding some tips for yourself in the speaker notes section.

Having to flick between a task and its supporting materials increases cognitive load in ways that don’t help you to do better work. Make it easy to act on feedback by having it all there, right where you need it.

Practise your skills

It’s time to process your feedback into something understandable and actionable. Choose one of the strategies discussed in this step and do it. Post below about your experiences. Or, if you have another strategy that works for you in feedback sense-making, tell us about it!