Leadership effectiveness - The feedback series, Part 3.

Feed Forward

In the first two articles of this series, we explored feed up (establishing where we are going) and feedback (understanding how we are going). Both are essential, but if you're looking for where feedback delivers the greatest return on investment, feed forward is where it's at.

Feed forward answers the third and final question in Hattie and Timperley's feedback model:

"Where to next?"

And it is here that growth actually happens.

In their paper, The Power of Feedback, John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007) argued that feedback's purpose is to reduce the gap between current performance and desired performance. While feed up sets the destination and feedback illuminates progress, it is feed forward that provides the information people need to adapt their learning, through enhanced challenge, improved strategies, deeper understanding and greater self-regulation (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).

In other words, feed forward is the part of the process that translates insight into action.

Yet here's the irony.

Feed forward is the least frequently used of the three feedback types. The feedback that is most transformative for people is the least prevalent.

I've observed the same pattern in workplaces and in conversations across industries. Leaders are often comfortable clarifying goals and will provide commentary on progress, but struggle to help people determine their next steps in a way that drives genuine improvement. We either shy away from it entirely or, more commonly, we rush in with solutions.

And this is where it gets tricky.

The Advice Monster

Feed forward is where we get the most value, but it needs to be navigated carefully. The temptation for leaders is to use feed forward as a vehicle for telling people what to do next. After all, we can see the gap. We've been there before. We know what works. So we jump in.

Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS), author of The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap, has a brilliant way of describing what happens in these moments. He calls it the Advice Monster – that insatiable urge within all of us to offer solutions, suggestions and direction the moment someone presents a challenge.

The problem isn't that our advice is always wrong. It's that we often give it too quickly, before we fully understand the situation, and in doing so, we solve the wrong problem. Or we solve the right problem but strip the other person of ownership, agency and the opportunity to develop their own capacity to self-regulate. We disempower the very person we're trying to help.

This matters enormously in the context of feed forward. Feed forward should help people determine their next steps. It should build their capacity to identify strategies, monitor their own progress and adjust their approach. When we rush in with our advice, we lose the opportunity to develop them (making our job harder in the long run).

Bungay Stanier's antidote is elegantly simple: stay curious a little longer. Resist the urge to jump to solutions. Ask questions that help the other person think more deeply about what they need to do next, rather than telling them.

This is a coach like mindset and it's the key to making feed forward work.

What does effective feed forward look like?

When delivered well, feed forward helps people move beyond understanding how they went and into planning what they will do differently. Drawing on Hattie and Timperley's research, effective feed forward includes:

• Cues and prompts that guide the person toward their own next steps rather than prescribing a solution

• Strategies for improving task performance that the person can apply in subsequent work

• Appropriately challenging goals for the next phase of development

• Support for self-regulation: Helping people monitor, evaluate and direct their own learning

Notice the theme? Effective feed forward builds the person's capacity. It doesn't create dependence on the leader for answers. It develops people who can increasingly identify their own gaps and determine their own next steps.

This is why the coach like mindset matters so much here. When you stay curious, when you ask before you tell, you create the conditions for feed forward to do its deepest work - developing self regulated, capable people who don't need you to have all the answers.

A final thought

If feed up is the steering wheel and feedback is the dashboard, then feed forward is the accelerator.

It is the part of the feedback process that converts information into action and progress. It is where the gap between current and desired performance actually closes. When navigated with a coach like mindset, staying curiou and resisting the Advice Monster, it becomes the most powerful lever a leader has for developing capable, self directed people.

But there is still more to explore. So far, we've explored feed up, feedback and feed forward as three distinct types. What we haven't yet examined is the depth at which each can operate.

In the final article of this series, we'll explore four levels of feedback depth - self, task, process and self-regulation - and how these levels can be applied individually and in combination across feed up, feedback and feed forward to achieve outstanding results. This is where the model becomes truly powerful for leaders seeking to multiply their impact.

Lead on. Lead well.

Roland

Keen to connect?

Email me at roland@rolandlewiscoaching.com

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Roland Lewis | LinkedIn

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