The Dilemma of Feedback

As part of going Agile, some of us at work have started handing out 1-page surveys at the end of Retrospectives we facilitate, in order to gather feedback on how it went so that we can make the next one even better. These are generally very simple forms, where you're asked to rate one or two aspects of the meeting (e.g. the activities used and the facilitation, or the effectiveness at reaching the stated goal and the pace) as well as the overall value of it to the participant. For each of these, there's a scale of 1 (useless) to 10 (awesome) that the respondent can circle their rating on, and a couple lines on which they can write comments. Then we often have some blank lines at the bottom under a heading like "What would you change about the format of the Retrospective next time?"

Some people, of course, will only circle ratings and hand their sheet in. I can understand that response, as I've done it myself on courses or tutorials I've attended in the past. Where it's frustrating, though, are the cases where someone provides a low rating but no comments to explain why they felt it wasn't valuable or effective. I have to wonder in that instance how they think they're helping, unless they simply hope by rating it low maybe they'll kill any future incarnations of it outright!

My boss, the VP of Engineering, decided to use the same sort of survey for today's All Hands meeting. It probably didn't help that the meeting was scheduled to end at noon and went about 10 minutes late, and then we asked people to stick around for a few minutes and provide feedback. But so it went.

I haven't seen the survey results myself, but I heard the ratings were generally OK (mostly 7 and up, let's say). Among the comments written in was "Matt's long winded" or words to that effect. My boss wanted to know if, in posting the results, it was OK to include that verbatim or would I rather he clean it up (depersonalize it) somewhat? I told him it wouldn't bother me at all, as written, because it's certainly not the first time I'm hearing it. The irony here is: in recent attempts to consciously address this sort of feedback by making my faciliation comments shorter, and keeping things very matter-of-fact instead of embellishing with what I'll generously call my usual flair, I always end up getting feedback that at least some people felt "things weren't explained fully" or "not enough direction was given." I'm sure there must be a way to walk this tightrope successfully, achieving a Goldilocks-like just right balance of brevity and depth, but I'm equally sure I'll never master it.

At least here, in the safety and comfort of the Blogosphere, I can celebrate my verbosity rather than being taken to task for it! (Although I'm still stinging over that "Holy Shit, you write a lot" zinger from Tim way back when.)


(OK, no I'm not!)