Notes from meeting - Monday 14 November

[lucymonie]

Developing a feedback culture at FAC

Meeting attendees: Dan, Nick, Cleo, Jen, Esraa, Nori, Lucy (apologies from Steve)

Downsides

• Mandatory feedback can feel contrived, forced or repetitive
• Feedback can cause unnecessary anxiety
• Badly managed feedback can damage team trust

Upsides

• Positive feedback can be very bolstering
• Giving and receiving feedback is an opportunity to grow and improve

Way forward?

There was agreement that feedback should be delivered verbally as there is less room for misconstruction. There was less agreement about how feedback should be organised. There were two main schools of thought: group-based and individual

Group-based ideas

• Tie feedback to tasks and groups rather than individuals
• Stop/go/continue in teams
• Someone (eg Dan) could lead each team's group feedback sessions
• Individuals could ask for feedback from the team on specific areas
• Feedback could lead to mutual coaching within the team

Individual ideas

• Each individual in the team gives feedback to one other individual (privately)
• Teams could split into pairs and give feedback to each other

Alternative ideas

• Feedback could be encouraged but given on the fly as the spirit moves you
• Half-group, half-individual approach: self-reflection followed by the team giving feedback as a group to each individual (in front of others)
• Pair coding observations

[sofer]

So, let's trial something in the next couple of days, i.e. before the next project begins. Perhaps each group can come up with a different approach and then we can feed back on Friday at the SGC session.

[lucymonie]

Outcomes of retrospectives discussion

Friday team stop/go/continue

• 20 minutes post-its on the wall, 20 minutes of discussion (with Dan)
• 2-4pm Wednesday 23 November

Individual feedback

• Teams to consider individual feedback and try it out if they want to

[sofer]

Thoughts from today's retrospectives:

• we didn't quite manage to stick to 20 minutes; arguably we might want to next time;
• some of the suggestions provoked a fair amount of discussion. While it's important to clarify a point to make sure you understand it, once that's done it may be more productive to acknowledge a controversial or interesting point and move on;
• going round at the end of the session to identify one thing that each member of the team wants to work on in their own practice seemed to be a helpful exercise.

I found the sessions very useful. I cannot believe that we haven't been doing them regularly before now.