Eduardo Briceno realised that he is not getting better at things that he cares about. Even though he was working hard on them. This stagnation is actually common. He learned that the most effective people alternate between two zones, the learning zone and the performance zone.

In the learning zone they concentrate on the things they haven’t mastered yet, they try to improve and most likely make mistakes and fail. In the performance zone they concentrate on the things they already have mastered, they execute something with as little mistakes as possible. Here is his great TED talk.

This reminded me of an episode of Abstrakt, where Christoph Niemann talked about his Sunday sketches. He takes time every week to do whatever he likes, with no specific goal, and often comes up with great ideas. When under pressure of a deadline, there is never time to experiment and do something risky, you do what you know works well.

We are most of the time in the performance zone, when working, but also in private life. To make progress in a skill and to be creative, we need to change into the learning zone regularly, experiment and make mistakes.

Last november we started a pilot project where a group of people committed themselves to give and get more feedback over a period of four months. Here are our learnings and the next steps we will implement.

“I started looking at feedback as an art, a skill to develop, and I now feel “officially” supported by Liip in spending time giving/receiving it.” François Bruneau

It takes a committed and organised team to pull something off

The organisers each committed to spend half a day for this project. Of course it turned out to be more. We organised trainings, answered questions, evaluated tools, reported bugs, led interviews, prepared newsletters and a talk. We organised ourselves in roles and each of us took responsibility for specific topics. Short reviews of what went well and what didn’t are totally worth their time.

Going with volunteers had pro’s and con’s

We asked for volunteers because we wanted to find people who cared about feedback. It was great to see how many volunteered and it gave us the safety of working on a topic that is important for the company. For the participants it would have been easier giving feedback to people who are open for it. But with volunteers in different locations all over switzerland this was not possible.

Offering a feedback training paid off greatly and is now offered company wide

We invited Marion Walz as a coach to give feedback trainings (one of many things I learned from Jurgen Appelo’s book “How to change the world”). More than thirty participants attended. Many told me that they had a better understanding on feedback mechanics, received inputs on how to formulate feedback and how to deal with feedback situations. The trainings gave a much better learning experience than any of the videos or reading material that we provided. We already organised more trainings for the whole company and will continue to do so.

“After the feedback training yesterday I managed to overcome my obstacles of giving difficult feedback and gave some. And it was amazing for all involved.” Michelle Sanver

Asking regularly about progress and obstacles helped us to take decisions

At the end of the pilot we decided if it’s worth spending more time on the topic and in what to invest next. To back this decision with data and to have regular feedback from the participants, we sent out a survey every couple of weeks and had detailed interviews with some of them.
In the first month the participants made remarkable progress, experimented, set goals and the motivation was high. Over time the engagement started sinking. We could identify which participants profited and stayed engaged, and what challenges were still unsolved.
Next time I would care more about how to visualise the data to make it easily accessible for everybody.

Participants who worked with a mentor made visible progress

Unsurprisingly “no time” was one of the main reasons for not giving feedback. Many participants didn’t or couldn’t take time to reflect on themselves or others.
The group of people who chose to work with a mentor took this time regularly and kept it going. The advice from their mentors had a great impact on their progress and their goals that would have stagnated otherwise. Nadja Perroulaz will implement mentoring company wide this year, yay!

“I could solve two rather big problems in current projects with the help of a mentor which was a big success for me. I also asked somebody for a one-time mentoring for a specific question where I benefited a lot. I really appreciate the chance of being able to discuss challenges with a mentor and get feedback from an outer perspective.” Simone Wegelin

We do not need a tool to deliver feedback

We offered Leapsome to our participants as a tool to give and request feedback and monitor progress. After an initial peak when everybody tested the tool, we only counted two feedbacks per week. Most participants preferred to give feedback face to face and said that they don’t need a tool at all. Some would like to manage their feedbacks, keep track of what they have given, received or learned, but not with Leaspsome. For now we are continuing without a tool.

“I’m sure now the tools or the methodology is not the big issue, but rigor about actually doing it is. And this doesn’t apply only to me ‘:)” Valentin Delley

Given feedbacks had an impact and led to changes and learning

A few people took the time and shared compliments or gave difficult or critical feedback to other Liiper. Not all of them went well, some people overreacted or just ignored the feedback. But mostly the feedback did lead to change the receiver and they were grateful for it.

“Before the pilot, I wasn’t sharing when somebody did a good job, I always thought that somebody else will maybe do it. Expressing it now makes the interaction more valuable and precious with this person.” Raphaël Santos

“I gave two critical feedbacks, both hard to give and to receive, but they had a tremendous impact. My learning: if there is a problem, go talk to the person instead of ignoring the person.” Thomas Botton

How might we reach a critical mass of Liiper who address issues directly and timely?

However, many Liiper don’t address their issues. Offering support, addressing conflicts or sharing compliments are often forgotten or avoided. For a lot of people it is still easier to ignore these issues instead of addressing them. We picked this as our next challenge to work on.
Christina Henkel, Christian Stocker, Martin Meier, Rita Barracha and Simone Wegelin gave their time and energy to come up with ideas on how to solve this. Jake Knapp’s book “Sprint” was a great help in this process. We will test and implement three winner ideas.

Feedback champions across teams and locations

We will recruit interested Liiper, who want to encourage feedback in their teams and locations and help to keep the culture alive. We will offer actionable activities for them, that are easy to do it beside everyday work.

A team budget for feedback

We will provide budget to teams which they are expected and encouraged to spend on giving feedback and increasing their feedback culture.

The feedback trophy

We are producing and testing a trophy, which can be placed on a colleagues desk. This colleague has to give feedback to somebody of their choice within a week and pass on the trophy. A history displays the given feedbacks.

Originally posted on blog.liip.ch

In the last year I received a lot of feedback from coworkers that I should talk more about my work inside and outside the company. I felt so too. But since I am quite uncomfortable about promoting myself, I did not make much progress.

Learning in front of others

The breakthrough came with Austin Kleon’s book “Show your work!” in which he writes about how to promote yourself as an artist. He says: “The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.” With this I finally felt comfortable and even motivated. Writing about my successes or knowledge feels like bragging to me. But writing about my learning process feels perfect and much more interesting.

Making a plan

And still … it was so hard to actually make time for it. When I had a lot to do, I could hardly bring myself to sit two hours and write that newsletter or blogpost. My coworker and mentor Laurent Prodon suggested that I have a communication plan for each project. We discussed together when it would make sense to inform who about each project. This made it less optional to write about my stuff, but more a part of my daily work that just needs to be done. I did not really have an excuse anymore to not write that blog post.

Time for boredom

I am passionate about my job and I have a family I care for. Sometimes my life is really packed and leaves very little time for breaks or doing nothing. In such phases, it is hard for me to be creative. I need enough free time and a certain amount of boredom to write. Just a time slot in between two tasks will not do. I realised that I need to be more careful with my time. In the last months I could take some days off and make room for days with no plans. After some hours lying motionless on the sofa I got up and started reflecting what I actually have done and learned in the last weeks and transform it into articles.
If you want to know more about the importance of boredom, watch this TED Talk from Manoush Zomorodi 

Keeping and revisiting a diary

But what should I write about? For a long time I thought that I don’t have anything interesting to tell. I found it hard to formulate what I have learned, achieved, solved or fucked up in projects. It all seemed so obvious and unimportant in hindsight.
Already some years ago, I started keeping a work diary with Day One to remember better what I struggled with in different phases. That helped me to see and acknowledge how far I have come and not only to look at the mountain that is still in front of me.
Austin Kleon’s blog post about different techniques in keeping a diary  inspired me to write a summary about my entries each month. Suddenly I had much more clarity about what I had learned in the last weeks.

So the best way for me to write about my work, was to keep a diary on what I learn, revisit and summarise it regularly, to have a rough plan on how often I want to publish something and I needed enough boredom in my life to get creative.

That valuable but painful thing called feedback
We all know feedback is helpful. Employees want it and organisations depend on it so that people can grow, make progress and feel engaged. But still we resist it so often and it seems so incredibly difficult to give and take it.
Employees at Liip get feedback from their peers once a year and have time to discuss the results and their goals. Many of them wish for more regular feedback to make progress in a faster pace. They miss both critique and compliments alike.
At the same time they told me, they find it difficult to give meaningful feedback, to find the right words and that they fear to hurt others with critique. For most of us, feedback is awkward, uncomfortable and sometimes painful.

What if we took more time to develop others and work on our own goals?
A small team (Christian Stocker, Christina Henkel and me) started to change the feedback culture at Liip. Our motivation is that Liipers take more time to encourage and support each other to make progress. Professionally but also personally. That they take more time to work on their own goals. We hope for more motivation and pride, better quality and less fuck ups.

We asked for pioneers in a pilot project
We drafted a pilot and asked in the whole company for pioneers who are willing to spend 30min per week giving and getting feedback. We asked them to work on the following topics for the next 3-4 month.

Find a way to take time
Most of us have busy days. Client work has usually higher priority. It is difficult to take time to work on own goals and develop others.
We suggested to specifically plan time in your calendar to give feedback to others. First thing in the morning, before all the other tasks hit you.
To work on your own goals, find a mentor in the company. Somebody who discusses the topic with you, challenges you and just offers her perspective.

Get better in giving and accepting feedback
Feedback is a skill and most of us probably lack know how and experience. To gain more knowledge we offered some video and reading material (Clean feedback, Radical candor, Practical guide to employee feedback).
In addition we organised the external coach Marion Walz to give an introduction about how to give feedback and deal with challenges that come with it.

Do we need additional infrastructure?
Leapsome is a tool that lets people give and request feedback from other employees all over the company. It lets people define goals and view their progress.
We test Leapsome in our pilot to understand if we need additional infrastructure or if we can go with what we have.

Is it worth to invest more time into feedback culture?
To understand if the pilot is of any value for the participants, we collect their feedback regularly and ask them about the progress they make. At the end of the pilot we will decide if we continue investing time. The tough question will be, what exactly we could do in the future, to improve feedback culture even further. During the pilot, we will develop and test prototypes (this could be a digital solution on screen, a service or even a physical space or a product) to understand what works best for our participants and employees.

It was a already a long way until here
Before we came up with this pilot, we went through different rounds of collecting ideas and sketching solutions (thanks for the great work Marlene Stroj-Rullo, as well as help and support from Laurent Prodon and Thomas Riotte). Not everything worked as we planned and imagined. Some of the prototypes did not come to life, others had only little impact. Very often complexity hit us and left us disencouraged. It helped me to ask “what is the smallest step we can take towards our goal?” instead of solving the whole problem at once.
I also learned to evaluate ideas more carefully. In the early projects I often picked ideas that seemed most promising quite quickly. Today I sketch them out more carefully, ask for feedback from different people or do small experiments. Only then do I decide where to invest more time.

This is the first workshop we organised to collect ideas about feedback

The outcome is uncertain
If this pilot will be successful, we don’t know yet. We have a lot of volunteers and progress is visible. Taking time is difficult and often has low priority in the many tasks of daily work life. We definitely have a long way to go until we live a culture of regular feedback.

Originally posted on blog.liip.ch