No More Feedback: Cultive Consciousness at Work

INTRODUCTION

My Personal Experience with Feedback

My story is an overview of everything offered in this book. I wonder if it will feel familiar to you.

Take notes! And be sure to let me know.

When I was almost 30 years old, I put myself on the track toward becoming a full

university professor. I was working on a doctoral degree and teaching at San Jose State

University in a combined program for graduate students in business, urban planning, and

information technology (then called cybernetic systems). Each student earned a master’s degree

in one of these disciplines but took courses in all three.

Teaching and conducting research in the program exhilarated me, partly because I was

the youngest member of an exceptionally experienced team of full professors. I did not mind

being the kid on the block who often did the grunt work. Sadly, the program ended after only

three years because a new dean of the business school chose to redistribute resources to other

“worthier” endeavors. I had a dual master’s in business and urban planning and was offered a

teaching position in the Urban Planning Department. It was there that I experienced firsthand the

devastating impact of what I had been teaching—ideas that were, in fact, toxic practices.

The Dean of Urban Planning fancied himself a great leader and coach of up-and-coming

faculty. He was sincerely dedicated to this work, and he had an undergraduate minor in

psychology that reinforced his confidence. He was introduced to feedback many years before,

when he was in the military, and brought it with him to his new vocation.

After one month in my assistant professor role, I found myself sitting across from him

wanting very much to be seen in a good light by my new superior. He held my future teaching

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career in his hands. He announced that I was going to be introduced to what he called a

“cybernetic feedback method,” one that we would recognize today as the forerunner of 360-

degree feedback, which is conducted annually in many companies.

The dean gave me a form and explained that I was to evaluate myself against nine

competencies defined by the faculty leadership team. I had seen these competencies before but

was still a bit confused about how they applied to me and where I fit in their system. I did not

expect that I also would be evaluated by my peers—a handful of faculty plus the chairman of the

department. The dean was very patient with me. He answered all my questions and then set me

off to come back the following week with my own evaluation. I was to receive the reflections of

my peers within a month. The chairman would review these, add his own thoughts, and meet

with me again within a couple of months.

I was surprised at the level of anxiety this process brought on in me—very surprised. At

the time, I had been meditating for seven years, a practice that invites and supports looking at

one’s mind and its machinations. I was also part of a group that journaled together, using a set of

practices that asked us to set personal aims (inner ones) based on learning and accomplishment

(personal growth) objectives. We met monthly and used spiritual teachings as references. We did

a lot of reflecting but never provided feedback to one another.

I did my feedback homework as required but I was pretty dissatisfied with the core

competencies list as a reference against which to evaluate myself. Some competencies felt

shallow or vague; for example, was I “able to listen and take criticism?” I wondered if that meant

whether I was able to listen to all criticism and take all of it as useful. Some competencies

seemed to be the opposite of what was most important to me as a faculty member. Analytical

thinking was stressed but there was nothing on the systems thinking that was central to my work.

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The competencies seemed academic to everyone I asked for help, and I got only very

general ideas about how to apply them. Even the definitions and examples on the page of

instructions were abstract. I attended a one-hour training where I watched a video on the process

but that was no help either.

Even worse, a few of the competencies felt dead wrong. For example, one of the

questions asked if I was “able to persuade and influence others.” What had happened to co-create

and collaborate? Neither was on the list, although there was a reference to teamwork. For the

most part these questions, too, felt abstract and generic making it difficult to assess myself in a

meaningful way. Equally important to me, not one of the nine competencies addressed how

graduates from the department would successfully enter the real world, given our contributions

to their learning.

Truly, everything that I felt was really great and challenging about teaching did not

appear on this list—namely, the ability to make sense out of very complicated ideas and engage

others in understanding them together. Developing this competency was the very reason I had

asked to be part of the cross-discipline teaching team in the program that had been shut down.

Here, in my new position, it did not seem to count at all.

The people evaluating me were a mix of those I had worked with, even if not closely, and

others who knew me from a bit of distance. I taught department courses on social and

psychological aspects of communities while working on my doctorate in cognitive and

organization psychology. My dissertation research examined how researchers almost always

(consciously or unconsciously) influenced their research hypothesis, methodology, execution,

and findings.

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The method for my own research was to ask researchers to assess themselves using a

journaling process and then to engage them in an interview about their findings. (I followed up

with half of them a few years later and found that what they had learned about themselves

working with me on this project continued to guide their self-directed development and

professional work.) I started this research when I was teaching in the cross-degree program and

carried it forward in the Urban Planning Department. Within the context of my meditation

practice, journaling group, and research, I also journaled my experiences, interior and exterior,

working on the feedback form required by my new position.

My peers offered many ideas intended to help me grow. For example, their comments

included, “Spend more time writing out your lectures so that less is left to chance and your

presentations are not incomplete. This should enable you or others to replicate your lectures for

classes in the future.” Most of these faculty knew or had heard that I favored working from

outlines of key points. I used the life situations of my students, in real time in the class, to teach

principles based on their actual organization and community experience. This was intended to

draw out what they had learned and rigorously test my own ideas. It worked so well and

generated such enthusiastic learning that I and my students often ended up staying after class for

more conversation and exploration.

To my peers, this did not seem to match the competency to “be well prepared and able to

benchmark thoroughness and repeatability.” The department chairman gave these remarks to me

and added another suggestion: I was to learn to “simplify core concepts and require less effort

from students to extract them, in order to prevent confusion and lack of clarity concerning what

the test will include.” But, unbeknownst to my chairman, I did not test my students. I assigned

them to develop projects that would create real change and then to write papers developing a

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theory of change based on their concrete experiences carrying out their projects. This was a

graduate program. Was I really supposed to be spoon-feeding information to my students?

The outcome of my feedback process was two objectives, which were written into my

development plan: 1) simplify my course and make what I wanted students to learn more explicit

from the beginning, and 2) write out my lectures to make them more thorough and repeatable in

order to ensure transference. I was given training assignments and quarterly benchmarks to

follow up on. I mark this as the first day of a two-year period during which I mostly stopped

listening to myself and gave up ways of working based on what I knew, deep down, to be far

better. Looking back, this seems almost inevitable. It was a pattern carried forward from my

childhood. Feedback had hit me in one of my most vulnerable places.

And this pattern was ingrained not just in me. I recognized from my own research that it

commonly developed from the way most children are raised in Western society. I also had seen it

in an experimental research project I conducted that demonstrated how easy it is to get children

to abandon their own ideas and focus on what adults or powerful others want them to do and

think. I knew this was behavior built into our brains. We all need to belong; the fear of being

ostracized is part of our survival instinct. This instinct is so powerful that it causes children to lie

to themselves and others about what they are doing. Instead, they mirror what others tell them

they ought to be doing—or, if they do not lie, they experience painful doubt about themselves

and their own ways of thinking.

Aspiring to become a full professor in a cross-discipline program meant I needed to learn

to function in an environment where others were part of a process that taught us how to see

ourselves. At the one-year feedback follow-up, I was considered to have improved on both

fronts. I had worked hard in this new direction and taken my training seriously. But I was still

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keeping my journal, consistently recording feelings that what I was asked to do was not serving

my students well. I taught differently, and I was perceived to be better at it. But my newly

developed capabilities and the method of working I was developing did not fit me or my teaching

philosophy at all. They adhered to supposedly core competencies, and yet I felt that the

objectives in my development plan came from the ideas of other people about what good

teaching at the graduate level looked like. In their earnest attempts to help me grow, my peers

judged me against their own shortfalls and well-intentioned preconceptions.

I left San Jose State one year later, feeling that I could no longer enjoy a work track that

required me to sacrifice the real value I had to offer students and what they most needed from

their graduate programs. I wanted to work with the Socratic method on very complex subjects. I

wanted to engage with people in organization and community leadership roles on work that

would enable them to discern paths forward through complex and extraordinarily challenging

situations. I soon came to understand my disappointing experience in the Urban Planning

Department as a conflict of epistemology, defined as how people learn and the acceptable means

of helping them come to know something.

It took me about five years to find a different, truer path to what I wanted to accomplish.

The alternatives that I created to replace toxic practices such as 360-degree feedback are the

result of that search. I began to develop them when I finally learned to trust myself, to know and

work from my essence, and to listen to my ideas. This life change enabled me to find teachers and

colleagues who thought that what I did was amazing and wanted to learn how to do it for

themselves—not merely to imitate what I did. These people were passionately committed to

finding and following their own paths to innovation, based on discovery of their own essences

and ideas.

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The biggest surprise of this transition was that I discovered how many people had

stopped listening to themselves, and were keeping their heads down and working within the

system. I was also surprised by the strength of their hope and desire to find ways to fulfill their

potential in the professional worlds they had worked so hard to enter. Some had left their

institutions in search of a different path, as I had. Some had stayed and made their way as best

they could. Often they had given up. They had come to believe the toxic stories told to them in

feedback sessions. If they had managed to stop dwelling on them, they were nevertheless mostly

silenced, and their original dreams were obscured.

I felt deeply that I wanted to help those who had not found ways to be fully themselves in

professional environments. By the time I was 35, I had focused on businesses, particularly

corporations, as the places I thought I might be able to succeed in carrying out this personal

mission. These were the organizations where most people made their livings, and where large

groups of people had to adhere to guidelines and programs over which they had little or no

control. I soon found a way to create evolutionary changes in business practice, based on the

ideas I had about how organizations could work for the benefit of all—customers, employees and

cocreators, communities, ecosystems, and stockholders—in other words, the people I now refer

to collectively as “stakeholders.”

The door to this way forward was opened through a set of conversations with managers

who knew that something was wrong and wanted help. A wide gap existed between what they

thought were the sources of their challenges and what I knew they had not yet learned to see. To

me, this was my great opportunity to contribute to the world, and it was where I began the next

stage of my professional development. I grabbed it and I am still running with it.

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PART ONE

A TECHNOLOGY OF CHANGE

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CHAPTER 1

Five Challenges to Discernment

Why is it that organizational leaders, and people in general, have such difficulty recognizing the

negative impacts of their business practices and work designs? Why do we so deeply believe in

what is later found to be not only untrue but often harmful? What allowed me, as a young

assistant professor with high aspirations, to give in to 360-degree feedback?

False Certainties Are Not My Fault—or Yours!

Do you remember the low-fat craze? I do. I put on about 30 pounds before I lost faith in my lowfat

diet. Not that I blamed the regime. I followed it erratically, off it as often as I was on. I did

not question its premise and kept eating the low-fat way for decades, undermining my health

even as I studied and debunked misguided business practices. My unexamined eating habits led

to diabetes and high blood pressure. When I finally heard the messages my body was sending

and realized I had fallen for false research, I felt really stupid for a long time. I had been duped

by claims concocted by industries pushing harmful products to make money.

We do not need to go into the details of that fiasco but we do need to understand how it

was possible and why so many smart people were taken in, including me. At this stage of life, I

consider myself to be intelligent, highly discerning, and conscious that my choices are my own.

But I still get mad at myself for falling victim to the low-fat scam.

Developing this kind of understanding—in this instance, by tackling feedback—is an

invitation to engage in a process of discernment that is extremely difficult, even for those with

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the best of intentions. Real blinders prevent us from seeing how we were sold a bill of goods and

defended it. I have come to define them as the five big challenges or restraints of which we are

mostly unaware, especially if we are not thinking critically about ourselves and others. I still

have to remind myself of these challenges, and I am someone who writes and teaches about them

every day of my life!

The Challenges

First, we are culturally dependent. That is, all of us live in a culture interwoven with what

social psychologists call “implicit agreements.” To belong and be accepted by our communities,

we agree to accept the dominant patterns governing our way of interpreting and making sense of

events. These patterns seem right to us; we do not question them. They often include our political

and religious leanings, our understanding of how relationships work, what makes for success,

and how we view ourselves within our families. So many people with power and influence tell us

these agreements are true, that it is hard to go against the grain and question them. And if we did,

we might well be ostracized by groups of people we depend on for our well-being (family,

friends, teachers, colleagues, congregations, agencies), which would leave us feeling alone,

unstable, unloved, and alienated.

Second, there is no process readily available to most of us for questioning the

assumptions and agreements that have shaped us. Most communities never question or invite

individuals to question what they have been taught their whole lives by their families, schools,

employers, religious communities, and social circles. What everyone thinks and believes is so