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