One of the key ideas of Nonviolent Communication is to remove judgment from our language when we want to communicate constructively. I gave an example of this in Judgment is a Silent Killer: I shared feedback with a customer on our cooperation thus far — all intended as very constructive. However, I made a mistake: I slipped in one piece of judgement, and that ended up being the only thing being heard by the customer.

I wanted to to tell you this last week as a reaction to your last piece, but it sounded like feedback, so I dropped it. It appears the result of my public musing on toxicity of feedback has resulted in feedback deprivation: a few people have admitted they would have given me feedback (also positive) on various things — but, because I’ve fallen off the feedback religion, they didn’t.

An exercise: Stand in front of a group, and say something meaningful on a topic the audience cares about. No, no, that’s not all, here comes the hard part: Now, look around the room (realistically: zoom room). Hopefully you see familiar faces. Now do this exercise in empathic listening: for each audience member (yes, this is a foreach loop), mentally put yourself in their shoes, or ears, or whatever.

In April I wrote about the No More Feedback book. Ever since it’s been in the back of my mind, and I’ve played with and researched some ideas on this topic. Let me share some of my musings and insights. A brief recap of the core idea of “No More Feedback” (in case you haven’t lost sleep over it like I have) — again, this is my summary of the book, not my own conclusion (although I do buy into it):

In a previous post I wrote about the “No More Feedback” book. I’m not done with this topic yet. In fact, I skipped a concept Carol Sanford focuses on quite a bit in the book: your essence. I realize how hippie this may sound, but as usual: bear with me. So, dear reader, let’s continue our journey to make sense of a world without feedback, a world where everything you assumed to be “right” is turned up-side-down.

At OLX I send out a weekly update email every Friday. It is an attempt to be transparent about what I’ve been working on that week and helps me reflect. Sometimes I also muse a bit on more broader topics I’ve been thinking about, or books I’ve read. This is an excerpt of this Friday’s email, I thought it may be interesting for people outside of the company as well.