I’m a sucker for feedback.
I prize it so much that whenever I ask for general feedback, I always start with this question:
What are the things I need to know that I do not know?
The question above may seem familiar. That’s because in some other contexts it can also be referred to as Unknown Knowns.
Unknown Knowns simply can be described as something that is true that I’m yet to discover.
To help illustrate, think about Gravity, Newton only discovered and proved the maths behind it but gravity existed eons before he wrote Principia Mathematica. Thereby turning an Unknown Known into a Known Known.
If you start with the question “What are the things I need to know that I do not know?", you give the other person permission to assume you do not know of your flaws or mistakes and you make them cognizant that you are ready to learn about them. This means they can give you feedback on things they genuinely think you are unaware of — They can show you your blind spots. This is what I mean by Blind Spot Feedback.[1]
I’m going to give some scenarios that help illustrate blind spot feedback as well as explain why the person you get it from is just as important as the feedback itself.
First, some trivial examples that can be embarrassing:
In all these cases, we can remove the social awkwardness when we are confident there are people around us to tell us things we do not know but need to know.
Social embarrassing examples aside, blind spot feedback is applicable to other situations and here are some that plague a majority of us:
and so on.
These are not necessarily detrimental or embarrassing but can help you improve once you become aware.
Let us shy away from general situations for a minute and focus on work environments where blind spot feedback can be useful. If you are doing a write up for your project, a “fresh pair of eyes” can alert you to errors or things you missed.
E.g.
If you have ever used “a fresh pair of eyes” for anything then you are more familiar with blind spot feedback than you may realise. Even for this essay, I employed the use of “fresh eyes” before publishing the final draft.
A major point to note about the blind spot question is recognising it has to come from an observational standpoint. You can’t walk up to people with this question — “What are the things I need to know that I do not know?” — and expect an immediate answer. You have to give them a period of time they can observe you, whilst having that question at the back of their minds. Once the time you’ve given has elapsed, the answers produced will be more genuine and sample-specific because they observed you over a period of time.
So far, we have talked about the “what” but I want to talk about something just as important, the “who”. Across any type of feedback, not just blind spot feedback, “who” you get feedback from is just as important as what the feedback is. [2]
This may seem obvious but you’ll be surprised how easy it is for the “who” not to be carefully considered when seeking feedback. The who helps you put a weighting on the feedback received to help you determine its importance. The who is often why reviews from experts differ from the common public. The who helps you see the thin line between a piece of feedback and a pet peeve.
Determining the who is quite a tricky area to model but from my experience the who can be categorised into different hierarchical levels.
At the highest level — Level 1 — you collect feedback from those who have a stake in your situation/scenario/activity. That is, your improvement in an activity or situation directly affects their lives. They are more inclined to give you pertinent feedback since it directly affects their output.
The next level down — Level 2 — is feedback from experts. Those who have been through or witnessed a certain situation/scenario/activity before. They may not have a direct stake in your improvement but their feedback can be effective.
Level 3 is for those who care about you but do not have a stake in your improvement and are not experts. E.g. your parents.
The next step — Level 4 — is free for all. I will posit that some feedback is better than none, so asking the smartest people you know, or perhaps using the web (e.g. Quora) can help.
Note though, every type of person in the hierarchy can give you perfectly good advice or bad advice or even the same advice but in the real world this rarely happens so sorting by type of person is an effective way to do it.
Sorting by the “who” also helps you to determine pet peeves vs real feedback. It’s very easy for people to say what they don’t like about you but feedback is not about likes and dislikes, it’s about improvement. Someone who has a stake in your development (i.e your output affects their output) is less likely to talk about pet peeves but more about your development.
Let’s revisit the zipper issue from earlier and ask ourselves this question: Of all the people you come in contact with (daily, monthly, or any period), who are those you feel most comfortable with to mention a zipper issue?
If we extend my initial predicament to: My zipper is still undone but this time, I’m carrying a sign that reads “feel free to tell me if there’s something wrong with my outfit”. Are you now more inclined to give me feedback? Perhaps you would, perhaps you would not care. But the point is, permission-based feedback gives you the chance to let someone know something they don’t know about themselves.
A general question you might ask:
Isn’t all feedback effectively blind spot feedback since you are receiving new information you were not aware of?
The short answer is no, as most feedback is on things people know they need to improve on or measure their progress on. They might not know how to proceed but in most cases, they are aware of the topics. Blind spot feedback is about those things you are not aware of.
A final point to make:
Ask and you shall receive. Asking the right people to give you feedback enables two things:
Blind Spot Feedback won’t occur unless you request it.
[1] Feedback can be positive or negative but I’m dwelling on negative here.
[2] Feedback is a huge topic on its own if not a book, so we can spend a lot of time on this. Thankfully I’ve decided to focus on one specific type that is hardly discussed — Blind spot feedback.
Thanks to Akin and Olamide for reviewing this. :)