Leave It At the Stream: Letting Go of the Past, Focusing on the Future
I love Fast Company magazine. I picked up one of the very first issues back around 1996, when I was doing a doctoral seminar project on change and leadership. I’ve been hooked ever since!
Found this great article over there. Marshall Goldsmith talks about his concept of “feedforward.” Face it, most of us have enough critical, negative feedback about things we can’t do anything about. Goldsmith urges us to focus on what we can change in the future.
Goldsmith’s ten reasons his “feedforward” concept works…
We can change the future. We can’t change the past.
It can be more productive to help people be “right,” than prove they were “wrong.”
Feedforward is especially suited to successful people.
Feedforward can come from anyone who knows about the task.
People do not take feedforward as personally as feedback.
Feedback can reinforce personal stereotyping and negative self-fulfilling prophecies.
Face it! Most of us hate getting negative feedback, and we don?t like to give it.
Feedforward can cover almost all of the same “material” as feedback.
Feedforward tends to be much faster and more efficient than feedback.
Feedforward can be a useful tool to apply with managers, peers and team members.
Seems like a thing we “Jesus apprentices” ought to do, if we’re going to be like our Boss.
