I recommend reflecting on your experience with this chapter’s exercise before continuing. You can reflect about anything you found relevant, but here are some questions you may want to consider:

1. Did you notice differences from feedback you might have gotten?
2. Who is the leader in Feedforward?
3. How did others seem to feel during Feedforward?
4. How did you feel during Feedforward?
5. Did you get any useless advice? Was that a problem?
6. Where and how might you apply your experience in the rest of your life?
7. 
   

Data from Exercise

The one person you can never see from another perspective is yourself, yet you wish you could the most. After all, everybody else sees you from another perspective.
Others’ views are indispensable to improving your life and leadership skills. Most people get them through feedback. At work they get reviews from their managers. Athletes, actors, and other performers get feedback from coaches.
As much as feedback helps, it has limits, mainly that it evaluates the past.
Asking someone to evaluate creates communication issues. People often hold back what they think you won’t like hearing or if you might react in a way they might not like. If you ask someone how you did on a project and they say, “You did part X great, part Y great, and part Z great,” does that mean you did everything great or that they didn’t want to tell you what you did poorly? You’ll never know, not because he or she isn’t a great friend, but because of inherent issues with communicating evaluation.
When you ask about the past, you’re asking about something you can’t change. To act on feedback, you have to translate information about the past into something you can do now.
Feedforward gets usable information and advice without the baggage of feedback. It looks forward instead of backward. It’s a simple, two-minute practice that can get you more useful information than feedback. I’ll give some background and then outline the practice in a simple script.

What to Do

Follow the Feedforward script 10 times for one behavior you want to improve.
Like you learn scales by playing do re mi fa so la ti do, not in other orders, you learn Feedforward by following the script. If you want to improvise, you can, but you’ll do so more effectively after you master the basics. You’ll get most of it after 5 or 10 tries.