Weeknotes #18

The feedback fatigue one

Jun 06, 2025

Weeknotes 📝

Longform ✍🏻

In the past week I’ve had multiple conversations with colleagues who’ve identified a problem and want to organise some sort of meeting or workshop to discuss it, but the idea of retrospecting on what’s already happened again is filling them with dread.

It isn’t that these folks don’t care. Quite the opposite. They want to improve something. They instinctively know that getting the right people in the right setting can be a conduit to change. They’ve just had enough of talking about the same topics in the same formats.

My suggestion to each of them has been simple: ask futurespective questions, not retrospective ones. Look forward, not back. We know X is a problem, we believe success looks like Y, so let’s work backwards from that and identify the first steps we can take towards it. An oversimplification, perhaps, but a refreshing shift all the same.

It got me thinking about wider organisational feedback mechanisms like engagement surveys, and whether feedback fatigue is a downstream side effect of these processes, or a predictable outcome of a system built on lagging indicators that keeps asking for input without ever changing how it responds.

Imagine you’re a tired employee in the trenches of your organisation (not hard to picture, I’m sure). An engagement survey link lands in your inbox and you fill it out with more or less the same responses as you selected last time.

A couple of months later the results are presented by top-level leaders, playing back the key themes from the survey to the very people who gave that feedback. You and your fellow trench mates, if you will.

That same data then gets sliced by department and team and cascaded to mid-level leaders, who are expected to present it to you again along with another round of discussions to delve deeper into those themes.

By now, you’ve seen this feedback regurgitated multiple times at the organisational level, while also giving or receiving individual feedback to support calibrations, in 1:1s with your manager, by the coffee machine, in mentoring sessions, project update meetings, scrum of scrums calls, guild sessions, company all hands meetings and countless other channels and mediums that top-level leaders either aren’t part of or don’t engage with.

You’d be forgiven, then, for wanting to avoid creating another feedback regurgitation session yourself at your next meeting.