Carol Sanford

I found this book disappointing, dogmatic, poorly edited, and in places, outright wrong. The extended reference to the Schroedinger's Cat experiment is entirely wrong but that wrong idea supports the authors 'Premise 5' well, suggesting she did not research it but instead misremembered it as what she wished to make her point.
I disagree with the premise that all feedback is unhelpful and pushes people into a fixed mindset, preventing them from growth and development.
I agree that rather than offering advice we should question and teach people to fish for themselves, but this is a hard thing to teach and requires a lot of time and effort. Self-reflection is likewise hard to learn to do and can take years, even with professional training.
I finished this book so I could throw it across the room. I do not recommend it, I do not agree with it.… (altro)

As a student of cognitive and organizational psychology, in "No More Feedback," Carol Sanford outlines the ways in which the standard business practice of feedback results in the mechanization of people. When people are turned into machines, they inherit all the shortcomings of machines: they lose the ability of sense perception, they break, and they no longer can function autonomously.

What is it to be human, and how can we return humanity to work?

Sanford posits that humans have three core capacities:
* Locus of Control
* Scope of Considering
* Source of Agency

Each of these span an internal to external spectrum; are we self-centered, or systems actualizing? All of these capacities are dynamic and often are influenced by context.

The process of feedback assumes that I, the observer, know both how you should behave, and that telling you how to behave will fix the problem. What if I am more biased than you, as you know yourself better than anyone else? And what if you don't like being told what to do? In these instances, feedback might not work that well.

Feedback is undergirded by the desire for control. Much of the business world is in the command and control paradigm; the CEO sets the course, managers distribute the CEOs vision, and workers execute. But what if groups of people in collaboration were able to achieve emergent outcomes?

Sanford is clear to state: feedback works in the short term. If you tell people what to do, and have control over their livelihoods, they generally will do what you tell them. But this is generally prevents the possibility of someone being able to work consciously, creatively, and compassionately.

To zoom out: feedback is one of many forms of behaviorism, in which we seek to control the behavior of others through external stimuli, such as rewards and punishments (praise and reprimand). If you're interested in reading more about this subject, please explore Shoshona Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" and Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards."

There is another way. Sanford has distilled a school surrounding living systems frameworks and regenerative business that leverages our humanity rather than snuffing it out. It is based on the assumption that humans can self-observe and develop. Although these processes are much less predictable in the short term, they are vastly more effective in the long term.

Although Sanford's school is complex and nuanced, at its core is a process of Socratic questioning. These are open ended resourcing questions that come from a place of genuine curiosity. This process surrounding reflection is at the heart of Sanford's work.

Through stories from her own experience and framework distillations of these experiences, Sanford has created a compelling and readable text.

As an economist, I'm left wondering—is money a form of feedback? Are there ways in which money could encourage self-reflection? But these are questions for another place.… (altro)

I enjoyed Carol's book. Although I don't have a strong connection with her examples [actually, many of her examples have negative connotations for me that detract from her argument], I appreciate the framework she sketches out.

I was interested to see that, although she references the Native American origins of her archetypes, she doesn't reference the Gurdjieffian influences of her use of systematics. Actually, a good portion of the book could have come directly from J. G. Bennett's writings [for example, the claim that the 20th century was the time of the mechanistic worldview and that the 21st century is that of community]. These influences strengthen her stance, whether acknowledged or not [maybe she just felt it would be politically incorrect to reference such sources].

I'm going to go back and review her frameworks again [and skip over the examples]. There's a lot of potential depth to these frameworks, much of which probably goes over our heads on our first exposure to the frameworks.

It's worth noting that I disagree about the potential of for-profit entities in a shift between ages [I don't think they're everything]. I think if Carol were to be more liberal in her application of her worldview she'd find that the framework of money is also an artifact of the Age of Separation. But she's come a long way anyways.… (altro)