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Giving and Receiving Feedback

“There is no failure, only feedback.”

 

–Thomas Alva Edison

Feedback is a concept borrowed from engineering. It is a process where we extract information about the performance of a machine and use this information to tweak the machine settings, so that we achieve an improved performance. When applied to human beings, feedback is a moment of reckoning—when we let others observe us and suggest appropriate corrective actions so that our behaviour and performance become even better.

Of course, with us humans, things are not as simple as pressing buttons or designing appropriate electrical circuitry. We will have to deal with a whole slew of complex psychological factors while going through the feedback process.

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