Feedback is when you hold up a mirror to someone and describe what you see. It’s always coloured by your experiences, biases, and observations, but feedback is still valuable to give because it helps other to consider how their actions were perceived.

Today, we’ll talk about one of my favourite, simple feedback models – it can be used for peer-to-peer feedback, manager feedback, or anything else. It’s called the SBI model, and it stands for Situation, Behaviour, and Impact.

📍 Situation

First off, start off by describing the situation: what happened? When was it? Where was it?

Outlining the situation is important because feedback given as a generalisation very rarely goes well. (Consider the difference between hearing feedback on the presentation you did this morning vs. “every time you present.” Which sounds like it has more merit?) If you can’t think of a situation, then maybe you shouldn’t give the feedback.

Ideally, you would also give feedback close to the situation you’re describing, because it’s fresh for both of you (and will be easier to reflect on), and the recency means the recipient of the feedback will be more likely to take it well.

Consider being given feedback on something you did 6 months ago. You’d probably feel like they were holding a grudge this whole time!

👀 Behaviour

Next up is behaviour: what did you observe the other person doing or saying?

Remember that for this to work well, you need to stay as close to reality as possible. That’s why we talk about what you observed: don’t infer anything at this stage about why they behaved that way, just focus on what you actually noticed. Consider two ways of giving feedback:

1. When you were showing the new starter how to use the system, you went too quickly and were really impatient.
   ↳ This assumes impatience – the person you’re giving feedback to might not have been going fast due to impatience, so to them it could invalidate the feedback or make them frustrated.

2. When you were showing the new starter how to use the system, I noticed that you went through the steps very quickly.
   ↳ This is an observation with no judgement at this stage. This is much more effective because you can’t refute an observation.

💥 Impact

Finally, the last step is to actually deliver your feedback. Now that you’ve laid out the situation and outlined what you observed, you can tell them what the impact of the behaviour was.

Similar to the Behaviour step, try to keep assumptions out of it. Impact can be observed, or it could be known (eg. someone tells you they were upset).

The impact step is really the crux of this feedback model. It links it all together: by you exhibiting this behaviour, it caused this impact on your coworkers/the project.

You’ll notice that the SBI model is totally absent of judgement, recommendations, or corrective action. The idea here is to give as honest an observation as you can to someone else to let them really reflect, and then you can have an open and constructive conversation about next steps together. ✨