What is Clean Feedback?
Clean Feedback is a simple, effective way of giving better quality feedback to yourself and to others. It can be used as a personal development tool or as a way of creating a psychologically safer culture across families, teams, and organisations. At its core is the ability to separate our responses into three categories: Evidence, Inference, and Impact. It should be used in conjunction with an understanding of the Drama Triangle to ensure you are not weaponizing the Clean Feedback model to confirm your own bias.
Evidence is what actually happened; what you saw or heard or did. Inference is the meaning that you made up about it; what you think or feel about what you saw, heard or did. Impact is the consequence; what happened next because of what you made up about the thing that you saw, heard or did.
The feedback giver reflects on their experience and separates it into these three categories. The categories don’t have to be given in a certain order, just so long as they are all there. For example, if I particularly appreciated something my colleague did, I might say, 'when you sent that email with guidelines for editing only within the columns of the book, I knew just what was needed and felt confident to start the project and I make up that you know what I need to work at my best'.
Anyone offering Clean Feedback will benefit from understanding Karpman’s Drama Model to explore any Drama they are in. Clean Feedback is a learning tool, not a wet fish to slap people with nor a pom pom to cheerlead people with whom you want to encourage. If you are wanting to ‘help’ someone or to encourage them without an express invitation, don’t give them feedback. If you want to disparage someone or paint yourself as a victim, don’t give them feedback. Set boundaries or ask them what they’d like to have happen instead. Once you’ve acknowledged your drama to yourself, you can use the clean set-up to help you consider what you’re giving the other person feedback for and how you’d like your relationship with them to be. Clean Feedback was designed so that you can learn about yourself, they can learn about the impact their behaviour is having and you can learn about them. There should be space in the process for you to say: What didn’t work well was when you did/said ….. I thought it was …… and the impact on me was ….. What was happening from your perspective? It works best when taught within Systemic Modelling but even without the add-ons, cleaning up your feedback can only be a good thing.
The Clean Feedback model was designed by Dr Caitlin Walker with input during development from Dee Berridge and Nancy Doyle.