Feedback
The SBI model structures a feedback conversation around Situation, Behaviour, Impact, describing what happened and its effect rather than judging the person, so the conversation stays about the behaviour instead of triggering defensiveness.
Four labelled boxes run left to right, Situation into Behaviour into Impact into inviting their response, with arrows doing the pushing.
Reach for this when…
- A feedback conversation keeps sliding into character judgments.
- Someone needs to hear something hard without shutting down.
- Praise feels vague enough that nobody knows what to repeat.
How to run it
- Describe the Situation: specifically when and where.
- Describe the observed Behaviour: only what was seen or heard, not your interpretation of it.
- Describe the Impact: what happened as a result.
- Use the same SBI structure for both positive and developmental feedback.
- Give the person time to reflect before responding.
- Ask: 'what do you want to do with this feedback?'
A worked example
Situation. Lukas Meier led product at Alpstream Software, a SaaS company in Basel, Switzerland, and had been avoiding a conversation with an engineer whose stand-up updates ran long and vague.
Applied. Instead of 'you're disorganised in stand-ups,' he used SBI: 'in this morning's stand-up, you spoke for six minutes on one ticket, and the team lost ten minutes it needed for the rest of the board.'
Result. The engineer didn't get defensive, because there was nothing to defend against, only a specific moment and its effect. The next stand-up update ran ninety seconds.
The catch
SBI describes the behaviour cleanly but doesn't make the delivery easy; a well-structured version of hard news is still hard news. It works best on a specific, recent instance and gets vague fast when used for a pattern spanning months. And skipping straight to Impact without a real Situation just relabels judgment in a calmer voice.
If you can't name the specific moment, you're describing a reputation, not a behaviour, and SBI won't fix that.
Origin: Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)