Feedback That Works
Feedback That Works is the rehearsal side of CCL's SBI model: the discipline of separating what you actually observed from the story you've built about it, before you say a word, so the Situation and Behaviour you state hold up when the other person pushes back.
Five boxes run left to right: what you noticed, the interpretation you strip back out, then the Situation, Behaviour and Impact you're left with to actually say.
Reach for this when…
- You give feedback and it either gets defensive or gets ignored.
- Feedback sessions turn into personality debates instead of behaviour change.
- Someone needs to hear something hard and you keep softening it into nothing.
How to run it
- Name the Situation: when and where it happened.
- Describe the Behaviour you observed, not your interpretation of it.
- State the Impact: what happened as a result.
- Practise separating observation from interpretation before using it live.
- Deliver it, then ask what landed and what didn't.
- Commit to one real conversation within 48 hours.
A worked example
Situation. Mia Gruber runs a garment factory in Graz, Austria, and her feedback to line supervisor Lukas usually came out as "you're not committed", which he shut down against every time.
Applied. Mia switched to SBI: "This week you were late to the 7am briefing three times. You arrived after the line had already started. That means the team runs the first hour without instructions and misses the daily target."
Result. Lukas admitted his childcare drop-off overlapped the meeting time; they moved the briefing 15 minutes later. The lateness stopped, and there was no character war to recover from.
The catch
SBI only works if you actually observed the behaviour, not the story you built about it - if the Situation and Behaviour are secretly the interpretation, it just sounds objective while working the same as before. It says nothing about handling a defensive reaction, and one clean SBI does not undo a pattern of feedback avoided for months.
If you cannot state the Behaviour without a motive attached to it, you have not separated observation from interpretation yet.
Origin: Center for Creative Leadership