Yesterday, I stumbled upon a very timely phrase for what I´m going through at the moment, and I realized that, as it happens, it´s not fully translatable from English to Spanish:
If you want to grow, get feedback
Feedback. That amazing word. Technically, it does have a translation, but not for this particular context, I believe.
Surprisingly, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language includes the word feedback as-is in its dictionary, with two meanings that reflect two different contexts: "retroalimentación" in biology (literal translations of back and feed joined in a single word), and "retorno, eco" (as in echo) related to sound (like when you place a speaker opposite a microphone and it starts screeching). Google translator offers alternative words like "realimentación" (same idea "retroalimentación") and "comentario" (as in comment), which I guess can be applied to the context or social networks, but even in that case, it sounds like a bit forced to me.
Realistically, what happened is that in the workplace, professional and creative contexts, Spanish speakers got used to the word feedback feedback as it is, without translation, for this word has a third definition in English that doesn´t exist in Spanish. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it´s "information about reactions to a product, a person's performance of a task, etc., which is used as a basis for improvement."
And what do these three definitions have in common? Well, as indicated by the word itself (feed-back, feed backwards), the result of a process is used as information to regulate the process itself. In biology (my favourite! I still remember when, as a teenager, I learned about this in school), the product of chemical reactions at a molecular or cellular level controls the reaction itself, very often to get back to a certain balance. In technology and engineering, the output from one system can be connected as an input to the same system, forming a loop that allows it to self-regulate. And in the workplace, we find out how well or how badly we´re doing things (or how much our work is liked or disliked) based on the comments we get on it.
An interesting definition I found on Wikipedia is the one proposed by Ramaprasad in the 1980´s. According to him, feedback is "information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level of a system parameter, used to alter the gap in some way". The key is in the second part of the definition: information by itself is not feedback unless it has an impact on the system, giving way to an action.
Going back to the workplace, that´s also the purpose of feedback: helping us to enhance "the system" (in this case, our abilities and performance in a specific area) using the information provided by our own results. Sounds easy, right?
Pero por supuesto, no es tan fácil. ¿Por qué? Porque somos personas, no mecanismos automáticos. Los seres humanos somos mucho más complejos. Por un lado, por mucho que nos engañemos pensando que somos objetivos, no lo somos ni mucho menos, así que la información nos llega distorsionada. Desde dentro nos cuesta ver claramente los resultados que estamos produciendo, y necesitamos que nos los muestre alguien desde fuera. Por otro lado, aquí «el sistema» no es algo ajeno a nosotros, sino que somos nosotros mismos, por lo que tendemos a tomarnos el feedback como algo personal; lo recibimos muchas veces como un juicio a lo que hacemos, y en última instancia, a quiénes somos, en lugar de simplemente información sobre el efecto que producimos con determinadas acciones. Y empiezan a surgir emociones, pensamientos, mecanismos de defensa…
What if we could go back to the origin of this word and remember that feedback is nothing but reference information we can use to continue to improve? We need to know when we´re going too far and when we´re falling short, and the only way to find that out is to give it a try, and then analyze what happens.
Which brings me back to the phrase from the beginning: If you want to grow, get feedback. And I would add: even if it hurts a little.
Todo esto me ha venido a la cabeza porque estoy en este momento a la espera de feedback, y es súper interesante ver todo lo que remueve…
What about you? What are your thoughts on this?