Quality
Conscious Communication and Feedback
“When important things are left unsaid”
“When things are said with no regard for their effect on the listener”
Feedback is not an evaluation tool. It is a conversation and, like any conversation, it requires listening, clarity, and care. In a feedback culture, people do not wait for the annual review to say what they think: they say it when it matters. They do not avoid difficult conversations: they know that running from them comes at a higher cost.
This is not a matter of technique. It is a matter of relational infrastructure. There are teams where feedback exists but no one offers it. There are teams where feedback exists but no one asks for it. And there are teams where feedback happens every day, as something ordinary, without anyone needing to call it feedback.
What a team cannot say is, so often, what most needs to be said.
Level 1
Provoke
One day to dismantle the myths (feedback sandwich, hierarchy, mandatory niceness) and rehearse the practice in a safe environment. The starting point: we are all blind to ourselves, and feedback is the information that cannot be obtained any other way.
NOS, Curso Comunicação Consciente, desde 2022
A Conscious Communication course designed for NOS, now past a dozen editions over several years. It works on listening and on the different types of conversation, always through practice. Edition after edition, the motto holds: talking things through is how people come to understand each other.
Level 2
Develop
A cycle of sessions until giving and receiving feedback stops being the exception. Individual and team work, with support in the field. It includes exploratory conversations about goals, behaviours and commitments. In practice: rehearsal workshops, peer practice groups, inherited from clinical supervision, and individual advisory conversations. Each person takes an active role in their own development.
Fidelidade
Individual advisory programme: 272 sessions over several months, with employees from different areas. Feedback shifted from a threatening moment to a natural part of each person's journey.
Level 3
Transform
When the problem is no longer about individuals: silence has become the safest route. An intervention on communication as a system: what is said, what is not said, how it is said, what happens when it is. It includes leadership, management practices, meetings, and decision-making processes.
Solvay, Kitchen Conversations, 2024-2025
Metaconversations with the HR leadership team. Through informal conversations and direct observation of meetings, the team identified its own patterns: who speaks, who goes quiet, which conversations are avoided, which assumptions are never voiced. Naming those patterns made possible the feedback that had no place before.