You dread your annual review time. You cringe at retrospectives. You wince in the face of a 360 Review. You don't like feedback - and you're not alone. Receiving feedback is hard, and when we ask for help with it we just get more feedback. On top of that, your brain doesn't like feedback, and it has some sneaky tricks it uses to convince you to argue about, pick apart, or even outright ignore that feedback. But there's hope - you can fight your brain and win!

This workshop will use LEGO to help teach you the following: the types of feedback and when to use them; how to structure a feedback conversation for maximum benefit; what are the questions you should be asking at each step in the conversation; what a feedback trigger is and how to recognize, defuse, and redirect those triggers; and more! We’ll apply all this to both giving and receiving feedback. By the end of the workshop you should be able to face even the most brutal peer review with a straight face (though maybe not a smile).

Jumps between lecture style and then exercises using actual LEGO (which I provide). The exercises are designed to get people feeling frustrated about feedback in various specific ways, which I do by pairing people up and then giving them secret instructions. I use the LEGO so there's something people can safely critique that still has an element of personal taste and choice to it, which is necessary for some of the feelings I'm trying to generate.

It runs best as an 8-hour workshop, so that people have a chance to practice the techniques, but it can be done in 4.