Article: Feedback Vs Feed-Back

In September 2015, my wife and I attended and spoke at a singles conference of disciples from our churches in Ghana in the southern town of Koforidua. The city is regarded as one of the calmest and coolest in Ghana, close to the Boti falls. We still cherish great memories of the journey from Accra and back, of the fellowship, the classes, the sports activities, touristic adventures etc.

During the last day of the retreat, we shared with the organizers about the areas we thought needed improvement. A post-mortem can be defined as a discussion of an event after it has happened, primarily what was wrong with it or why it failed. I remember that a committee was instituted back in Winneba in 2008 to review and plan for the next edition.

Fast-forward three years later, and the same team that organised that national singles conference had the opportunity this time, to plan and host the International singles retreat. The improvement is truly remarkable across board.

There’s a lesson here even for our individual lives, our ministries, our family, professional, spiritual lives etc.

My former boss preferred the word feed-forward to feedback because it takes away the negative connotation associated with the latter and focuses on the way forward, simply learning to make positive changes based on past experience.

It has been said that it takes our ego about ten positives to be able to handle one area of improvement. In our efforts to bring about growth, we can build others up rather than tearing them down.

How are you doing in this area? Do you build people up or tear them down? Do you take them back to their mistakes in a negative way, or point them to how they can even do better in the future?

*Ephesians. 4:29; Col. 4:6; 1 Thessalonians. 5:11; Prov. 15:7; Matthew. 12:34-37*

Gilbert Kimeng