Feedback on the Top-10 U2 songs

Last weekend my wife and I joined a zoom call with our friends from London to discuss our top-10 U2 songs. Seems like a simple topic, but it turned out to be both significantly more complex and even more interesting than we imagined. As I made my list, I assumed that at least half of these were no-brainer-top-10 songs….it turns out I was quite wrong. Bringing all lists together we had thirty-six different songs. THIRTY-SIX!! Only two out of ten songs on my list appeared on my wife’s list. Only two different songs from her list appeared on one of our friend’s lists. One of us had zero songs appearing on any other list. Only one song in a #1 position appeared on any other list. How is it that we have such a disparate interpretation of the Top-10 when we have so many other things in common? In addition, why was I the only person who knew correctly that The Fly is the best U2 song? :-)

 On the same day that we were slightly overfilling our wine glasses and discussing songs, I was reading about cultures of feedback and what is required to develop our skills in both giving and receiving feedback. One clear element is to establish the facts. Real, concrete and proven facts. Not opinions and not interpretations. This sounds easy but it is not always the case. I was reading a study recently that recorded how people describe a past occurrence in an extremely vivid and clear way, but the facts of their story were totally wrong! This study was not comparing the perceived facts with other witnesses but was instead comparing the respondent’s own description as compared to a description that they gave at an earlier time. How does it happen that even our own memories of events can change over time?What seems to be the case is that memories hide away gathering dust in our heads, and it is not until we call them back from the vault that we create our mental picture of what occurred. In this interpretation these memories are filtered through a background of our situation, environmental changes, emotions and expectations which naturally influence these memories during the recall phase. Could this be one reason why my friends not only failed to correctly identify The Fly as U2’s best song but they also failed to include it at all? Maybe. Could it also be one reason behind an experience many of us have had where two or more people have a clear and vivid understanding of what occurred in an earlier meeting but describe a completely different set of facts?

 What this highlights is how important it is for any feedback to be timely. We need to get used to delivering and requesting feedback as close to the performance as possible so as not to allow time for facts to become blurry in either head. Doing this takes some discipline but makes a difference. Imagine how much easier my Sunday discussion would have been if I had been able to give timely feedback that my friends had wrongly interpreted a specific song as a classic way back in the 90’s! ??

 Feedback can also be a tricky process if participants were not all undertaking the actual job required or had interpreted the situation or the job-to-be-done differently. Take our Top-10 song list as an example. It turns out we all approached this process of developing the list differently. We even had a slightly different understanding of what Top-10 meant. Some of us looked at songs that had a big impact on them at the time. Some looked for songs that created a mood for them or a song that linked back to emotional periods. Others looked at a small guitar riff or clever lyric and that was enough to send a song into the Top-10. Whatever the reason, we were not assessing based on consistent criteria which contributed to the unique nature of each list. It is not only music where that happens which is something we should be conscious of when giving feedback.

 Is a song list the best metaphor to use to discuss feedback? Maybe, maybe not. Songs that we are passionate about invoke strong feelings in us only because of our interpretation of what we hear. Facts were not so important for our Sunday afternoon music discussion. It is a fact, for example, that there are guitar sounds at the start of a song. The opinion that The Fly is U2’s greatest song is mine alone and it really does not matter whether people agree with that selection or not. The facts on which we base our feedback do matter. They matter a lot. For feedback to be effective it needs to be delivered in a timely manner, based on facts, discuss the impact observed from those facts and contain a suggestion for either a different approach or to keep doing what was successful. My friends and I will never agree on one Top-10 list for U2 but we can agree to keep listening to music, keep meeting for a glass of wine even if it is virtual, and to keep celebrating the things we have in common and the things we interpret differently.

 In conclusion The Fly is the best U2 song ?? ….give me feedback on that!

(For completeness, here is my Top-10 list...)