I Don't Synthesize Feedback Alone Anymore
In my career, I have spent so much time in one on one conversations with leaders and employees doing feedback reviews. In all of those sessions, I find that the things I heard most recently sit in my brain in a bigger way than the conversation from three weeks ago did. Even when the context is the same. Welcome, recency bias.
Gathering information to help people learn and grow is very important. Doing it where these biases creep in does the person you’re helping a disservice. It’s a problem when you can’t give an accurate picture of how that person’s presence is landing across multiple voices.
The actual cognitive task.
Synthesizing feedback across different sources means you have to hold a lot at once. What the person said, what they didn’t say, how their relationship to the subject might be shaping what was shared, and whether what you’re seeing is real or just how you’re perceiving it. It’s very complex.
Most HR leaders are doing all of this while also juggling jobs that pull their attention in a 100 different directions, all within the span of a few hours. The time spent on synthesis gets pushed to a morning before the day gets crazy, but could also end up being even less time after all the interruptions. The key here is having really good notes to go back to, but that only helps if you actually have the time to go back to them.
What comes out of this process is usually good enough. But that often means the most vivid conversations you had with individuals end up carrying more weight simply because they’re recent. You end up underweighting something that was said a while ago, or something that was buried within other points an individual made.
Why it keeps happening.
This process of getting feedback doesn’t have an easy structure or cadence to make it consistent and really remove the bias. Whenever you do the synthesis, you’re starting with a blank document, and the mental bandwidth you have at the time is what you’re working with. HR leaders are often the only person who sees all the information, and the work has to get done in isolation, under time pressure, with no mechanism to catch where your attention drifted.
What I’ve started to do.
The game changer I found here is using AI tools to make this process easier. I focus all of my attention on writing notes, what somebody said, what language they used, what I noticed in the conversation. Then I take all of those sources I put that effort into in the moment and put them into an enterprise AI that lets me surface themes across all of the inputs.
That’s the game changer.
Unlike my memory, it doesn’t weight the note from yesterday over the one from three weeks ago. It just reads what’s there.
This output is always a first pass, never something I’m relying on 100%. I go through my own recollection. I think about something the AI might not have flagged. I also take into account what I was feeling in those moments, in terms of what might get missed.
The final synthesis is always mine, and something I know is in support of the people I work with every day. It’s an output that ensures quieter voices are heard and weighted equally against louder ones. It helps me stop weighting recency over pattern. And I get to spend my energy on what all the information means, not just on figuring out what the information is.
There are limits to this. AI can surface structure or repetition, but it doesn’t catch hesitation in a conversation, or why somebody chose one particular word over another. It doesn’t account for the human aspects, which are a huge piece of these conversations. That interpretive work still has to happen between the HR leader and the human going through it.
Also, for what it’s worth, I never add names of individuals into these AI products. I personally scrub everything before it goes in, to make sure there’s no data issue.
What are you doing in the space between the last conversation and the final synthesis? If the answer is mostly trusting your memory to hold it, that’s the gap this practice is designed to close.