As you look take stock and look to the future, one useful approach is to look at yourself as if you are the pilot of your own plane. And just like a pilot, it’s crucial to gather feedback on yourself in three key areas:
■ Forecasts about the journey ahead
■ In-the-moment data during the flight, and,
■ Feedback on how well you piloted the plane.
The ultimate goal is to stay on course, self-correct as needed, and avoid any major turbulence or hazards that come your way.
Successful pilots use an evidence-based approach, relying on data instead of getting defensive. It’s the same for you as your own pilot. Feedback is everything. That’s why it’s important to gather feedback from various stakeholders in your life, including your spouse, kids, parents, friends, and investors, as well as customers and clients, co-workers, partners, employees, and the wider community.
To grow self-awareness and social intelligence, you should use a range of tools to collect feedback. This includes having mentoring conversations, tracking financial metrics, monitoring the amount of time you spend at home, with kids, and exercising, tracking the amount of sleep you get, monitoring your health and well-being data, and paying attention to social media responses like event attendance, likes, and retweets. It’s also important to take note of people who actively help and refer opportunities to you.
In preparation, begin to identify all the various stakeholders that influence your direction and momentum going forward in the following areas, and consider what kind of feedback (observations about what happened) and feedforward (suggestions about the future) they might be able to provide.
In this section, we will look in detail at how to design and implement various feedback loops as part of the Dare Change Lab.