How Feedback Requests Reveal Organisational Deafness Rather Than Openness
Imagine a long-term relationship where one person suddenly sits down and earnestly asks, "How are we doing?" The question seems considerate, even vulnerable. Yet for the other person, it may trigger a devastating realisation: You genuinely don't know? After all this time, all these conversations, everything I've shared—you can't tell?
What was intended as a moment of checking in instead reveals absence. The sincere request for feedback exposes that one party hasn't been reading the relationship at all. Once that realisation lands, trust fractures. The relationship has fundamentally shifted, not through malice, but through revealed inattention.
This same dynamic operates at organisational scale, yet remains largely unexamined. When businesses, government departments, or institutions formally request feedback from customers, citizens, or stakeholders, they may believe they're demonstrating openness and commitment to improvement. In reality, they're often signalling the opposite: that they haven't been listening all along.
When someone explicitly asks "Can I get your feedback?" or "How are we doing?" they're making an announcement, whether they realise it or not: I haven't been paying attention to what you've already been telling me.
Real-time feedback flows constantly through every interaction: response rates, engagement levels, complaint patterns, questions asked and not asked, what people return to, what they avoid, usage behaviour, body language in face-to-face encounters, tone in written communication. All of this is feedback. If someone has been genuinely attentive, they already know the answer to "How are we doing?" They've been reading it all along.
The explicit feedback request resets the relational dynamic. It positions the asker as reflective and open whilst simultaneously revealing operational deafness. There's an implicit demand: "Stop what we're doing and tell me how I'm performing." It centres them and their need for evaluation rather than the actual purpose of the relationship or the communication already flowing within it.
Moreover, by formally requesting feedback, organisations control when feedback is given, how it's framed, and implicitly whether it needs acting upon. It's feedback on their terms, in their timing. Genuine listening, by contrast, means being responsive to feedback that arrives inconveniently, that wasn't requested, that challenges rather than validates.
Macnamara's extensive research across three continents found that organisations devote substantial—sometimes massive—resources to constructing an "architecture of speaking" through advertising, public relations, and corporate communication, but listen poorly, sporadically, or sometimes not at all. His work identifies what he terms a "crisis of listening" in modern organisational life: practitioners spend more time talking about listening than actually practising it.
There's a world of difference between two approaches:
"How are we doing? Please complete our feedback survey."
"Let me check what I'm hearing you say. Over the past months, you've been telling us through your usage patterns and the questions you've raised that X, Y, and Z are concerns. Is that right?"
The first centres the organisation's performance and need for validation. The second demonstrates that attention has been paid, offers back what's been received, and seeks confirmation or correction of understanding. It centres the other party's communication.
Genuine listening happens organically within the flow of relationship. It doesn't interrupt to demand assessment. A practitioner truly attuned to a client doesn't need to stop and ask "Is this working for you?" They can see whether it's working. They're reading the room continuously. The explicit question often signals they've lost the thread.
Research on stakeholder engagement distinguishes between "symbolic participation"—where stakeholders are given a place at the table but their voices carry little weight—and "engaged participation," where genuine influence shapes outcomes.
Studies of consultation processes in various sectors reveal that engagement is often performed "merely to meet requirements" rather than from authentic commitment to listening. The feedback request becomes theatre: a performance of openness that legitimates predetermined courses of action.
Listening can and should happen continuously. Gathering information from both formal and informal channels and using it for analysis should be an ongoing organisational function, not an occasional event.
When an organisation sitting on this mountain of existing signals then issues a feedback survey, they reveal one of three problems:
In each scenario, the feedback request damages rather than strengthens the relationship. In the first, competence is questioned. In the second, authenticity is undermined. In the third, genuine partnership is exposed as impossible.
Macnamara's framework distinguishes between "listening structures" (surveys, feedback forms, consultation processes) and actual attentive listening. His research reveals a paradox: whilst organisations use listening structures to signal openness, these mechanisms can actually reinforce existing power structures and create what he calls "opportunities for unwanted surveillance" rather than genuine dialogue. The form substitutes for the substance.
A self-perpetuating culture has emerged around "getting feedback." This isn't an excuse for organisational collusion—participating in dysfunctional culture perpetuates it—but understanding the ecosystem helps explain its persistence.
Everyone colludes because it appears to be good practice. The feedback request signals virtuous attributes: openness, responsiveness, user-centredness, commitment to improvement. It's organisational virtue signalling.
There's also the seductive "sugar hit" of being asked. Initially, it feels good—someone wants to hear your opinion, your voice matters, change might happen. This momentary rush of validation can be genuinely pleasurable. Being consulted feels like being valued. But like any sugar rush, it passes quickly, leaving the "listened to" ultimately unsatisfied when nothing changes, when the next feedback request arrives asking the same questions, when it becomes clear the performance of listening was more important than actual hearing.
The metaphor is physiologically apt. When we consume sugar, blood glucose spikes rapidly, triggering dopamine release in the brain's reward centres—that immediate pleasure, that sense of satisfaction. But the body responds by flooding the system with insulin, causing blood sugar to crash below baseline levels within 30-60 minutes. This crash brings irritability, fatigue, and craving for another hit. It's why giving children sugary treats before bedtime creates chaos—the initial hyperactivity from the glucose spike, followed by the crash that leaves them dysregulated, cranky, unable to settle. Their small bodies swing wildly between extremes, seeking stability but finding only turbulence.
Feedback requests operate on the same cycle. The initial dopamine hit of being consulted, the spike of hope that things might change, followed by the inevitable crash when nothing does. And just as repeated sugar consumption leads to insulin resistance—where cells stop responding to the signal—repeated feedback requests create "consultation fatigue," where people stop believing their input matters. The body adapts, the excitement dulls, participation drops. We're left craving genuine listening but receiving only more empty calories of consultation.
But here's where the betrayal cuts deepest: during that sugar spike moment of being asked for feedback, people invest emotionally. They spend time crafting thoughtful responses, share vulnerable experiences, offer creative solutions. They believe—genuinely believe—that this time will be different. The dopamine hit isn't just from being asked; it's from the anticipation of impact, the neurochemical reward of expected agency. When nothing changes, the crash isn't merely disappointment—it's the physiological experience of betrayal. The brain had prepared for reward, released anticipatory chemicals, created neural pathways of expectation. The absence of follow-through doesn't just leave things unchanged; it actively damages the relationship at a biological level. Trust, once encoded in our neural pathways through repeated expectation and disappointment, becomes increasingly difficult to rebuild. Each ignored feedback form literally rewires people to expect betrayal.
But the cultural normalisation creates a more insidious effect. This ecosystem actively trains people—service users, customers, citizens, families—to expect that their ongoing communication won't be heard unless formatted as formal feedback. It teaches them that real-time signals don't count. Only the survey matters. Only the official feedback channel is legitimate.
The culture therefore actively undermines continuous, organic, relationship-based listening. It replaces attunement with episodic data collection. And by making feedback requests ubiquitous, it renders genuine listening—continuous attention to signals already flowing—seem quaint, unprofessional, or insufficient.
Research indicates that business professionals have asserted for over half a century that effective listening is highly desirable in the workplace, yet systematic research on whether organisations actually practice it remains sparse. The assumption persists that feedback mechanisms represent genuine listening rather than substitutes for it.
In power-balanced relationships, asking "How are we doing?" can be relationship-ending. The question reveals that one party hasn't been present, hasn't been reading the signals, hasn't truly been in relationship at all. What was thought to be connection is exposed as one person going through the motions whilst the other assumed mutuality.
In power-imbalanced relationships—which organisational relationships typically are—the damage operates differently but no less profoundly. Service users, employees, clients, or citizens may already harbour doubts about whether they're genuinely heard. The formal feedback request confirms their suspicion.
The feedback form arrives and the implicit message is clear: "We haven't been listening to what you've been telling us through your behaviour, your questions, your complaints, your engagement patterns. Please now tell us explicitly, in the format and timing we've chosen, what you think."
Two failure modes emerge:
Either way, trust erodes. The relationship shifts. And in organisational contexts where alternatives exist, people quietly withdraw their engagement, their custom, their commitment.
Genuine organisational listening doesn't announce itself through feedback requests. It demonstrates itself through responsiveness to signals already received.
"Based on your usage patterns over the past quarter and the recurring themes in your support queries, we understand that process X creates frustration. We've redesigned it. Here's what's changed."
Or: "We've noticed that customers in your demographic rarely use feature Y but frequently request functionality similar to Z. We're exploring whether..."
Or even: "The questions you're not asking suggests we're not explaining Z clearly enough. We're revising our documentation."
This is fundamentally different from: "Please rate your satisfaction on a scale of 1-10."
Research on listening in organisations reveals what might be termed a "listening paradox": whilst listening is understood to benefit speakers, it can be experienced as costly and depleting for listeners. This partly explains organisational reluctance to maintain continuous listening—it's genuinely demanding. But the alternative—episodic, formalised feedback collection—creates worse problems. It substitutes performance for substance, reinforces power imbalances, and trains stakeholders that their ongoing communication doesn't count.
When organisations issue feedback requests, they reveal something profound about their operational state. They're either admitting they haven't been listening, or they're performing consultation whilst retaining all decision-making power, or both.
The temptation to ask "How are we doing?" merits examination. Those genuinely uncertain about their performance might consider whether the problem lies not in lack of feedback but in lack of listening. The signals are already flowing—in every interaction, every pattern of engagement, every silence.
Real listening doesn't require periodic data collection. It exists as a continuous practice of attention, interpretation, and response. It means being genuinely present to signals as they arise, rather than controlling when and how they're permitted to arrive.
Macnamara argues that organisations must create an "architecture of listening"—not merely structures for collecting feedback, but cultures, systems, and practices that enable genuine hearing. This requires moving beyond the performance of consultation toward the substance of relationship.
The feedback request, far from demonstrating organisational commitment to listening, often signals its absence. The question "How are we doing?" inadvertently announces: "We haven't been paying attention." Once recognised, that admission is difficult to retract. Trust, once broken by revealed inattention, requires more than another feedback form to rebuild. It requires actually listening—continuously, attentively, responsively—in the first place.
A note from the author: Next time you're presented with a feedback form after training, buying a new product, or the latest workplace reorganisation, feel free to point them to this essay. Just don't expect it to be read!
Macnamara, J. (2016). Organizational Listening: The Missing Essential in Public Communication. New York: Peter Lang.
Macnamara, J. (2018). Listening and organizational culture: A review and reconceptualization of listening in public relations and corporate communication. International Journal of Listening, 32(3), 155-176.
Macnamara, J. (2020). Beyond post-communication: Challenging disinformation, deception, and manipulation using a critical theory approach to public relations. Public Relations Inquiry, 9(1), 87-104.
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