Is the feedback from your colleagues on your Briefing anonymous?

One of our favorite features of SpotlessMind is a subtle and half-hidden feature that allows you to request feedback from different people you have worked with to improve your Briefing and make it more accurate.

This is one of our favorite features because we’ve found that this is how Briefings often transform from “Really, really, really good” to “Spectacularly amazing” (to use the scientific terminology). That outside feedback makes a real difference. You should try it on yours!

This implies an important question: can’t you figure out what each friend said about you, which would then prevent them from being honest? And even if it is “anonymous,” when you send it to 2 people for feedback, and you know their personalities and your work history together–you can figure it out. So that doesn’t feel very anonymous, right?

To solve this problem, we came up with a clever strategy, which is implemented and live in the software.

Basically, until 3 colleagues have given feedback–the feedback is hidden and nothing changes. (Or groups of 3 colleagues, like 3 colleagues, then the next 3, and so on; roughly think of it as batches of 3.)

Then, once 3 colleagues have answered the questions about you and working with you, our system takes their feedback, synthesizes it together, and, based on their comments on you, makes recommendations to update your Briefing. The recommendations are based on a unification of what they all wrote; at no point do you [1] have access to what any individual wrote, nor [2] have access to what they wrote as a group. All you see are Briefing update recommendations based on the synthesis of what they wrote.

Said differently: their feedback is fed into the AI, and then the AI uses it to make recommendations. But no one can ever see what they wrote, their answers are top secret private. And the “no recommendations until 3 have given feedback” feature is merely an extra safeguard to prevent our system from recommending something you don’t like after one person. Hence, you realize that that one person had to have said something not-ideal about you. Now, if that does happen, it is your best guess of 1-in-3.

To make it even safer beyond that, no changes are ever made to your Briefing without your explicit approval and confirmation of any changes. Your colleague’s unified feedback becomes mere suggestions. But you control the final version of the Briefing.