Series 2, Episode 38: How feedback can super-charge your organisation, with Professor Henning Piezunka, INSEAD

Does your organisation get the feedback it needs? In particular, does it get the feedback it needs to improve and to better meet customer or stakeholder needs? Or instead does it just hope for the best and pray that any improvements, changes or innovations somehow meet those needs?

To explore the role of feedback and the pivotal role it can play I am delighted to be joined by Professor Henning Piezunka of INSEAD.

Key insights:

• Feedback is vital for organisations and it is vital that they seek it out
• Not all feedback is equal, organisations need to be clear who is sharing it and how relevant it is
• People giving feedback notice what the organisation responds to and adjust their responses accordingly
• The clearer an organisation’s positioning, the more relevant will be the ideas and feedback received – though this comes with the potential cost of missing out on more unusual ideas that might be important
• Organisations must manage the trade-off between narrowing the feedback criteria to get something that is very focused, versus looking for a broad range of responses
• When organisations respond to feedback online they are not only responding directly to that person but also to other potential customers who will take note of how the organisation has responded
• Feedback is not always objective, but rather reflects performance against expectations – and these expectations can be framed based on the feedback of others

About Henning

Henning Piezunka is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise at INSEAD and is currently a Visiting Professor at Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Henning is an award-winning researcher who studies how organisations can tap into the knowledge of their members to foster greater inclusion, innovation and diversity. He has also conducted research into the crowdsourcing of ideas and the wisdom of the crowds. In another stream of research, Henning studies collaboration and competition, such as the factors that escalate competition into dangerous conflict. He has further researched succession in family firms and how people can improve their ability to interact with others by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Through his research, Henning has developed significant expertise across various domains, including start-ups, technology companies, family businesses and a range of sports. He has leveraged data from sports such as Formula One, soccer and chess to shed light on effective management practices. Henning’s work and expert opinions have been featured in leading business media including Time Magazine, The Economist and Harvard Business Review.

You can follow Henning on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henningpiezunka/

The paper discussed is available here: https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2022.0710

(Full reference: Park, S., Piezunka, H., & Dahlander, L. (2024). Coevolutionary lock-in in external search. Academy of Management Journal, 67(1), 262-288.)

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