Creating a Feedback Culture

Designing questionnaires, then collecting and analysing data are the relatively easy part. Changing behaviours and embedding a feedback culture, that’s the hard bit.

And so this newly published HBR article is useful as a blueprint for organisational change. Rather than aiming to inform and inspire with communication campaigns and training, instead researchers have turned to behavioural science to create the ‘4T model’.

The approach is about embedding timely interventions into the specific moments when people make choices. Here’s how it works (followed by a client feedback example):

(1) TARGET a specific behaviour, decision, or outcome

From hundreds of behaviours connected to an aspiration such as innovation, inclusion, or high performance, you prioritise ones that will make the biggest impact, ideally using data to mine for insight and develop hypotheses.

(2) Develop a THEORY of change

Next, you talk to stakeholders and identify what barriers keep them from changing, and look at the scientific literature on behaviour change for inspiration. Like a doctor, you must make your own diagnosis and consider what treatment might work best.

(3) Design a TIMELY intervention

You need to implement your intervention when it matters – when people have the opportunity to act. It has to be within a process where a decision must be made in order to progress, where it cannot be skipped.

(4) Put your work to the TEST

You test your intervention to accurately estimate the causal impact on the outcomes you care about. Some people have the decision inserted into a process and others don’t so the impact on behaviour is evident (i.e. a randomised control trial).

IN PRACTICE

At Chorus we’ve seen this work in practice. One firm was struggling to get partners to put clients forward for interviews. Marketing was frustrated because they had no data to work with, impeding their annual planning activity.

Talking to partners, many argued they didn’t want to bother clients since they already knew they were happy. So they turned to IT and added a step to matter closures. For any over £20k, they included a mandatory field to the system: “Client feedback candidate? Yes / Not this time.”

For “Not this time,” they must pick a reason from a list: “Completed in last 12 months/ Other matter pending/ Other reason”. If “Yes,” it auto-populates client name, matter type and partner, and triggers a handoff to marketing (with no email exchange needed).

They kept it simple and didn’t impose any consequence for opt outs. However, having to give an explanation in itself created enough friction to make “Yes” the easier option. And that’s what happened – the one ‘test’ department went from three interviews in the previous year to 13 in just six months.

Want to know more? The research was conducted by James Elfer, Siri Chilazi and Edward Chang and published on the HBR website: To Change Company Culture, Start with One High-Impact Behavior (19 January 2026).