The Feedback Gap: Turning Different Perspectives into Better Work - Karolina Sarna
Feedback doesn’t fail because people are bad at giving it. It fails because we’ve turned an information gap into a performance.
Someone thought your work should look different than it does. That gap between their expectation and your reality isn’t a judgment—it’s signal. The problem is we’ve designed the whole conversation around managing feelings instead of accessing information. So we get theatre: someone performs caring, someone performs receiving it, nothing changes.
And knowing this doesn’t fix it. Your nervous system reads evaluation as threat before your rational mind gets a word in. You can understand intellectually that feedback is just two people with different information about the same work and still go defensive the moment it lands. That’s not a character flaw. It’s biology.
So the work isn’t understanding feedback differently. It’s designing conditions where the threat response doesn’t get triggered in the first place.
This session covers both: what feedback actually is, and why knowing that isn’t enough. How to give it so it changes behavior instead of just relieving the giver’s frustration. How to receive it without going into threat mode, even when it’s badly delivered. What questions get you real signal instead of validation dressed up as a question. And what needs to be structurally true about your team for feedback to flow without it being a quarterly ritual nobody believes in.
What we'll cover:
Why feedback feels like a personal attack—and why that’s not a mindset problem
How to give feedback that changes behavior instead of just expressing frustration
How to find what’s useful in feedback even when it’s delivered badly
The questions that generate real input instead of validation dressed up as a question
What needs to be true in your team culture for feedback to stop being performance theatre
Your host:
Karolina Sarna spent 15 years in tech scaling teams, building products, and learning—often the hard way—what makes feedback cultures work and what makes them collapse. She scaled data and product teams 10x at ICEYE, where she built the kind of feedback infrastructure that lets organizations actually learn from themselves. Today, she runs Rebel Strategy Lab, working with founders and leaders as a coach and strategist. She's a scientist by training. She holds up mirrors for a living.