The SBI feedback model

Feedback fails in a predictable way. The giver notices something, waits, and then delivers a summary judgement: 'you need to be more proactive', 'you were unprofessional on that call'. The receiver hears a verdict on their character and spends the rest of the conversation defending it. SBI is a repair for exactly that. It makes you anchor the feedback to one moment, describe what a camera would have recorded, and then say what followed. The Center for Creative Leadership developed the model and has taught it to managers for decades. It has spread well beyond CCL because it is short enough to hold in your head while your pulse is up.

The three parts, and what goes wrong in each

Situation: anchor it to one moment

Start with when and where. 'In yesterday's client review, about ten minutes in.' That level of precision feels pedantic to say out loud, and that is the point. Without an anchor the receiver cannot check your account against their own memory, so they either accept it on authority or reject the whole thing.

Vague timeframes also invite the least useful argument available. Say 'you've been late a lot recently' and you will spend five minutes negotiating the meaning of 'a lot'. Say 'the last three Monday stand-ups' and there is nothing to negotiate.

• Name one occasion, not a pattern. If there is a pattern, run SBI on the clearest single instance first, then say plainly that you have seen it more than once.
• Keep it recent. Feedback about something from three months ago becomes a conversation about your delay rather than their behaviour.
• Check they are in the same room with you before you continue: 'do you remember that moment?' If they do not, rebuild the scene before you add impact.

Behaviour: describe what a camera would have caught

This is where most attempts at SBI quietly collapse. People substitute interpretation and call it observation. 'You were dismissive' is not a behaviour, it is a conclusion about one. The behaviour was: when a colleague raised the timeline risk, you said 'we've been through this' and turned back to your laptop. That version is harder to argue with, and it is also the only version the person can do anything about.

The test: could a camera have recorded it? If not, you are offering your interpretation, and interpretations are arguable in a way that observations are not.

• Quote where you can. Words you actually heard hold up better than your paraphrase of them.
• Strip out adverbs of judgement. 'Aggressively', 'defensively' and 'half-heartedly' are verdicts hiding inside descriptions.
• Absence counts as behaviour when it matters: 'the draft didn't arrive by Thursday' is observable; 'you don't care about deadlines' is a theory.
• One behaviour per conversation. Stacked examples get heard as a case for the prosecution, and people defend against cases.

Impact: say what followed, and own it as yours

Impact is the part people skip, and skipping it reduces feedback to a preference about manners. On its own, 'you interrupted twice' is a rule about etiquette. Add the impact and it becomes a work problem: two people stopped contributing for the rest of the hour, and the meeting ended without the risk list it existed to produce.

State the impact from where you actually stand. If you felt it, say 'I'. If you watched it happen to someone else, say what you saw. If you heard it second hand, say so rather than laundering it into fact. Borrowed impact ('the team feels...') loses the room instantly, because the first thing the receiver will want to know is which member of the team said it.

• Effect on the work: what got delayed, redone, missed, or decided on bad information.
• Effect on other people: who went quiet, who escalated, who did the same job twice.
• Effect on you: including the things you now find yourself doing, like checking their work more closely than either of you would like.
• Effect on them: how it lands on their standing with others, said plainly and without threat.

The same feedback, twice

How to run the conversation, not just the sentence

SBI is a way of constructing one contribution, not a script for a whole conversation. Deliver all three parts and stop, and you have made a statement. Most of the value is in what happens after it.

1. Ask and frame in a single line: 'I'd like to give you some feedback on yesterday's review, is now a good time?' Ambush feedback is heard defensively regardless of how clean your wording is.
2. Deliver situation, behaviour and impact in that order, in well under a minute. Long run-ups raise the receiver's threat level before you reach the point.
3. Then stop. Genuinely stop. The silence after impact is where their account of the same moment arrives, and it usually contains something you did not have.
4. Ask for their view before you propose a fix. Active listening does more here than the model does.
5. Agree the change in behavioural terms. 'Be more collaborative' is not an outcome. 'You'll take the timeline question in the next review' is.
6. Say when you will return to it. Feedback with no follow-up teaches people that feedback is weather: unpleasant, and it passes.

Use it for recognition, or the structure itself becomes a threat

If SBI only appears when something has gone wrong, people learn to dread the sentence shape. You start with 'in yesterday's review...' and watch someone brace. Recognition is also where the model earns the most, because vague praise is genuinely useless: 'great job' tells nobody which of their instincts to repeat. Name the behaviour and the impact and you have told someone precisely which part of what they did was worth doing. More on the wider skill in how to give constructive feedback at work.

Where the model breaks down

1. It can be delivered perfectly and still land badly. SBI improves your wording, not your relationship. On a team with low psychological safety, immaculate feedback from a manager is still evidence to be defended against. Fix the safety first, then the phrasing.
2. Impact is not as objective as the model implies. Your reaction is real, but it is one person's reaction. Presenting it as an unarguable fact is where SBI turns into a well-structured way of insisting you were right.
3. It is built for single incidents. Long-running performance problems do not compress into one situation. Use SBI on the clearest example, then say explicitly that you are describing a pattern, or the person will fix that one Tuesday and change nothing else.
4. It leaves out intent, which is what the receiver is thinking about the whole time. An extension used at CCL adds a fourth step, intent, written SBI-I or SBII: rather than assuming why someone did what they did, you ask. In genuinely contested cases that question does most of the work.
5. Over-rehearsed, it sounds like a form being filled in. Teams who have all had the training can hear it coming. If your feedback sounds like the model, you are performing a technique instead of telling someone something true. Learn the discipline, then let the phrasing go.

SBI compared with the models you'll hear about next to it

They are not really competitors. SBI gives you a sentence, Radical Candor gives you a posture, NVC gives you a route through emotion. Managers who are good at this borrow from all three without announcing which one they are using.

Structure is the easy half

Anyone can write a clean SBI on paper, alone, with no one looking. The hard part is saying it out loud to someone who might be upset, at the moment when it would still make a difference. That is a nerve problem, not a wording problem, and it is why feedback training that stops at the acronym changes so little. In experiential sessions we put people into the conversation with the discomfort switched on, let them hear their own hedging played back, and run it again. The second attempt is almost always shorter, more specific and far less apologetic. Nobody gets there by memorising three letters.

Tour De Force runs this as live, experiential training for teams worldwide — online and in person. Talk to us, or play Gamified learning appsThe Weekly Challenge to see the method in ten minutes.