And you know it without even realizing it.

One Wednesday, you walked out of a hard conversation with your boss and passed something down the chain that wasn't quite about them.

Sincerely.

Without noticing. And some other Wednesday, you sat in a 1:1, took feedback that felt sharper than it should have, and decided the fault was yours.

Most of us have been both. Sometimes in the same week.

Now, here's the model every training course teaches: feedback is information.

You observe, you deliver, they improve.

Clean. Mechanical.

Neutral. Feedback in this context is an optional, good-to-have mechanism that people deploy when they believe they need to help an employee.

When a person doesn't need help, feedback is not provided.

Wrong.

Here in Meme Guide, we believe in systems thinking.

And every organization is a system.

And in systemic terms, feedback is not merely information.

It's an integrated signal — that system's used to evaluate how output affects its own input.

Let's make it simple — what this means is that what a system does or produces (the output) is used to alter or improve what goes into it (the input) in the future.

This cyclical process allows systems to adjust and enhance their performance over time.

So we need to think of feedback as an essential part of any organizational system, a signal that is being carried in all directions, to make sure that the system can adjust and cycle in a positive rather than negative direction.

However, what's happening is that feedback becomes just a story one human being tells another human being — through the filter of the sender's mood, fears, insecurities, and history.

In the real world, feedback is never clean and mechanical; it is contaminated.

Always.

So we are dealing with 2 problems here.

Misunderstanding the importance of feedback in an organization and its contamination.

Because the question you should be asking is whether your feedback is about you.

It's how much of it is about you — and whether you noticed.

And it matters.

Because people assume that when you give feedback, you know what you're doing.

They assume your read on them is accurate — not your bad morning, not your recent humiliation, not the thing in them that reminds you of something you dislike in yourself.

They're, of course, wrong to assume that.

But they'll assume it anyway.

Because you're the manager.

A clean piece of feedback gives someone and the whole system something specific to work on, whether it's good or bad. A contaminated one rewrites how they see themselves.

It becomes the voice in their head at 3 am that keeps cycling. It can stay for years.

This lesson is how to tell them apart.

Three things to do. Four things to stop doing.

And four real-world stories on how organizations have either succeeded or failed to deliver feedback