Feedback Is the Difference Between Sending and Communicating

Editorial Note: This essay is part of the Cultivated canon — a body of work exploring how clarity, communication, and learning determine whether good ideas turn into real-world value. It focuses on a persistent organisational blind spot: confusing transmission with understanding.

Feedback Is the Difference Between Sending and Communicating

Effective communication is often described as clarity of message.

In practice, it is clarity of outcome.

Communication only succeeds when meaning travels — when intent is understood, absorbed, and acted upon. Everything else is noise.

This is why feedback matters so much. Without it, communication is indistinguishable from broadcasting.

Sent does not mean received.

Communication Without Feedback Is Just Broadcasting

Most workplace communication assumes success at the moment of sending:

• an email is written
• a message is posted
• an announcement is made
• a decision is “shared”

But nothing meaningful has happened yet.

Without feedback, there is no evidence that:

• the message was noticed
• the meaning was understood
• the implications were clear
• the right action followed

In other words, without feedback, communication has not occurred — only transmission.

A Simple Model (And Why It Still Holds)

One of the oldest communication models comes from Aristotle:

• discover the message
• arrange it
• clothe it in language
• deliver it

It’s quaint, incomplete, and technically wrong in places — but it misses something crucial by modern standards.

There is no feedback loop.

Standing on a hillside shouting to a crowd, delivery was likely the end of the process. Today, delivery is only the beginning.

The Four Levels of Feedback

In work, feedback operates in layers. Understanding them prevents false confidence.

1. Not received
The message never arrives.
Emails disappear. Messages land in the wrong channel. Silence follows — often misinterpreted as resistance.

2. Delivered
The message reaches its destination.
A green tick. A sent receipt. A logged notification.
This confirms delivery, not understanding.

3. Opened or read
The message is seen.
Still, nothing confirms comprehension, agreement, or action.

4. Full feedback
Meaning has landed.
This shows up as:

• a response confirming understanding
• questions that refine meaning
• visible changes in behaviour
• completed work aligned to intent

Only here does communication actually exist.

Everything before this is assumption.

Why This Matters in Organisations

Most organisational failure is not technical.

It is interpretive.

Strategies fail because people interpret them differently.
Change stalls because assumptions replace confirmation.
Teams drift because leaders confuse silence with alignment.

Feedback is the mechanism that prevents this drift.

It closes the loop between:

• intention and interpretation
• clarity and alignment
• ideas and value

Without feedback, organisations accumulate invisible misunderstanding — and then act surprised by the results.

The Real Test of Communication

The test is not whether something was said.

The test is:

• what changed as a result
• what people now believe
• what they are doing differently

If nothing changed, communication did not occur.

Sent does not mean received.
Received does not mean understood.
Understood does not mean acted upon.

Feedback is what tells us which of these is true.

Closing Thought

Feedback is not politeness.
It is not administration.
It is not an optional courtesy.

It is the only reliable signal that meaning has survived contact with reality.

Without it, organisations talk — but do not communicate.