Use this when you need to deliver feedback that lands without triggering defensiveness. Situation-Behaviour-Impact strips away judgment, interpretation, and character attribution — leaving only what happened, what the person did, and what it caused. Three sentences. No adjectives about who someone is. Just observable facts about what they did and what followed.
Section 1
What This Tool Does
Most feedback fails before it's finished. Not because the content is wrong, but because the delivery triggers a threat response in the first four seconds. "You're not a team player." "You need to be more strategic." "Your communication skills need work." Each of these tells the recipient something about their character — and the moment feedback becomes about identity rather than action, the prefrontal cortex goes offline and the amygdala takes over. The recipient stops listening and starts defending. You've lost them. The conversation that follows is theatre.
The Center for Creative Leadership developed the Situation-Behaviour-Impact model — SBI — to solve this specific problem. Not the problem of what to say, but the problem of how to structure what you say so the other person can actually hear it. The mechanism is almost absurdly simple: describe the situation (when and where), describe the observable behaviour (what the person did or said, in terms a video camera could capture), and describe the impact (what happened as a result — to you, to the team, to the outcome). That's it. Three components. One sentence each, if you're disciplined.
The simplicity is deceptive. SBI works because it systematically removes every element that makes feedback feel like an attack: labels, generalizations, mind-reading, and moral judgment. "You're dismissive in meetings" contains all four. "In yesterday's product review, when you checked your phone while Maria was presenting the user research findings, she lost her train of thought and the team didn't get to discuss the methodology concerns" contains none. Same underlying issue. Radically different neurological response in the receiver.
What makes this more than a politeness technique is the precision it forces on the giver. Most people, when asked to deliver feedback, discover they can't actually describe the behaviour they're reacting to. They have a feeling — frustration, disappointment, concern — and they've attached a label to the person who caused it. SBI forces you to reverse-engineer that label back to the specific observable event that generated the feeling. Sometimes you discover the behaviour wasn't what you thought it was. Sometimes you realise the impact was on you personally, not on the team, and the feedback conversation needs to be framed differently. The preparation discipline is as valuable as the delivery structure. Often more so.
