Most feedback is either too vague to use ("great job") or too personal to hear ("you're not strategic"). SBI is the fix: name the Situation, describe the observable Behaviour, and state the Impact it had. It isn't a personality trait some managers are born with — it's a structure you can learn, and get sharply better at with reps. This is a lab to practise it: build a piece of feedback, watch three checks grade it live, and learn to spot the flaws before they leave your mouth.
Pick a scenario, then assemble the message from three pieces: the Situation, the Behaviour you observed, and the Impact it had. Swap in the tempting shortcuts — a character label, an "always", a vague "great job" — and watch the three checks react. Edit any line to write your own.
"Behavioural" asks whether you're describing an action someone could watch on a replay — not pinning a label on who they are.
SBI isn't the only way people talk about feedback. Here's how it lines up against the sandwich, against evaluation, and against Radical Candour's two-by-two — and why "describe the behaviour, state the impact" is the thread running through all of them.
Kim Scott's Radical Candour maps feedback on two axes: how much you care personally and how directly you challenge. SBI lives in the top-right — the hard thing said with obvious goodwill. Tap a quadrant to see how it fails when one axis drops out.
The sandwich buries a criticism between two compliments so it goes down easier. It doesn't. The praise reads as padding, the real message gets softened into nothing, and you train people to flinch every time you say something nice.
SBI drops the bread. It says the useful thing plainly — situation, behaviour, impact — carried by genuine goodwill rather than two slices of filler.
Evaluation is a rating: a score, a ranking, a "meets expectations". It tells someone where they stand. Feedback is information about a specific behaviour and its impact — it tells them what to do next.
You need both, but don't smuggle one in for the other. "You're a 3 out of 5 communicator" is a verdict with no handle; describe the behaviour and the impact, and you hand them something to act on.
| What people say | The SBI version |
|---|---|
| "You're so disorganised." | "In the last two standups you joined without an agenda, so we spent the first ten minutes working out what to even discuss." |
| "Great quarter, well done!" | "In the Q3 review you turned the churn data into three concrete actions, which is why the board left aligned instead of anxious." |
| "You need to be more strategic." | "The roadmap doc lists features but not the outcomes they serve, so leadership couldn't tell what we're actually betting on." |
| "You always overcomplicate things." | "This design adds three services for a feature one endpoint would cover, so the review stalled on scope we don't need." |
| "Be more of a team player." | "In Tuesday's incident you shipped the fix without pinging the on-call channel, so two of us debugged the same thing for an hour." |
Here are six lines a manager might actually say. For each, name the main problem, then read the SBI rewrite. The flaw is sometimes subtle: a warm, specific line can still have no impact in it, and a fair point can still be buried in a sandwich.
Each of these is a conversation a leader has most weeks. The weak version reaches for a label or a vague verdict; the SBI version stays on the behaviour and the impact — which is the only version someone can actually do something with.
"You're unreliable — I can't count on you."
"The payments API was due Thursday and landed two days late with no heads-up, so QA lost their test window and we shipped a day late."
Same problem — now it's a fixable behaviour with a real cost attached, not a permanent label to argue with.
"Be more collaborative in meetings."
"In today's planning you spoke for most of the hour and cut across Priya twice, so we never heard the migration risk and she stopped contributing."
"Be more collaborative" is untestable. A specific instance and its impact gives them a concrete thing to change on Monday.
"Nice save earlier — you're a legend, thanks!"
"During the outage you spotted the stale config and had a rollback out in twenty minutes, so downtime stayed under half an hour — that instinct is exactly what to keep doing."
Praise needs SBI too. Reinforcement only works if the person knows the precise move to repeat — "legend" doesn't tell them.
"This is sloppy work — honestly, you're careless."
"This PR went up with no tests and a description that just said 'fixes', so I couldn't tell what changed and review took three passes."
The behaviour can be blunt and the standard high — without ever putting the word "careless" on the person.
SBI is quick to understand and surprisingly hard to hold onto under pressure — when you're annoyed, rushed, or straining to be kind. It's a rep-based skill: the leaders who are good at it practised on small, low-stakes moments long before the hard ones. That's the work we do with the people and teams we coach — turning the model on the screen into a habit that holds when it counts.
Talk to us about coachingAnything you could catch on a replay is behaviour; anything that needs a mind-reader is a label. "You interrupted twice" can change. "You're rude" just wounds.
The "so what" is what makes feedback land. Without the consequence you're asking someone to change on your say-so; with it, the reason speaks for itself.
Don't bury the message between compliments. Lead with care, be specific and direct, and let honest praise stand on its own so it still means something.