Looking Within

Think, for a moment, about the last judge that you've interacted with who left you with the feeling that they were a good judge. Think about the last time you thought someone was a bad judge. Chances are, these aren't hard things to recall for anyone who spends a reasonable amount of time at tournaments.

Now answer this: What makes that judge good or bad?

For most people, this is a substantially more difficult question. Turns out, the terms "good" and "bad" are often thrown out without a whole lot of thought, as an easy way to express a gut feeling or a hunch. There's nothing inherently wrong with this; generally speaking, these hunches can have a lot of accuracy to them.

Think back to the last time somebody gave you feedback about your performance as a judge (or player) at a tournament. Perhaps after the tournament, the tournament organizer complemented you on a good job, or another judge pointed out something that you didn't do as great of a job at.

What did it mean for you to have done a good job or a bad job?

Again, "good job" and "bad job" are commonplace phrases, but what do these really mean, and what does it mean when somebody tells you that you've done a good or bad job? What have you taken away from this feedback and how has it helped you to improve?

Introspection Defined
These terms and sentiments may well be accurate. The problem is, they're not useful judgments, and they don't tell anybody anything about how to grow or improve. Imagine that somebody has just congratulated you on doing a good job. Other than making you feel good, what have you actually learned about being an effective judge? Or suppose that somebody tells you about a good judge that they encountered at an event. In either of these cases, there's actually very little in the way of lessons to take away.

This is, unfortunately, all too common. This type of feedback and description are easily thrown out casually, often in the name of trying to provide feedback (something that the DCI actively encourages and even "requires" from its senior judges). Doing so, however, misses the point of why feedback is part of the program in the first place. The goal, specifically, is to provide a mechanism by which people can learn to improve their own skills as a judge, as well as to give good insight to the DCI as to how well individual judges are developing. Generic and unactionable feedback fails to provide either of these in any reasonable way.

The process of introspection is the way that we can avoid this problem and take advantage of feedback opportunities by eliciting and capitalizing on useful feedback. Strictly speaking, introspection is the process of observing and examining yourself, and the way that you do things. As applied to this topic, though, there's a broader and more useful —if not strictly accurate—definition. Introspection is a two-part process by which you identify useful available feedback, whether that comes from self-analysis or from isolating the relevant portions of other people's thoughts, and then you internalize the information that you've identified, determining what parts are valid and how best to act upon it.

Very few people have an innate skill to give or solicit useful feedback, and to discern what is true and what a bad impression. As it turns out, this is something that I'm personally bad at, and unfortunately I'm not alone, because this is really much more difficult than it sounds. For most people, unless they spend time actively thinking about this type of thing and about how to be introspective in this way, they're likely to be bad at it too.

A good friend of mine has showed me, though, that there's a bright side to this story. As it turns out, she happens to have trained herself to be fantastic at introspection. There's no crazy, specialized skill or secret trick here. With a little bit of training, anybody can learn to be good at both identifying and internalizing good feedback, both for themselves and for others.

Learning to Identify
The first step to any improvement, whether it's your own growth or helping others to become more effective, is being able to identify useful feedback.

Useful Feedback is Specific: This is probably the tenet most directly violated by telling somebody that they did a "good job," but the issue is actually more obvious if we take this a step further and talk about feedback like, "you could best improve by working on your player management." At first blush, this sounds like a more useful statement that targets a specific area of work. However, think about receiving this feedback for a moment. What does this tell you to think about, and how do you actually improve on this? The problem is the same in both cases; the area being discussed (judging as a whole in the former case and player management in the latter case) is simply too wide and too generic to actually be able to do anything with. For the most part, it's difficult to actually concentrate on or make changes to a lot of things at once, so the most useful feedback will be very specific with regards to what was done well or what could be done better.

Useful Feedback is Actionable: This is similar to, though subtly different from, specific feedback. For feedback to be actionable, it must be about something that is within the person's power to affect. Telling a judge that the tournament would have felt smoother if the final results slips were entered into the system and the new pairings were printed more quickly between rounds is useful only insofar as the judge can relay that feedback to the scorekeeper, but it doesn't (usually) help that judge to improve themselves. Additionally, the very best feedback is actionable in an additional way: it suggests action items and courses of action for the person to follow up on, rather than leaving them to figure out what to do about something. Telling a judge that their announcements would be easier for players to follow if they practiced talking more slowly helps that judge to improve much more rapidly than just telling them that their announcements are sometimes hard to understand.

Useful Feedback is Honest: Because judging is a volunteer activity, where people judge out of love of the program or to benefit the community, there is an urge (like with many volunteering situations) to make those people feel appreciated and to play up their strong traits while downplaying the weak. This is well and good—and at times, even important, as it definitely is important to keep people feeling good about the work that they do and their willingness to do the job. This doesn't, however, mean that you should shy away from giving feedback about things that aren't going as well as they could, or ways in which somebody could improve. Ultimately, while it's easier to avoid criticism and make everybody involved feel a little bit warmer and fuzzier, this doesn't do a service to either the judge (who loses out on the opportunity to improve, to feel better about their advancing skills, and avoid a sense of stagnation) or to the community (which is deprived of a potentially stronger judge). Remember, however, to keep the criticism constructive, as it needs to be something that the recipient understands and learns from, rather than just a meaningless jab.

Useful Feedback is Encouraging: On the flip side, it's important not to overdo this. There's a limit of how much criticism somebody can take before they shut down to accepting more (or, in the worst cases, accepting any, once they decide that your feedback is clearly biased or is based out of some personal resentment). It's very easy, once you flip the switch to focus on things to improve rather than obligatory praise, to enter a mode where criticism is all that you can think of, and this can easily end up being worse than no feedback at all. Even if somebody didn't do a particularly good job and there are more negatives than positives to deal with, there's almost always something positive to balance things out with and to keep people motivated. In the worst case where there's really not, at the very least, focus on a few items at once to keep the feedback manageable (though really, there are probably bigger issues to deal with at that point).

None of this is particularly surprising, but it can be rather rare. The next time that you have feedback for another judge, take some time to think about whether your comments are going to fit these criteria or not, and if not, take some time to figure out why and determine what you could do to correct that. Similarly, next time you receive feedback from another judge, your TO, or a player at a tournament, take a moment to figure out whether not that feedback is useful enough for you to be able to improve. If not, see if you can guide them into focusing their thoughts. In both cases, you should find the interaction to be much more useful for it.

How to Internalize
Receiving feedback that is potentially useful is only half the game, however. The other half, once you have that feedback, is to learn how to internalize it—to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your performance, figure out what parts of that feedback you believe, and to take action on it.

Discard your Preconceptions: In order to get value from feedback, you have to be in the right mindset to receive it. Most of the time, this means that you need to clear your mind of your notion of how you perform and your own strengths and weaknesses. Not because these aren't valuable things to keep in mind generally, but because having strong preconceptions of where you stand can close your mind to the viewpoint of others. Take the time to process feedback with an open mind, and with the notion that it might be true even if it contradicts what you personally think. The goal isn't to overpower your own thinking with that of others, nor is it to ignore any external input. Instead, things work out best if you examine evaluations fairly and incorporate them into your view of yourself.

Remember the Context: This doesn't, however, mean that every piece of feedback that you receive needs to be incorporated into this vision. Instead, this needs to be done very judiciously because much of the feedback that you receive, even if it is potentially useful, will prove ultimately not to be. This happens for a number of reasons. Remember that a lot, if not most, of the opinions shared between people will not be good feedback, for any of the reasons already discussed. Considering even the subset that is, think about how difficult it is to get a good impression of somebody's performance in a short period of time (if you've been involved with interviewing people for a job and ultimately choosing somebody who wasn't what you expected, you probably have a good idea what I'm talking about). Perhaps you did something uncharacteristic that day, or were just plain having a bad day. On the flip side, maybe you were particularly on during an event. Ultimately, the evaluations that you get are simply a momentary snapshot of you; you are the only person that can have a good overall picture of your own performance, so you have to be the one to evaluate how accurate the snapshot that somebody presents fits into that picture.

Learn to Look Deeper: Even the most insightful evaluations generally can't do more than tell you what you do, or how you do things. What other people probably can't tell you is what the underlying cause is, and why you do those things. Oftentimes, the actual actions and behaviors that other people can see are only a manifestation of a deeper cause, and addressing or reinforcing any particular behavior only ends up grazing the surface. Rather than deciding that you should do more of a particular action, or do less of it, it's worth the time to sit down and think about why you even do that action in the first place. Applying the feedback to the underlying cause will then affect much more than that single case.

Decide on a Plan: Finally, knowing something that is worth doing will only take you so far. For many people, just knowing what you should do is a certain recipe for procrastination or for just not doing it at all. Rather than just having a nebulous set of goals or changes to make, making an action plan of specific things that you can do makes it much more likely that you'll be able to make progress. This doesn't mean that you have to address everything, or that you have to do it right away. Just having steps of progression in mind will go a long way toward making sure that you eventually get to where you want to go.

In Practice
All of this is fine in the abstract, but how do we apply these ideas to Magic and judging in particular? How do we learn to give the right kind of feedback, and what kind of specific things should we be looking for?

A great launch point for thinking about how to give good evaluations and help everyone to be more introspective about their judging already exists in the form of the Judge Review program, one of the functions of the DCI Judge Center at http://judge.wizards.com/. Under the Reviews section of that site is a list of various categories that the DCI has already identified as useful categories for consideration during the feedback process, categories including "Leadership" and "Professionalism" as well as examples of specific items that fall into these categories. These are by no means all of the things to watch for, and at times they can feel somewhat broad, but they're a tried and tested list. Thinking about these categories should help you to get a good idea of the types of things to be thinking about, and hopefully in generating your own ideas of what to think about and what to look for.

Getting used to writing reviews on people is a good way to get started with giving good feedback to them. Talking to them about what you've observed and what you're likely to write is an even better one. Write down your initial thoughts and then go over them and see whether or not the criteria above are met by what you've written. See whether you would feel like that feedback would be useful to you in your own introspection, and if not, figure out why and see if you can correct it. It may take you a few passes the first few times, but eventually you'll get used to thinking this way to begin with.

Also, when you receive feedback, take the time to really think about it and internalize it. If you find it not to be useful for this purpose, see if you can figure out why. Don't be afraid to ask specific questions of the evaluator to help them try and clarify what they're saying, and don't be afraid to give them feedback on how they write reviews and evaluate other people. Doing this will both help them to grow in their skills and help you to gather more useful feedback for yourself. Ultimately, like with so many things, there's no substitute for practicing. It can be difficult or frustrating, but it's worth it in the end.

Wrapping Up
Hopefully, this framework makes sense and will be useful to you in evaluating yourself as a judge (or player) and how you might be able to improve yourself based on feedback. Of course, these are only guidelines, and different tactics will be effective for different people. Whether these thoughts resonated with you or not, I hope that reading them has made you take a little time to actively think about how you feel about these issues and to figure out how you might best learn the ways in which you're good and the ways in which you might become better. Ultimately, the goal is to get to a place where you're able to solicit exactly the type of evaluations that you need, to grow from that feedback, and to give that in return to others. Embrace the methods that work for you and you'll find that your community is better for it.

Next month: The debut of "Snap Judgments"—your questions answered, and other topics too short for their own article. If you've ever wished that there was someone you could ask your non-rules-related judging questions, now's your chance. Mail them to mtgjudge@gmail.com or post them to the feedback thread.

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Nicholas J. Fang
DCI Certified Level 3 Judge—Redmond, WA
mtgjudge@gmail.com
Agbaar and Ag|Work on EFnet's #mtgjudge