Why Feedback Fails to Land: A Conversational Intelligence Model of Power-conditioned Interpretation in the Modern Workplace

Abstract

Organizations have long treated clarity, timeliness and candour as the pillars of effective feedback. Yet even well-structured feedback routinely fails to produce learning. This article argues that the dominant delivery-focused framework rests on an incomplete assumption. We introduce psychological interpretability: the extent to which a feedback message can be accurately decoded given the neurochemical, relational and power context in which decoding occurs. Drawing on sensemaking, attribution theory, social identity theory and Glaser’s conversational intelligence framework, we propose a power-conditioned model of feedback interpretation and develop seven propositions explaining why interpretive distortions arise under power asymmetry. We ground these in a thematic analysis of 52 public comments on a viral Indian workplace incident, using an NVivo-style open-axial-selective coding approach that reveals eight themes and achieves theoretical saturation within this bounded data set. We offer two practical tools, the Interpretability Audit and the Feedback Compass, to help managers close the gap between what they intend and what employees actually hear. Feedback does not fail because it is poorly delivered. It fails because it lands in a brain that was never made ready to receive it.