Thinking
From feedback as a tool to feedback as infrastructure
Over the past few years, we have consistently collected feedback from clients and stakeholders. But at a certain point, we realised that we were no longer just listening in order to improve ourselves. We were building an infrastructure.
From 2021 to today, listening has shifted from a moment of verification to a continuous practice. It has become part of how we hold together projects, relationships and strategic direction.
Along this journey, feedback has changed its role.
From a tool for operational improvement to a reference point for understanding how relationships, our role and our choices evolve over time.
Listening to orient decisions
At the beginning, our goal was clear: to understand how our work was perceived, to identify strengths and areas for improvement, and to challenge ourselves honestly and consciously. Over time, however, listening began to serve a different function.
Today, feedback helps us understand whether the way we design, collaborate and make decisions is consistent with the direction we have chosen as an organisation.
The fact that this process has become annual, comparable over time and shared internally has changed its weight. Listening is no longer just an operational improvement tool, but a true strategic compass.
Not only what emerges, but what disappears
There is one signal, more than any other, that made us realise the system was working.
Some issues that appeared repeatedly in the early feedback cycles no longer show up in the most recent interviews. Topics such as responsiveness, monitoring, organisational clarity or managing team changes are no longer at the centre of conversations.
These themes still matter, but over time they have become embedded in the way we work.
When certain questions stop coming back, it often means they have not been “solved once and for all”, but absorbed by a system that has learned to intercept them earlier. This is one of the clearest signs that a listening infrastructure is starting to do its job.
From doing to role
The feedback collected between 2024 and 2025 shares a common trait: it is more sophisticated, more nuanced, more demanding.
It is less about how we work and more about what role we can and should play. Reflections emerge around early project alignment, the need to make the connection between research and design decisions more explicit, and the perception of our strategic positioning in complex contexts.
These observations are not about mistakes. They speak of higher expectations.
They signal relationships that have matured, where the conversation goes beyond performance quality and starts questioning the value of the contribution as a whole.
Why we extended listening to partners
At a certain point, expanding the scope of listening became natural and inevitable. If feedback is truly an infrastructure, it must hold beyond the client–supplier relationship. This is why, in 2025, we began to collect structured feedback from our project partners as well.
The confirmations were strong and consistent with what emerged from clients. Method, quality of deliverables, communication and care for the relationship appear just as clearly in these contexts. At the same time, more strategic observations emerge, linked to alignment, trust and shared vision.
This is an important step, because it reinforces the idea that listening is not only about evaluating a collaboration, but about building common ground to work on over time.
Listening as culture
Looking at this journey as a whole, one thing becomes increasingly clear. Structured listening has become a cultural element, not an activity of control or reporting.
Over time, it has helped us strengthen relationships, overcome critical issues and make the link between daily work and the impact themes that guide Tangible more explicit, such as accessibility, trust, autonomy and digital sustainability.
The alignment between Tangible’s material topics and the priorities expressed by clients and partners is one of the clearest signals to emerge from this process. It does not speak of performance, but of consistency over time.
In 2025, with the extension of the process to partners and the introduction of impact leads within teams, this connection becomes even more explicit.
A way to stay aligned, over time, with what we say we want to be.
