feedback - the process in which part of the output of a system is returned to its input in order to regulate its further output
I've been thinking about feedback a lot for the last year or so. It has turned into a sort of Golden Hammer for me. When I see or hear about a system that is having problems the first thing that comes to mind is to look for the feedback loop.
Feedback is what steers our systems. This is what makes it so exciting to me.
When I look at the increasing cost of health-care, I see that the people making decisions about spending money on healthcare get very little feedback about the cost of what they purchase. When I am in a long line at the post office, I see that their system provides no meaningful feedback to the people behind the desk about the pain/cost that their customers are suffering.
Something I have noticed is that systems which seem to be getting little useful feedback often have many levels of indirection in their feedback loop.
Consider these two systems:
Customer → Health Care Provider → Insurance Company → Employer → Employee (Customer)
Versus
Customer → Health Care Provider → Customer
In the first system, our employers pays for our health insurance (instead of paying us that money). The insurance company pays claims filed by health care providers. The cost that customers pay for healthcare (lowered salary to pay for health insurance) feels unrelated to the cost of the services we receive. We have no incentive to choose a less expensive alternative (or do without a service), because we bear almost none of the cost directly.
In the second system, the customer pays for the each service received from a health care provider. If that service seems expensive then the customer can choose to find a cheaper provider or consume less of that service.
I use healthcare as an example only because it seemed topical and because the dysfunctional feedback loop is familiar to all of us.
So what use is all of this?
When we see feedback loops that are not steering things where we think they should then we can change the feedback. We can remove levels on indirection from the system. We can change what measurements are providing the feedback. We can provide the feedback ourselves.
