Creating Feedback Loops

A feedback loop for success is anything that looks at your past or current state and if you have fallen off the tracks does something to get you back on them.

That’s kind of vague. So here are some examples of feedback loops:

• For a weight lifter – keeping a log of past lifts encourages them to lift more, and work harder if they see loss of strength over time.
• For this blog a nag email goes out after a week of not writing, that email encourages me to write, which stops the emails
• The Jerry Seinfield calendar which encourages you to do something every day.
• A regular financial audit – helps to identify areas that need focus hopefully before they become a problem.
• An annual performance review helps employees develop strategies to improve.

If you have a goal then having an effective feedback loop can help you reach it.

The start of the year is a good time to do a review of your feedback loops (a feedback loop for feedback loops) to decide if any of them are ineffective and can be dropped, or if new ones are needed to match your goals. For a business it helps to be systematic.

If the goal is to 10x your business in 2014 then to start with you would create a strategy that would achieve it (concrete things to do). For each of those concrete steps in the strategy you would evaluate each major pillar of your business to see if any feedback loops would be appropriate – Financial, HR, Sales, Marketing, Product development.  Is there anything you could measure? A good feedback loop will help identify when you need to make adjustments to strategy earlier.

The worst feedback loop for a goal is to just put it in your calendar – “Dec 31 2014: review business to see if it’s 10x”.  A day or week after setting that goal, you’ll forget about it, get derailed, and be surprised at the end of the year when you get the calendar alert. You can do better.

If part of your strategy to 10x your business is to re-design your website, then an effective feedback loop is one that actually forces you to do the work. Perhaps an alert on the website’s github repository to ensure there is active development on it every day. or a kanban board to organize the work and visualize progress. If you want an effective website and not just a different one, adding A/B testing and doing a weekly review of conversion rates is a great way to keep focused on continual improvement.

The most effective feedback loops will DEMAND that you do the work to execute your strategy, and will MEASURE the effectiveness of the strategy to achieve your goals.