In a community that learns together, feedback is key

The main purpose of your brain is to link your sensory system (receiving stimuli from the world) to your motor system (which acts on the world in response). When your performance gains you some advantage, the neural pathways (firing patterns between brain cells) that contributed to that performance are reinforced. This is an example of feedback. Your own output is fed back to you as a new positive (reinforcing) input or negative (dampening) input.

The brain receives no light, sound, taste, touch or smell. It only receives electrochemical signals. Its only access to reality is through feedback. It has to match electrochemical signals from the sensory system with electrochemical signals it sends to the motor system. Some matches work and might be positively reinforced. Some matches don’t. Much of what your brain is doing after receiving stimuli is associating those electrochemical signals with past neural performances to make generalisations and assumptions. Where there is less past experience you have to make guesses. You then rely on feedback to select what guesses are working well enough to ensure your survival or increase your satisfaction. You could think of this as creating and refining a model of reality that you can use to make useful predictions – although there is not really any internal representation of reality apart from your performances. You see red, not because it is in the world, but because your brain performs redness in response to an electromagnetic wavelength of light. Your performance is your model of reality.

You do not have to do this from scratch. The genetic instructions for forming your brain have been selected from the past performances of your evolutionary ancestors. Performances that were successful in a particular environment or in response to a particular change allowed those ancestors to live longer and successfully reproduce, passing their genes on to the next generation. We call this feedback mechanism “natural selection”. It is how a species “learns” and passes that “knowledge” onto the next generation in the form of genetic predispositions for potentially successful future performances (including “seeing” the colour red). Of course, the future is not necessarily like the past, and new performances, even random accidents, may become more effective adaptations, changing a whole species.

All complex self-organising systems learn through feedback

Feedback can cause all kinds of systemic change. Think about homeostasis in the body of a living organism. This is the process of maintaining stable internal states like temperature despite external changes. Think about change in ecosystems, economies and organisations. Consider the feedback loop between predators and prey. As the population of predators increases they overhunt their prey. This feeds back to limit the predators’ population through food scarcity. As the population of prey rises, this supports a larger predator population. This feeds back to limit the prey’s population through hunting. There is a stabilising feedback loop between predators and prey.

Feedback can also amplify a trend. Think about melting ice caps. As ice melts, less sunlight is reflected back into space, leading to further warming and more ice melting, creating a positive feedback loop (positive meaning “reinforcing”,not “good”). Even an attempt to correct a perceived imbalance can lead to a positive feedback loop. Building new roads, for example, may initially alleviate traffic congestion, but over time can encourage more people to drive and buy cars, eventually leading to congestion again. Feedback can cause all kinds of systemic change. Most importantly for this article, feedback facilitates learning in organisations.

Organisations are complex, self-organising systems. Information flows through them as it does in all systems, but the ability of a system to be changed by that information in sustainable ways, and in advantageous time frames, is dependent on that system’s ability to experience and engage feedback effectively.

By improving feedback between all its parts, an organisation as a whole can become more conscious of itself as a community that learns and creates knowledge together. Of course, if employees are expected to only reproduce predictable routines, learning is limited.

When we focus on feedback we are actually focusing on relationships and the information that flows through them. Ideally, if you are a participant, you need to have the skills and attitudes that make you available to the information around you and enable you to actively engage that information critically and creatively. This means paying attention to what is going on around you, being willing to share what you know and experiencing collaboration as something that benefits everyone, with the understanding that your own learning and growth is bound up with the learning and growth of the whole system.

An experiment is an attempt to tease reality into revealing itself

When processes and outcomes are predictable you can plan (by relying on your assumptions, habits, routines and protocols), but when uncertainty and complexity mean that you cannot predict effectively, you need to make your best, informed guess, and then act and see what happens next. You create an experiment to try and tease reality into revealing itself. You push reality and reality pushes back, which you register through the success or failure of your performance.

Sometimes something completely new and unexpected can rise out of the in-between spaces (an emergent phenomenon) and take the whole system to another level. As long as all the parts are communicating with each other something bigger than the sum of the parts can emerge. It is not easy to predict what this will be, or even if it will allow the current form of the system to continue. But the probability that it will be more adaptive to change than any pre-designed and imposed solution is high.

Feedback doesn’t usually follow neat step-by-step rules. It is a dynamic process capable of generating unpredictable changes and innovations. This can make it a threat to hierarchical, authoritarian and prescriptive leadership practices or to rigid and narrow bureaucratic procedures designed to resist change and maintain the status quo. Feedback is all about the movement of information and works best in communities or systems that avoid unnecessary hierarchies, secrecy, hidden agendas, passive aggressive silence and power games, which all prevent a useful flow of information.

In any organisation, feedback happens in a complex network of interactions. It is a value-based process rather than a rule-based process. For feedback processes to operate efficiently and to the advantage of the organisation as a whole it usually requires a commonly held value system within the organisation to hold the context of the feedback process and the possibilities of an organisation’s ability to learn. Think about freedom of expression combined with evidence-based decision making and the ability to identify error. You know shared values are really working when they inspire a shared vision quest – not when people resist change in favour of the way things have always been done.

Through effective feedback, how work is done can be linked to how to do it better

Through the creation of effective feedback mechanisms, and through enabling people to give and receive feedback respectfully, how work is done can be deliberately linked to how to do it better. As new insights and solutions are generated they can be quickly assessed, appreciated and deployed systematically. This is of course more likely if all participants in the system are given permission to actively risk improving their performance. Many people resist useful feedback because they fear failure and rejection. They experience critical feedback as a personal attack. Opportunities for feedback should not be misappropriated to make people feel worthless and incompetent. Feedback in an organisation works best when it is part of an ongoing conversation based on the value of exploring the nature of learning itself.