Feedback helps us move forwards
Kirsten Gibbs 
I’ve been running my own personal Improve Process over the last 6 months or so. Trying to be more active, move better, eat better and lose weight.
It’s working.
How do I know?
Feedback.
This feedback comes from several sources.
Some of it comes directly from my own body:
- The fit of my clothes
- How I look in the mirror
- How flexible I feel
- How much I ache, and what type of ache it is
- How well I sleep
- How many times I go to the loo.
- How often I need painkillers
Some comes from indirect measures that are easy to take because they happen ‘automatically’:
- The scales
- The step counter on my phone
Some comes from data I have to manually log myself:
- How many trees I’ve planted through the 1% Club
Some comes from automatic analysis of data I log:
- My meal scores on the Zoe app
- My daily scores on the Zoe app
- My weekly scores on the Zoe app
And some comes from infrequent sampling:
- The state of my gut microbiome.
All of these things have helped me to improve over the last 6 months. What’s helped most is the hourly, daily and weekly feedback, from the activity tracker, Zoe and dare I say it – the toilet. This frequent feedback keeps me conscious of what it is I’m trying to achieve, tells me as soon as I start to go in the wrong direction, and enables me to take immediate remedial action.
The medium term feedback from scales, mirror, clothes etc. motivates me – I can see and feel the weight coming off, feel how I’m walking better, sleeping better.
The tree-planting feedback keeps me honest, which is really valuable. I can’t call a day ‘active’ unless I’ve done a minimum of 30 minutes exercise I wouldn’t otherwise do.
And the long term feedback from sampling validates all the effort, and motivates me to stick with the programme.
In business, as an employees, we get long term feedback – the performance appraisal, the payrise.
If we’re lucky we get some medium term feedback through seeing what difference our work makes to ourselves and others.
We rarely get the kind of short term, immediate feedback that keeps us conscious of what we’re trying to achieve and enables us to constantly adjust what we’re doing to stay on course for our goals.
Partly that’s because we haven’t thought explicitly enough about what our goals are so we don’t know what we should be measuring.
Mostly it’s because the information we need, the knowledge of what it means and the wisdom to act on it is seen as the preserve of ‘management’. Who sit on it like Smaug on his pile of treasure. Guarding it from all comers until, unlike Smaug’s hoard, it becomes worthless.
Only then do they share it.
Enough of the metaphors, let me say this bluntly:
I am actively managing my own health in a positive direction through the use of constant feedback of the right kind and frequency.
What if you set your employees up to do the same for the health of your business?
You might find you move forwards faster than you thought possible.
Discipline makes Daring possible – especially when everyone’s participating.