The Good Mechanics of Continuous Improvement have given us a culture of feedback. Feedback is worshipped. There is a whole sub industry on ‘how to give feedback’. It appeals to honesty, transparency, learning, accountability, leadership, openness, performance management, and the entire Father Christmas List of Good Management. Who can argue against it?
Not me. Well, a bit. Because it also leads to a rather mechanistic view of the organization that focuses on errors and fixes, on continuous improvement and natural feedback, loop learning. It’s Cybernetics as its best. And as a (very) old president of a Society of Medical Cybernetics, I can’t really dismiss that. But very often feedback loops lead to trivial incrementalism.
My problem is the hijacking of most of management airtime in some places. I feedback to you, you feedback to me, and we declare this space honest and good. Above all, we feel good. We’ve done it. I am not sure what we have learnt, or will do differently.
I am often missing a culture of feed forward, where we look at how we are moving towards a building of a shared future. OK, OK, OK, we also need to feedback about the present, which is always about yesterday. OK. But I want to know how we are building, constructing, creating and messing around with possibilities.
That’s me. Not a Universal Law.
I think we have too many thermostats that take care of the predictable and the achievable ( nothing wrong with this).
I really think we could do with switching off the thermostat from time to time. Maybe we need to experience a bit of the overheating or the hibernation.
PS: Here is another silly metaphor for the corporate collection: managers manage the thermostat; leaders have to secretly and furtively sabotage it, switch it off, under the cover of darkness.
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