Establish short feedback loops

A feedback loop is a sensory mechanism that tells you whether the work you are doing is moving you closer to your ultimate outcome.

Ideally, your feedback loops should be as short as possible, i.e., you should aim to minimize the time between the work being done and you getting a reading on the work’s effectiveness.

This is because short feedback loops have a number of benefits:

• They make the work more enjoyable. Human beings thrive on instant gratification. If you can establish a short feedback loop, the work will be more pleasurable. This is why software development is so addictive: you write some code, and you can see its results immediately.
• They allow you to course-correct quickly. Shorter feedback loops make it easier to correct your work in flight, while it is still cheap to do so. In that sense, a shorter feedback loop helps you eliminate the cost of mistake (or, at the very least, greatly reduce it).
• They allow you to attribute success and failure. When the feedback loop is short, it’s easy to trace a direct line between your work and the results you have achieved. Conversely, when the feedback loop is long, it can be harder to isolate the impact of your work from confounding factors.

Unfortunately, not all work lends itself to short feedback loops. Chaotic systems usually exhibit longer feedback loops, where the results of your work can show themselves after months or years—and even then, they may not be evident. (This often, but not always, happens when dealing with humans rather than machines.)

If you find yourself in one such scenario, it may be helpful to find a shorter feedback loop within the longer feedback loop.

More often than not, this means looking at a leading metric rather than a lagging metric: for instance, if you have a very long sales cycle, and you want to measure the impact of your go-to-market process, it may be a good idea to focus on pipeline activity rather than revenue booked.

References

• How Do You Know When to Stop, Versus When to Push Through? You Don’t, Not Even in Hindsight. But These Guiding Questions Can Help.