Feedback - and forward

Category: Editorial

Some time ago I had trouble with a professional advisor. It was not so much that his advice was incompetent as that his staff lacked the necessary procedures and his attitude was one of self protection and justification rather than customer care.

When my complaints created resistance rather than resolution, I told him that "Feedback is a gift." He did not get the message and I would have taken him to court if I had not resolved the situation through another advisor.

Recently we had an opportunity to prove the point. Someone tried to use our e-commerce system with a foreign currency and I received a frustrated phone call. I could not understand her problem as the system was working perfectly for me as I talked her through it. When we could not resolve the problem I sent her the product by email with our compliments.

In return the lady kindly sent me a screen shot of the problem page and as a result our technical team was immediately able to discover a bug in our computer code and put it right.

What could have beome a complaint was welcomed as feedback and did us a good turn. Feedback is a gift.

There is another concept, that of feedforward.

I have recently been writing to people who have applied to Brefi Group to become associates. Unfortunately, some of them had not included contact details on their CVs and I have been unable to tell them of the special offer that is available to them. They did not think forward about how their CVs might be used.

I learned this lesson early in my career. I submitted a proposal for a design project to a major institution. Eventually, when I had heard nothing from them for a long time, I contacted them. They were still interested and I did get the contract. But they had been unable to contact me.

I was confused. I had submitted the proposal with a covering letter on company headed stationery with full contact details. However, the proposal had been separated from the letter when it was sent to the decision maker. There was no contact information on the proposal itself.

Lesson learned. Now every Brefi Group proposal has contact details as a footer on every page!

I first came across the concept of feedforward in the book The Art of Systems Thinking by Joseph O'Connor and Ian McDermott. I quote from their text: -

"Feedforward describes an interesting and slightly different effect of some types of feedback. It comes from our ability to anticipate the future. It is when the anticipated effect in the future, which has not yet happened, triggers the cause in the present, which would otherwise not have happened. Thus the future reaches backwards to affect the present. For example, when you expect to fail, you often do. After all, what's the point in trying if it's a forlorn hope? When you expect to succeed, on the other hand, your energy and optimism help you and make it more likely that you will. Nothing succeeds like success. (And nothing fails like failure.)"

USEFUL LINKS

• The Art of Systems Thinking Joseph O'Connor & Ian McDermott



• The Fifth Discipline Peter M. Senge



• " Yes" or "No": the Guide to Better Decisions: A Story Spencer Johnson

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