10 :: Feedback Loops

🚪TL;DR:
“No man (or innovation, if I may add) is an island” is a timeless universal principle, right? Data is the new oil and feedback, as the currency that appreciates data transactions in many contexts, has the potential to be the most valuable currency in the world. It is not for nothing that I’ve asked for yours since the very first issue of this newsletter. And if the fittest is indeed the new greatest, feedback loops are the fittest enabler. Continuously looking for, acting on and repeating the process over and over again is a (if not the only) golden ticket for performance excellence.

🧠 What is it?
Feedback is the evaluative and constructive observations about a person, project, product or service performance that is shared with its owner to improve it. Like the inputs that feed a system to enable the production of better outputs. Following the same logic, a feedback loop is an always-on (ideally, automated) mechanism that enables the continuous collection and integration of feedback as input to get closer and closer to the ideal output, but also using that output as the input for the next round of feedback - creating a flywheel effect. In the context of innovation, this refers to customers, employees, and any other stakeholders’ feedback (input) about new services, products, or processes (output). The first inputs are used to iterate the original output, which create an improved version of that output, about which more inputs are collected after and so on and so forth.

📦 Why is it relevant?
At the risk of becoming repetitive: no innovation, growth, or leadership (all the topics this newsletter covers and that are instrumental for CINOs) exists without feedback. Does this sentence sound familiar to you? If it doesn’t now, it might by the time you finish reading this issue if you read it through. It is as simple as that. CINOs have no chances to succeed at their jobs - both at generating new value-creation streams and at growing into the leaders that inspire more value-creation - if they are not obsessed with looking for and programmatically integrating feedback. Ultimately, it works as a growth accelerator. On the people side, it accelerates talent development, engagement and retention, team collaboration and a leadership culture. On the innovation side, it accelerates market validation during the initial stages (as seen in the previous issue) but, further ahead, also customer satisfaction, brand reputation and, ultimately, profitability.

🧶 Where to learn more about it:
Even though it is always somehow a similar concept, feedback loops are observed and valuable in many different realities. In case you are interested to learn about what was probably the original example of feedback loops, read about its role on the human body in this scientific publication. In examples that are more relevant to innovation, learn more about feedback loops for product in this explanation and examples from Productboard and in this Harvard Business Review article about how AI can enable it. For business growth, Mailchimp wrote a nice piece about it that I really like too.

See you next Tuesday! 👋