The Role of the Feedback Loop in Successful Management

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It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that a positive feedback loop is necessary for the success of any venture. This should be clarified to say "the continued success" since feedback will not occur until a venture is underway and hopefully it will be feedback from the successes that determine the new course of action.
A positive feedback loop feeds back the output of a system into the input so that any trends are magnified. These trends can be towards success or failure, the action of the feedback loop is the same, it will be the circumstances that are different.

 The positive feedback loop sometimes known as a vicious circle has received much attention in science and engineering since it usually causes problems that make a system run out of control. There are various methods that can be devised to control this but when we seek to increase success they are methods or influences that must be removed.
There are several topics that can be used to trigger ideas for brainstorming. The first of these occurs when there is saturation of some commodity that is required for the venture to be successful. In the case of management this might be restrictions on information fed back or simply on the time available to perform necessary tasks. It is the management's job to identify these situations and rectify them.
In an extreme case management may be cut off from necessary information entirely, due to politics within the organisation or because a management does not have the necessary technical expertise to understand the information presented.

Good management is not only about information transfer of course. Staff morale is an important ingredient in the culture of a successful organisation. Such morale, usually borne of success, is catching and can reinforce itself as it spreads through the organisation. The situation to be avoided of course is low morale which is equally likely to spread unless countered in time.

Delay in feedback has been seen to cause even the biggest companies to fail. Such delay occurs when middle management makes mistakes and hopes to rectify the problems before senior management finds out. A well-known company suffered disproportionately when its wares were found to be out of fashion and sales plummeted before the top management were made aware of the situation.
External influences can interfere with the smooth running of a company. If these are government regulations or external bureaucracies then it may not be possible to alter the situation. Interference from top management may however be causing a problem. It probably arises because the lower management is not keeping them adequately informed. If the problem is micro-management then it might be reduced by agreeing to a course of action that is only reviewed at intervals to check that a project plan is being met.
It is necessary from time to time to review the culture of an organisation. Such reviews are a form of negative feedback loop. These loops provide a compensatory influence to correct errors. An annual review with staff may be too infrequent but the good manager should have antenna to detect problems before they escalate in importance.

The author has considered how some lessons in science and engineering can be applied to problems in every day life. He has prepared the Scoldent list as an aid for solutions to typical problems. Before retirement he was a Chartered Physicist and a Chartered Engineer. His book "Vicious Loops and Pendulums" is available as an eBook or as a paper-back at http://www.scoldent.co.uk

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