Positive Feedback Brings Efficiency To The System

Feedback is a gift and ideas are the currency of our next success and great feedback is a critical element of best-practice performance management. Not me, but everyone would advocate that positive feedback brings efficiency in our system while the negative feedback reduces it.

Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect. Simple causal reasoning about a feedback system is difficult because the first system influences the second and second system influences the first, leading to a circular argument. This makes reasoning based on cause and effect tricky, and it is necessary to analyze the system as a whole.

Self-regulating mechanisms have existed since antiquity, and the idea of feedback had started to enter economic theory in Britain by the eighteenth century, but it wasn’t at that time recognized as a universal abstraction and so didn’t have a name.

Without the positive feedback, the efficiency in our system cannot come rather the system further goes on deteriorating.

From my childhood, I was a critic and used to point out the things which pinched me with a view that the same must be pinching others. There are a number of incidents where I had given the feedback and the system has improved.

I recollect that during my college time, the boot polish tin used to come with the opener by sliding the pin which was not effective and has to be opened by pressing from one corner. When I sent a feedback to the company it was replaced with pressing from one corner which is now available on the market.

When I pointed out to one magazine to change the title ‘Frozen Thoughts’ as it creates confusion, the same was changed to ‘Infinite Thoughts’ with a letter of thanks to me.

In another incident of 80s, while crossing from Mohali to Chandigarh, a huge hoarding was put up to contact for advertisement with landline phone number as there were no mobiles at that time.   But the spellings of advertisement were painted wrong with ‘t’ missing.  On reaching my office, I made a call to the advertisement company to correct the spellings on the hoarding.  To my surprise, on my back from office in the evening, the spellings were corrected.

On another occasion, when I happened to visit a senior officer, the National State Emblem of India in his chamber on his back seat was incomplete. Officially, the emblem consists of the profile of the Lion Capital showing three Lions mounted on the abacus, with a Dharma Chakra in the centre, a bull on the right, a galloping horse on the left and outlines of Dharma Chakras on the extreme right and left, with the motto “Satyameva Jayate” – written in Devnagari script below the profile of the Lion Capital. A State Emblem of India is incomplete without the motto ‘Satyameva Jayate’ inscribed in Devanagari script – below the profile of the Lion Capital.

When I pointed out to him that incomplete display of State Emblem of India is a violation of the State Emblem of India (Prohibition of Improper Use) Act 2005, he did not mind as it was hanging prior to his posting rather took it a positive feedback and happy to see the corrected State Emblem on the very next day.

Frankly speaking, the famous quote by Anonymous is befitting – What is the shortest word in the English language that contains the letters: abcdef? Answer: feedback.

Had I not pointed out on all these incidents, the system would not have changed? It is an admitted fact now that feedback always brings efficiency while the negative feedback reduces it.