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When designing a feedback system to influence change (for instance, a status report to influence the project progress, or an attempt to lose weight or save money) it’s easy to fall into the trap of going for accuracy first. Countless hours can be wasted designing the perfect measure of progress, making sure it’s accurate as can be, ensuring everyone fills in the data as accurately as possible, etc. Most of that work is, however, pointless, because accuracy is not the name of the game here. Sure, feedback needs to be vaguely accurate, but it doesn’t need to be very accurate to work.

So what is good feedback then? In this post, I’ll look at what constitutes a good feedback system and what doesn’t. Finally I’ll propose a simple framework for figuring out what feedback system to use.

Feedback should be consistent

Inconsistent feedback drives irrational behaviour. In fact, giving random feedback is a proven, effective method of driving people to misbehaviour (or even to insanity). If your feedback can’t be consistent in its frequency (how regularly and often it is given) and its direction (ie positive feedback should always be positive), don’t bother with it at all - it will only make things worse.

Consistency of feedback is like consistency of logic - it’s a sine qua non, without which everything else becomes meaningless.

Feedback should be timely

I believe the next most important quality of any feedback is timeliness. Here’s an example: my previous phone company used to send feedback 2 months after the fact. It was very accurate (itemised billing usually is), but since the call went into the next month’s bill, and that bill came at the end of the following month, there was a very long lag time between abuse of the phone and feedback about it. As a result my phone bill was often over £100 per month (yes, that’s huge). This didn’t allow me to correct my behaviour - all it did was make me feel bad that I overspent on my phone again.

I switched to T-mobile UK, which provides a weekly text message reminding me of how much of my “Flext” allowance I have left for this month. Since then, my phone bill has not gone above £46, on a £42.50 tariff.

Similarly, every project has some form of feedback (at the end of the project). Either the project team gets congratulated, or they get told they screwed up and caused all sorts of issues within the organisation and to clients and the world. Unfortunately, by then, it’s far too late to take corrective action. All you can do is make everyone unhappy that they were part of a failed project.

What is timely? Well, in some cases, it’s instant feedback - but not always. You don’t want to be snowed under a mountain of white noise about the progress of everything you’re involved in. “Timely”, in the context of feedback, is related to the pace of change. For expenses, for instance, I define “timely” as instant. For a project, weekly feedback usually does the trick. For weight loss, try the daily feedback of a scale.

Feedback should be effortless

I used to try to save money by keeping a log of all my expenses. I carried a little notebook, or a PDA, with me at all times, and recorded all expenses. These were subtracted from my weekly budget, so I knew how well I was doing at any point. This system worked relatively well, but it had one fatal flaw: it required constant effort. I never managed to sustain it more than a few months at a time, after which I would stop tracking things, because it was too much hassle, and relapse into over-spending.

If your feedback system requires constant effort to maintain (particularly if the effort has to come from the person receiving the feedback), it is flawed in the long term and will eventually fail.

What did I do about the spending? Well, I came up with a new feedback system. Instead of counting expenses, I switched to paying for everything in cash. On Thursday of each week, I take out my weekly allowance from the cashpoint, and I spend from that. The instant feedback from seeing my little cash pile diminish works as well as counting expenses, but takes no extra effort on my part. The only effort was in thinking of the system in the first place (thanks Bob!). If your expenses are out of control, I highly recommend it!

In conclusion, the holy grail of any feedback system should be for it to be completely effortless, to continue working even when the attention of the receiver is somewhere else.

Feedback should be vaguely accurate

Of course, feedback needs to be somewhat accurate. But here, there is an expression that gets across the idea quite well: “it is better to be vaguely accurate than precisely wrong”. I’d add to this: “especially if the extra accuracy comes at the cost of timeliness or effortlessness”.

The feedback from T-mobile’s Flext is not accurate. It only tells me about my aggregate phone usage. But it’s timely, and so it works. Similarly, project feedback does not need to be very accurate to work. This is the approach that the typical agile burn-down chart takes. Ultimately, “story points” are fairly loose stuff. But what’s always true is that as long as you’re not making up silly User Stories with random estimates, it’ll always be the case that: “every point you deliver is a good thing”. So you get a vaguely accurate pat on the back at the end of each iteration telling you you delivered something useful. Or, if you delivered nothing, you get nothing - and that’s feedback too!

In contrast, I once had a long discussion with a project manager as to the most accurate way to measure completion of tasks (I supported partial completion percentages, whereas he thought that only a finished task earned any percentage). In hindsight, the discussion was futile, not only because we were both right (both approaches have benefits), but because the accuracy difference between the two was irrelevant. What was relevant was implementing weekly status reporting where there was nothing - Whether it was 10% too high or too low was irrelevant, so long as the error was consistent.

A typical example of accuracy that can be improved is the weight scale that I mentioned earlier. Weight scales are accurate at measuring weight, but the reason most of us want to lose weight is because we want to lose fat. Plain weight scales don’t give you that information. Without a Body Fat Percentage scale, you might measure things with the right frequency and with only a little effort, but since you’re not measuring the right thing (unless you weigh hundreds of kilograms, in which case most of it is certainly fat), it won’t help you achieve your goal of eliminating fat.

Summary

So, we have a few key elements of what constitutes good feedback. Good feedback should be:

* Consistent
* Timely
* Effortless
* Vaguely accurate

This provides a simple framework for improving a feedback system, by providing you with four questions to ask about your current system, and an order of priority between them.

* Is the feedback system inconsistent? If so, can I make it more consistent, even at the expense of timeliness, effortlessness and accuracy?
* Is the feedback system timely? If not, can I make it more timely, even at the expense of effortlessness and accuracy?
* Is the feedback system effortless? If not, can I automate any part of it so it happens even if I don’t do anything, even at the expense of some accuracy?
* Is the feedback system accurate enough? Can I make it more accurate without hurting one of the other key qualities?

I hope you found this article useful. Thank you for reading. Any feedback (timely or otherwise) in the comments below would be most welcome!