TL;DR
Feedback is an informational link between cause and effect that enables recalibration. From the lens of digital strategy, feedback is a process where we refine the solutions in our digital strategy based on an evolved understanding of the context in which our strategy operates.
What is feedback?
Feedback is a process where information is shared between two parts of a process (cause and effect) that influence each other. Within digital strategy we receive information from the solutions we have put in place and alter the solutions based on an evolved understanding of our context.
Feedback ensures that our digital strategies are able to cope with the inherent complexity of the environment in which they are deployed. To empower our digital strategies with feedback we need the right metrics, the associated parameters, useful visualisation and the ability to act.
How feedback empowers
If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it. James Harrington
When Ford first began mass-producing vehicles, they moved a car through their manufacturing process with militant efficiency. The conveyor passed the car to each work station until it was assembled. Each work station was set up to do one specific task and staff at the stations were seen as nothing more than individual automata within a larger system. Management's job was to drive as much speed out of the workers/automata as possible to increase the number of vehicles that could be produced from a plant on a given day.
Once a finished car came out of this process it was checked for defects and any defects found were fixed. The issue with this process was that the original cause of defects were difficult to track down. Even the pre-1950 car was a complicated machine, by the time the car got to the end of the manufacturing process it was near impossible to identify the original source of any error and therefore impossible to prevent the error happening in the future.
Kiichiro Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, knew the way cars were being produced was inefficient. He felt it was more important to find and fix errors as they happened rather than blindly building on shaky foundations.
Toyoda wanted to apply Japenese philosophies like kaizen, continual improvement, to the way his plant produced cars. In order to gain this control over his plant, Toyoda had to rebuild the Toyota factory and management culture from the ground up. Each employee was responsible in identifying and reporting errors as they occurred. Each employee on the assembly line had the ability to pull the entire production to a halt if the issue was serious enough.
Up until that point in time stopping a car manufacturing plant mid-run was considered idiocy. However building this feature into his manufacturing plants allowed Toyoda to identify and overcome errors as they happened. By instrumenting his plant to give immediate feedback when errors occurred and empowering his employees to think, Toyoda was able to vastly improve the efficiency of his plant. The efficiency gained allowed Toyota Corolla to thrive in the market and become the most sold car in the world in 1974.
Feedback is inherently empowering as it allows you to measure, understand, control and improve even the most complicated systems. By redefining the automotive plant to allow feedback Toyota was able to disrupt the global automotive industry.
Emergent strategy
Emergent strategy itself implies learning what works in a search for that viable pattern. Clayton Christensen
In the Innovator's Solution Clayton Christensen discusses the importance for embracing emergent strategies in complicated circumstances. Emergent strategies are ones that become clear through trail and error during execution.
Emergent strategies work because they embrace complexity and the unknown. It's arrogant and counter-productive to think we can predetermine the interplaying outputs of every element within our digital strategy. The environment within which we launch our digital strategy is simply too complex. Even if could predetermine the outcomes of our strategy, our environment constantly changes, a new technology, competitor or service could launch tomorrow that eradicates an important assumption that our estimation is based on.
Feedback's role in our digital strategy
Like automotive production, our digital strategies are complicated systems relying on interrelating methods to work together. Ensuring our systems are instrumented with feedback allows us to identify problems and opportunities more rapidly and therefore be in a constant state of improvement. Feedback enables us to have emergent strategies.
When using feedback in our digital strategies we want to create an information loop between what we want to achieve (our success criteria), what we are achieving (the efficacy of our solutions) and how to narrow the divide between those two parts of our system. The feedback for our digital strategy is broken down into metrics, parameters, visualisation and action.
Metrics
A metric is a measure that lets us understand the effect our digital strategy is having. The most important factor to having an effective metric is that we can correlate it to a positive outcome. Using the wrong metric can lead to a waste in resources and have a negative impact on the outcome we want to achieve.
For example, we may want to increase brand advocacy as a positive outcome of our digital strategy. As a consequence we might measure Facebook Fanpage Likes as a metric. Based on this metric we would naturally focus on increasing the number of Facebook Fanpage Likes to the point where we're driving irrelevant people to like our page through promotions and media buys. These people are less likely to engage with our brand and therefore less likely to be brand advocates. By focusing on delivering the wrong metric we've unintentionally diluted a marketing channel and wasted a number of resources.
In many organisations people fall into the trap of vanity metrics. These metrics look impressive and are fun to tout but tell us nothing about the effect our digital strategy is having on our business or the core positive outcomes we want to achieve.
Parameters
The metric we measure is a variable that depends on independent variables or parameters. For example, sign ups to our service may depend on parameters such as positive social media sentiment volume, converting organic search and internal site click through rates along with others. The degree to which our parameters affect our metric will vary over time.
Parameters are important because they enable us to understand the elements that our metric is comprised of. Tracking and understanding parameters allows us to make forecasts, we can also rely on parameters to give us a more in-depth understanding of problems when they occur. Understanding how parameters vary and how we need to manipulate them allows us to better control our metric's performance and ultimately allows us to have more control over the success criteria we're trying to achieve.
Visualisation
A metric is only of use if we can access, understand, keep track, take meaning and act on the metric. Visualisation of our metrics plays a critical role in allowing us and our colleagues to how we make metrics useful.
There are a large number of tools that enable us to visualise our metrics. We need not worry about excess design or functionality in how we visualise our metrics. The most important considerations we need to take into account is that we:
- Show the metrics that correlate with the positive outcomes we're trying to achieve
- Automate the visualisation of metrics and how they're distributed to our team
- Ensure people viewing the metrics understand what they are and how they impact them
- Can quickly act when team members point out an opportunity or issue with the metrics.
Action
For our digital strategy to benefit from feedback we have to be able to act based on our metrics and parameters. In the Toyota example the factory employees were charged with identifying issues and, if sever enough, stopping the entire production process to fix the underlying issue causing the errors. Actionable feedback turned every employee into a knowledge worker and by moving knowledge management away from senior management and into the hands of employees, Toyota was able to optimise at a velocity their production that left competitors for dead.
In order to be able to act on the insights generated from our feedback processes we need to:
- Have an agile pool of resources
- Be able to objectively rank priorities
- Consistently review our priorities based on our feedback
- Re-asses and optimise our context, strategy and methodology fit based on new understanding.
Feedback
Feedback ensures that our digital strategies are able to cope with the inherent complexity of the environment in which they are deployed. To empower our digital strategies with feedback we need the right metrics, the associated parameters, useful visualisation and the ability to act.