What Are Feedback Loops?
In business, as in life, feedback loops are essential for growth and success.
A feedback loop is a system where the output of a process is fed back into the input, allowing the system to adjust and learn from its mistakes. This can be done in a variety of ways, but it is essential for any business or organization that wants to improve over time.
In this blog post, we will discuss feedback loops and how they affect your life, body, and even your business!
Main image courtesy of Retently.
Have you ever thought about the feedback loops that affect our lives, business, and bodies?
Cause and effect play a big part in our everyday lives, and it also plays a tremendous role in business operations or human performance. They even affect the simplest things we do, such as marketing a brand, washing the dishes, or paying the rent.
Feedback loops are systems that are constantly running, surround us every single day, and affect everything in the world. The system produces outputs that will be input into the system that will produce more outputs and this cycle continues to repeat constantly.
Are you interested in learning more about feedback loops and how they work especially in the business sense? If so, then make sure to continue reading for everything you’ll need to know!
What is a Feedback Loop?
It’s important to know how feedback loops work in our everyday lives before knowing how they work in a business!
Learning more about feedback loops and how they affect our everyday lives is essential to spot them in the business world as well. Image courtesy of Reader’s Digest Asia.
Have you ever heard of the term “feedback loop”? A feedback loop is when the output of something produces the input and it just keeps going through this endless cycle where the output produces the input. This can also be considered a chain of cause-and-effect where this cycle constantly feeds back or responds to itself.
Positive and Negative Feedback Loop
There are two types of feedback loops as they can be positive or negative:
- Positive Feedback Loop: This feedback loop enhances or amplifies changes, which results in a more unstable state as the system moves away from equilibrium.
- Negative Feedback Loop: This feedback loop dampens or buffers changes, which results in a more stable state as the system is maintained at equilibrium.
How Feedback Loops Work in a System
It’s important to know just how important feedback loops are, especially in a system. No matter what the system is, an electrical appliance, temperature regulation in the human body temperature, or the sales and marketing in a company, feedback is how the system changes future behavior and produces better and more successful results.
It is also important for feedback loops to balance out as well to find a state of equilibrium where it does not need to change and maintain the state they are currently in.
In the thermostat example, the negative feedback loop maintains the temperature that is currently in your home. And so the feedback loop balances out by knowing when to kick on and off in order to maintain the temperature that you have it set on.
Reinforcing Feedback Loops to Keep Them Secure
Since you know how a feedback loop works and you know how to keep one balanced, it is just as important to reinforce feedback loops so they maintain the same quality they continue to produce. But how is it possible to do that?
Reinforcing loops is extremely important and it’s also super easy to understand. Think of your bank account and how much money you have in it currently. The more money that you have in your bank account creates a positive feedback loop to earn you more money in interest, and this cycle continues with the more money you put into your bank account.
When you think about it, feedback loops are surrounding you no matter where you go and they can fit into almost any category or system that is occurring. For example, they can be the temperature regulation in your air conditioner or thermostat, or even something as simple as seeing the interest build up the more money you add to your bank account.
Knowing what feedback loops are, how to balance them, and how to reinforce them is important for understanding how they can work in the corporate world or even your own body.
How Do Feedback Loops Work in your Business?
Feedback loops have a lot that goes into them to be able to understand how they work, especially in a business!
Knowing how feedback loops can work in a company can lead to successfully selling your product, service, and more. Image courtesy of Entrepreneur.
Overall, when associating feedback loops with businesses as a whole, successful businesses have positive feedback loops while stagnant ones have negative feedback loops.
Since we know that producing strong outputs can in return create better inputs, this process shows how decisions can change a business entirely, for better or for worse. It’s important to examine how feedback loops can improve your business, especially in the areas of market research, customer satisfaction, customer experience, employee retention, and internal processes.
Customer Satisfaction
At an individual customer level, the customer feedback loop is essential to the relationship between companies and individual customers.
This feedback loop allows organizations to collect customer feedback to improve their customer experience, products, or services. They can see whether individual customers have positive feedback or a negative view of the company’s products or services.
Without customer feedback, businesses would have no way of knowing what customers want or how they can improve customer satisfaction. This positive feedback loop is essential to ensuring that companies provide better service and respond to the needs of their customers to always be improving and growing.
Market Research and Performance
Similarly, at a larger market level, the market research feedback loop is critical to the relationship between a company and the overall market.
This feedback loop helps companies to understand how well their products or services are performing in the marketplace. When a company creates a new product or service, it can gather data on many sales occur to observe how it performed in that given market.
The company can then decide to introduce similar products or services or cut back depending on this feedback loop. This feedback loop will allow organizations to effectively reach their target market.
Employee Satisfaction
At an individual level, a company can use a positive feedback loop to improve employee satisfaction. This feedback loop allows companies to collect employee feedback to improve their workplace, policies, or procedures.
It’s important to be able to let employees be able to voice their opinion in the workplace by listening and accepting these criticisms. Gathering feedback, analyzing it, and then acting on the employee feedback can help to drastically improve how the company ensures that employees are satisfied.
Satisfied employees will result in a great place to work
Employee Retention
Similarly, at a firm level, employee satisfaction plays heavily into employee retention. This is an important feedback loop for maintaining a healthy labor force in an organization.
If employees are not satisfied and compensated appropriately with their job, they may leave the company. This can be a larger issue for the firm to reduce churn, maintain talent, and grow the company. Further, unhappy employees will lead to poor feedback from customers, which creates a negative feedback loop and cause stagnation.
Internal Processes
Internally, major companies should have internal processes with feedback loops to help them gather data and information, make decisions, and improve the process.
Feedback loops help to ensure that company processes are running smoothly and efficiently by providing feedback that can be used to make adjustments. They also help to identify problems and correct them quickly.
The feedback loop begins with a process being carried out, and the output of that process is then fed back into the system. The feedback is then used to assess the process and make necessary adjustments. This feedback-adjustment cycle continues until the desired results are achieved. Feedback loops are an essential part of ensuring that company processes are effective and efficient.
Feedback Loops in the Human Body and Everyday Life
While feedback loops sound just like they revolve around businesses, they are also relevant in your everyday life!
Making sure that you understand how feedback loops affect your everyday life is just as important as how they affect businesses, everyday objects, and more. Image courtesy of Inc. Magazine.
We know that we’ve talked a lot about feedback loops and how they affect businesses and other important systems, such as thermostats which help maintain the balance of more heat or cool air in your home depending on the weather, but did you know that you can apply feedback loops to your everyday life as well?
Feedback loops play a huge part in your daily life with your health, the decisions you make, and your reactions to certain situations and scenarios that you encounter. There is a lot to consider when thinking about how feedback loops play into your life, so here is how it can!
Bodily Functions and Feedback Loops
A great example to provide into how feedback loops play into your everyday health involves your health. Your health is crucial and it’s important to make healthy decisions, such as eating the right foods, exercising daily, and doing a lot of stress-free activities to help your mental health, and one way that feedback loops can work into your everyday life is how your body functions.
Take your blood sugar, for example, it’s important to regulate it and eat three meals a day, choose foods lower in calories, drink more water, and so much more. You can relate how you regulate your blood sugar to how a feedback loop works within your body, and in this case, it can work as a negative feedback loop.
Whenever you eat, the negative feedback loop controls the level of sugar in your blood. Your body will absorb the glucose in your body, which is the main sugar in the human body, and it will disperse into your bloodstream. Glucose helps your pancreas create insulin to be distributed throughout your body and if your pancreas stops creating insulin, the cells in your body stop absorbing the glucose.
The negative feedback loop in this case would be when your blood glucose level is too low and the pancreas instead creates glucagon. This breaks down glycogen into glucose, which then enters back into the bloodstream and will help maintain glucose levels and bring your blood sugar back to normal.
Other Examples to Show How Feedback Loops Affect Your Everyday Life
There are a ton of other reasons how feedback loops affect your everyday life. This can show in many different ways throughout your body including the following feedback loop examples:
- Returning your body back to homeostasis
- Enhance changes in the brain
- Regulating the temperature in your body
- Body temperature rises when you are cold
- A woman giving birth to a child
- Recovery of injured blood vessels
- Wanting to correct situations in your life
- So much more!
Knowing just how feedback loops can impact your daily life is important because it can affect all aspects of it. From making positive changes to your brain and even working on maintaining parts of your body, such as your blood sugar, and so much more, feedback loops not only can affect businesses and other everyday systems we use in our life but also within our bodies as well.
Final Thoughts on Feedback Loops
Feedback loops are an important part of life. Knowing how to understand them in order to help your business run successfully making both your customers and your employees happy, keeping your body and brain healthy, and also knowing how it can work in objects as simple as our thermostat and keeping us warm or cool during the weather changes, feedback loops do a lot in your everyday life.
Making sure you understand feedback loops can drastically help improve many aspects of your life, so get to know a little more about what they are and incorporate them and how they work every day!
