Every process must have a complete loop. A business leader often used to say; ‘if there is no way to check the system, the system is dead on arrival.’ Great systems have ways of checking themselves, they optimize their feedback mechanisms. Feedback is the hardest thing to solicit.
The commonest feedback with any system is that people stop using it. And that feedback is harder to process. Example in question, a restaurant advertised the best luwombo in Uganda. On Sunday, we decided to order Luwombo from them. Each Luwombo costs UGX 27,000. When the food was delivered, it was far from all the expectations. In fact, it didn’t defy expectations, it shattered all of them. We were too frustrated to even care about offering direct feedback. The best feedback was to blacklist that restaurant from our life path.
For process excellence, system designers must optimize for mature feedback mechanisms. In the case of our restaurant, once food is delivered, there should be someone to call and interact with the client. Someone who confirms the completion of this process. Yet, this restaurant has probably stopped at just declaring the sale, what happens beyond the sale, is none of their concern.
Feedback is the check to the system; the feedback loop is the stamp of process excellence. Without this check, it’s hard to improve the system. It’s hard to build a learning system. We see the same even in hard systems such as logistics. A logistics system without a clear feedback loop will deteriorate to the degree of absence of feedback. Thus, all strategists must learn to ask one question; ‘once we have put in place this system, how does it self-correct, how does it exceed itself?’ Any system without a feedback mechanism, a working one, is bound to fail!