Sequence is important

The order in which we do things is very important. Initial conditions are important. What happens next is important. I’m not any kind of cook, but I imagine that cooking is probably like this too — you can’t just empty all the ingredients at once into a receptacle and cook it and end up with a three course dinner. Or maybe you can, I’ve no idea. I doubt there’s really an endeavour in life in which it doesn’t matter at all in which order you do things. Not important activities, anyway. Even making a cup of tea is a religious matter — milk in first or last?*

Let me ask you a question. What comes next:
1 2 3

If you answered 4, that’s a perfectly logical response, but if you answered 5, you’re also correct.

How is 5 the next in the sequence? Well, we might be just beginning a Fibonacci sequence. Let me present it in a more correct way:

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 and so on.

Let’s say you have the first number — 0.
Let’s say you put in a second number — 1.
These two numbers represent our initial condition.

Now, take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. Take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. Take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. And so on. This is the process we will apply.

Well, life’s a lot like this. We have initial conditions, and we have processes.

The initial conditions may be the way we’re born, for example. We’re born into certain families with certain belief systems and certain attitudes to wealth (or more usually, a lack of it), and certain ways of looking at the world, wherever in the world we’ve had the luck to be born. Or, you could think of initial conditions as where you are now. What you’ve got now. What you start with if you were to start now. If you’re about to embark on a big change in your life from now on, you have to take it from where you are now, who you are now and what you’ve got now. Those are your initial conditions.

The processes we might also call strategies. A strategy is simply a predictable repeatable already-defined approach to doing things, applied no matter what. Occasionally we find the strategy doesn’t work effectively so we have to do something on the spot, something exceptional, some made up fix, instead of following the plan, just enough to get us back to the strategy. We call these tactics.

A tactical approach deals with cases as they occur, each in a specific way.

A strategic approach deals with everything according to a defined process.

With the Fibonacci sequence, the strategy is simple, as I said above, “take the two most recent numbers, add them and this is your next number” and then do it again and keep doing it. No matter what the last two numbers on the stack are. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care. As long as there’s two numbers on the top of the stack, we’ll take them, add them, push the result onto the top of the stack, and then do the whole operation again and again. That’s the strategy. That’s the process. That’s the thing we do in life. If you have a specific approach to life, if you respond to things that happen in a characteristic way (you know, according to your character), if you have your way of doing things, then you have a strategy and you’ll do it no matter what, to whatever happens. Doesn’t matter, don’t care, just do the strategy as usual, it got us this far so it must be the correct thing to do.

If you change the strategy to a different strategy, let’s say, “take the two most recent numbers, divide the newer one by the older one and chuck away the remainder, and this is your next number” and you run this strategy over and over, you will get a totally different result. You’ll end up at a different destination, even from the same beginnings.

As I say, life’s a lot like this. There are people with comfortable beginnings, and people with tough beginnings. There are people who have a certain strategy to what happens in life, and there are other people who have a different strategy to what happens. Some people seem to have no strategy, treating everything as it comes on a tactical basis but in reality, this is some kind of strategy in itself (not a particularly strong one, though). Change one part of the initial state of the fibonacci sequence and apply the same process and you get a different result — try this:

Instead of 

0 1 1 2 etc

run it beginning

3 1 etc

see what you get. Same process, different initial conditions. Totally different destination in life. Busy millionaire instead of daytime telly on the sofa. Unfortunately, we can’t very well do much about who we are, the family we’re born into, the country, the economy, the educational opportunities planned from birth, etc. We can’t even do much about where we are today, retrospectively — we can’t go back to yesterday and make a change. We take it from where we are now. What we can change, though, is the process in our lives. The strategy. We can re-strategise any time we like, and if we like the results, stick to it as though it’s a proper strategy and we meant to do it like that all along. The strategy we live by is a specific sequence. Put the milk in first, every time, or put the milk in last, every time? Or put the milk in first if it’s a teapot and last if it’s a teabag in a mug. It’s a sequence, it’s a process, it’s a strategy.

* The answer is last, if you’re using a teabag, first if you’re using a poncy teapot — the teabag requires tea to brew at pretty much boiling point. If you let cold milk cool the hot water before it has a chance to perform the action you just end up with tea-coloured hot water instead of a proper cuppa. However, if you think you live in the Edwardian era and use a teapot, then the brewing occurs in the teapot, unhindered by the cooling effects of cold milk, and therefore the tea can be poured into cups that already have a bit of milk. This would have been a necessity in the olde times as the bone china in those days was quite prone to fracturing with contact with boiling hot water, and the milk in the cup helps avoid this outcome. As you see, the initial conditions followed by the sequence of the process consequently applied is important. Especially with tea, which is of course of utmost importance.

Is feedback useful in business and real life?

We need feedback, they say. Not when you’re on the radio, of course, the delay through the transmission process will cause your own voice to return later and echo through the same process. Not when you’re singing on stage, either, as you’ll get a high pitched tone as the mic and amplifier picks up its own signal from the speakers, causing a positive feedback loop. That’s no good. But all other times, feedback is what we want. Is that right? We want feedback?

If the bad kind, on stage, in broadcasting, is bad because it is positive feedback, then what is negative feedback? That’s all over the place too — technology is full of negative feedback systems, for correcting deviations, etc. Aircraft navigation and flight controls use negative feedback to ascertain how far off course we are, how far out of the desired steering the plane is, etc. At home, the central heating has a thermostat which uses negative feedback — is it at the correct temp yet? No, then keep heating. Is it at the correct temp yet? No, then keep heating. Is it at the correct temp yet? Yes, then stop doing what it’s doing — stop heating. Most systems we use all day use negative feedback for correction and control, it’s an essential part of modern system design, from cybernetics to signal theory (see Claude Shannon’s work, if you’re interested in that sort of thing).

What about us? In business, in real life? Do we need feedback? Which sort? Are we cybernetic systems, designed to operate through error correction via a negative feedback loop? I would suggest it’s not that simple. Yes, we operate mechanistically in many ways, but not totally. We are subject to the mass reinforcements of feedback that amplify, exaggerate and ramp up the input to increase the output that are all typical of an out-of-control positive feedback loop. When we’re told of news of a bank that’s perhaps on shaky ground and there’s a slight risk that in the distant future it may fail, we all queue up at the doors to get our money out, and guess what, the bank fails. It’s that horrid positive feedback again, isn’t it.

What about negative feedback. Our lives are full of that. You need not look any further than our partners or spouses to find a constant and reliable source of negative feedback. Corrective criticism designed to adjust what we’re doing can obviously improve the outcome. Anyone involved in quality control in mass production knows this — if there’s an issue or fault, detecting it, measuring it, and bringing this evidence to the source of the error as negative feedback will hopefully adjust and correct the error, so that subsequent production is within tolerance. That’s pretty normal for modern production in most industries.

However, although the negative feedback loop indubitably works so well for keeping systems under tight control, is it the way humans work? To a certain level, yes of course. If you’re learning something, or training someone, highlighting errors or incorrect actions will hopefully cause subsequent attempts to occur within acceptable boundaries. Learning a musical instrument, a language, a sport, etc. You want to know what you’re doing wrong, and in quite significant detail, otherwise you’ll continue doing it, perhaps never knowing why things aren’t turning out quite right.

However, as hinted at in reference to partners, there’s a tendency to think that if negative feedback achieves so much good, then just keep doing it, and doing it more! Not just partners, but work colleagues, everyone we are in contact with in fact. Of course, that falls into the category of positive feedback and escalates to a level of saturation representing the most that we can put up with. Occasionally, though, that top level is reached and broken, so people split up, people walk out of jobs, people shout at customer service workers, people even go out on strike and have marches.

What about positive feedback as the antidote? If used carefully, it can be a good thing, it can be a reinforcement, an encouragement, and an ingredient for growth. As referred to earlier, 100% positive feedback is no use. Telling someone they’re fantastic all the time when they’re not is really unproductive and can be damaging, but never telling people they’re doing okay when they’re doing okay is also unhealthy. You can achieve a lot with negative feedback but you can’t go all the way with just nothing but criticism, and similarly you can have quite damaged outcomes with nothing but positive feedback but used now and then it’s quite a good ingredient.

What about no feedback at all? Well, there I think is the biggest problem. People working alone or at home or teleworking or setting up new businesses on their own, are at risk of having absolutely no feedback at all. Most feedback you’ll get from the Internet is simply non-existent — no feedback at all — you’ll be totally ignored. You don’t exist. Your efforts add up to nothing.

The next level of feedback is simply a simple “+” or a “like”, which might well only indicate that the person reading it didn’t disagree with it and wants some way of remembering it later, on that fictitious day that they’ll come back to everything they’ve ever bookmarked and read some of it again (I don’t know, maybe the Internet firehose dried up that day, nobody posted new stuff, so we all have to read some old stuff). The Internet is a strange and unintuitive system when it comes to feedback design principles. There’s a lot of positive feedback tendencies about it — things can ramp up out of control very quickly, “going viral” as they say (in reality it’s more like a stampede than a virulent outbreak) and then it’s old news, buried forever like Crazy Frog or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. There’s no shortage of negative feedback on the Internet either — you don’t have to look far to find maximum criticism occurring any day of the week.

But the risk of working on your own is that there’s absolutely no feedback at all — your efforts might be good, or might need adjustment, but the particular response curves of the system are simply not linear (technically, there’s hysteresis, which is partly the reason things can go viral) and this lag or disconnection can be disconcerting, depressing and give the impression that you’re being completely ignored.

We need feedback — to tell if we’re on the correct path or not. Without feedback we might think we’re doing okay but we’re really heading off in an incorrect direction. Or worse, without feedback we don’t get any validation that what we’re doing amounts to anything worthwhile at all, so we stop wasting our time on it and do something else instead, or at least, slow down, in case it turns out to be a waste of time.

If you’re doing your own thing, if you’re working alone, if you’re not part of a group, then there’s an additional resource drain of having to have faith that what you’re doing might one day add up to something. Even when in the face of things, there’s nothing complete right here and right now, and the whole world is ignoring you, giving no feedback at all — neither positive nor negative — just nothing. It’s under those circumstances that we must remember what we’re doing and fix our sights on the eventual outcome — the goal, the destination, the thing we’re doing it all for. We have to be our own feedback loop.

Ian Tindale’s ‘Success in Seven Parts’ on Amazon. ASIN: B00LJJCLIA

This is the youtube promo for my book ‘Success in Seven Parts’ on Amazon. ASIN: B00LJJCLIA

Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon UK
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon ’Straya
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon India
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon US

…and the other Amazons too.

What do you read Kindle books on? I myself don’t own a Kindle. I read Kindle books on the official Kindle app on my iPad, on my Android tablet and phone, and when I had a Nokia 920 for a while, the Windows Phone Kindle app. Does anyone read Kindle books on their Mac or Pc? Laptop? Desktop? It’d be interesting to know if anyone does. I merely assume all Kindle consumption occurs on tablets, phones or actual Kindles, but all mobile devices. Post a reply if you do it on a laptop or desktop, let me know.

Success In Seven Parts — the blog

This is the launch post of the “Success In Seven Parts” blog. It accompanies my “Success In Seven Parts” series of motivational speaking talks. Are you interested in the process of achievement? The “Success In Seven Parts” pilot is up on youtube now: