People are our product

I can see why social media is so compelling for most. We have a kind of herd instinct — well, it’s certainly not a true herd instinct in the sense of cattle, but we are fairly gregarious, us humans. It’s almost like our instinct to return to a group for security is being triggered all the time. It rewards us in the same way each time we are exposed to it, and when we aren’t we are reminded of the feeling. We have a kind of itch inside that prompts us, whenever there isn’t any overtly engaging conscious stimulation, to turn around and catch up with what the herd is doing. In past times, this may have involved going down the pub or similar venue. Going to a church or something like that. Going to the beach or a park or somewhere that affords “promenading”. The phone or tablet we carry is a constantly alluring gateway to get back to the crowd again for our regular hit of validation.

Even in shopping centres and tube stations, people standing on the right on the up escalator will simply look at the people standing on the right riding the down escalator, and vice versa. We like to look at each other, be with each other and discern differences in each other. We get a lot of pleasure from just looking at another human being — it’s obviously of value. There are even entire magazines devoted to looking at people. And television programmes. And films in the cinema. We value other people, their presence and existence makes us feel good.

In fact, that is precisely the point we should be taking to heart and embodying as the core of our businesses and products and endeavours — that people are effectively the product. People are our product. All of us. We are our product. We make stuff, for other people. We do stuff, for other people. We fix stuff and say stuff and squeeze stuff and show stuff — all for other people. People are who we connect to in our social networks, people are our societies. Our product is effectively nothing but people.

We offer value to each other — or at least, we should if we want to be successful, and we can measure our success by the connections we are rewarded with, and how influential we become within our networks. Maybe in addition there’s some kind of transactional reward involved, featuring temporally decoupled representational stored effort tokens, or maybe not. But that isn’t the main point. The value we gain is that of connectivity and agency within the network. If we offer value we may be rewarded with connectivity that affords network  fitness. One person connects to us, if they like what we offer, good, but if they don't they can pass the connection on to another and if they pass the connection on and so on, this builds our influence and allows our reach to extend. One person passing the good word on to another is how reputations are built, and the reputation stays or persists much longer than any set of connections in your network. We’re not really building networks, then. We’re really building reputations, and the way that we do this is by using the network as a substrate upon which our reputation grows.

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.