The Etymology of Feedback
March 3rd, 2008I was asked the other day by a manager who believed that we were stone dead wrong about feedback [”I could never tell my people their mistakes. it’s unprofessional!” Amazing. - H] what the history of the WORD was. It ended up being a funny story, but it’s instructive too.
I told him I got that question a lot [for the wrong reasons, but whatever.] I told him that “feedback” started in the early 20th century, with the advent of microphones. Since inputs into the mics were “feeds”, and they were designed to only work with inputs, if there were “feeds” that came back through the system [usually from being too close to speakers], you’d get an awful noise. That awful noise was named “feedback”, because it was a “feed” that came “back” into the system.
Well, you’d have thought that he’d been handed the talking points of an opposing debating team. He attacked our model for using a term whose origins were legitimately associated with an awful noise. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that feedback was even then useful, and managers who don’t give feedback because they think it’s an awful noise just don’t realize how awful a noise their silence makes.
What I should have said, rather than taking his question literally (no, he did not use the word etymology), was that we use the word NOT because of its earliest origins, but rather because we’re engineers, and all good systems are built with feedback mechanisms built in. The word feedback is NOT inherently negative today, even though that’s how it began, and how managers who don’t want to do it define it themselves. The word usage has CHANGED, to incorporate the value of feedback into systems that touch all aspects of our lives.
Word usage DOES change. It used to be that Bethlehem hospital in London was a mental institution. It was initially derogatory slang to describe a completely chaotic situation as “bedlam”, but it got that name because that was how Bethlehem Hospital was pronounced.
Maybe you as a manager think of feedback as an awful noise, but you’re glad there’s feedback in other systems, we’re sure of that. When your automatic car window STOPS going up because the system has a new force put on it - FEEDBACK - your child’s hand doesn’t get crushed. When your automatic garage door STOPS going down because something interrupts the safety circuit, well, your child’s hand doesn’t get crushed. When someone says, “WHAT?!?!?” when you use a word they don’t understand, or they just don’t hear you, or YOU MISPRONOUNCE it, or you’re not using the language they’re most familiar…that TOO, is feedback.
When you do something, the world responds. That’s feedback, and we’re usually happy to have it.
And so are your directs.
So stop worrying about the WORD - or heaven forbid its HISTORY, and add a feedback mechanism to your directs’ performance.
Just like you want YOUR BOSS to do.
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March 3rd, 2008 at 10:51 am
Part of my degree course (we don’t have Majors and Minors like the US here in the UK but if you think of it as my minor you won’t be too far off) was Electronic Engineering. We had an entire term and a half (14 weeks, about 40 hours of lectures, 30 hours of labs plus tutorials and expected to do around 150 hours of self study) on feedback (although they called in “Control Electronics”).
Feedback, in an electronics sense is where the output of a system is fed back into the inputs to change the outputs. This can be a simple as a digital system where the effect of the change in the inputs to a system also depends on the state of the outputs (e.g. traffic lights) through the temperature controls of a chemicals plant to a complex analogue feedback to damp the flight characteristics of a plane. If you dig deep enough into the systems, feedback is what keeps a modern jet in the air. It’s often said that a good fighter pilot flies a hair’s breadth from out of control, it’s feedback systems that allow that to happen. In fact in one to the final tutorials of the control electronics course we had an assignment to watch some video of a new USAF fighter that was having problems with it’s landing attitude control (it tended to wag it’s tail) and diagnose the faults with it’s avionics.
In an MT sense behaviour is the output, as a manager we pick up on that behaviour and provide a suitable signal back to the inputs to either amplify desirable behaviour or damp undesirable behaviour.
Stephen
March 4th, 2008 at 4:44 am
You should ask this guy if he’d be happy if his boss didn’t tell him when things weren’t going so well. I know I wouldn’t!
March 15th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I believe what is unprofessional is setting up your directs for failure for LACK of giving feedback then at the end of the year compiling all they did wrong into an annual review (and giving them the shock of their career).
March 18th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Being anally retentive I reviewed the meaning of feedback on dictionary.com. The feedback from dictionary.com was “the process of returning part of the output of a circuit, system, or device to the input, either to oppose the input (negative feedback) or to aid the input (positive feedback). ”
Given that the goal of the Feedback Model is to provide positive feedback (an aid to behavioural systems) to a device that has an undefined method for processing that input - the output from the device concerned could be defined as indeterminate. Therefore the Feedback Model provides the mechanism by which the provider of the input can determine how the device is handling said input over time.
This Feedback Model then allows the input provider to make assessments and adjustments to the feedback provided to tweak the device in a manner that encourages the behahiuor required in the environment.
Stephen