Discovering Feedback

Feedback is the most powerful force known to engineering to enable a system get what it wants. Success stories like Hewlett Packard under David Packard, Nucor Steel during the time of Ken Iverson and others like South Western Airlines and Walmart have established the reality and power of the force for Management systems as well. I truly understood the relevance of Feedback to my work in the process of creating a submission for a Management Innovation contest. I created eight articles for the contest to explain my compelling delivery of Feedback and its importance. They did not win the contest but they did raise me to a higher and simpler level of understanding which I propose to explain in a future series of posts.

The eight articles in their logical order are as follows:

Perspective: The last article I wrote was The Hack 'Solving the ages-old problem of the 'ignorant diagnosis''. It introduces the fundamental and unsolved problem of Management.


1. The Hack ‘Achieving the ends of Knowledge with feedback’ presents the goals of Knowledge Management and analyzes why they were not achieved. It explains why Feedback will attain the goals, and leverages my sketches to introduce the delivery of its content and value with Dialogue.


2. Reliable means to raise Collective Ability is the core need for superior performance or success. My Barrier ‘Absence of a means to exploit the latent collective ability for pursuing success’ explains how the growth of interactions has overwhelmed means for collective creation and introduces the Conventional Wisdom that has held up progress.

3. Rich wisdom has accumulated on the way to success but Managements are unable to apply it. My Barrier ‘Neglect of the accumulated Management Wisdom’ defines the neglect of wisdom and how a compelling Knowledge Assembly Line may be conceived to manage the organization and discipline for taming Knowledge interactions.

4. My Barrier ‘The importance of dreaming about the free flow of Knowledge’ presents the deep significance of Dialogue and why free-flow is a rare phenomenon in the business scape.

5. The Hack ‘Creating a common language to unite stakeholders’ explains the development of a language for bringing the Knowledge Assembly Line into common usage and for converting the Knowledge captured into Dialogue for raising the Collective Ability.

6. Empowerment is the single most powerful force for Management Transformation. My Barrier ‘Change from within is a citadel that must be stormed – from within’ represents it is not enough to possess Knowledge, be empowered and perhaps even know how to apply Knowledge. It explores the internal barriers to successful empowerment and how they may be overcome.

7. The Hack ‘Compelling Energy for a quantum jump in organization performance with the same resources’ explains my harnessing of IT to deliver the Knowledge Assembly Line and its amenability to a swift roll-out across the enterprise.