Seek real feedback

What if you ate food, but couldn’t taste it? What if you had your coffee, but wouldn’t feel the warmth as it goes through your throat? What if you were giving a presentation, but the audience only stared, not reacting?

How would that feel?

The problem is the lack of feedback.

Nearly everything we do in the real world has a feedback loop. You lift a cup of coffee, you feel the weight and the heat. You stub your toe on a threshold, you feel the pain; you tell a joke, someone laughs, and you feel warm inside.

But in much of modern work there’s none of that. The feedback loop is expanded to fit tens of people, each with their own expertise, and so the result does not garner actual feedback from the real world. Yet without actual feedback, how can we know if the thing we created works?

To be effective at solving problems in the world, we need to keep close to reality and seek out information about whether the thing we did worked or not. We also need to be brutally honest with ourselves about the information we get and use it to adapt if necessary. No excuses.

Do you have a clear way of getting real feedback?