Quotes About Feedback

psychological research clearly shows that people who feel underappreciated tend to resent criticism and ignore the advice they're given.

I asked him why he turned us down, and what I could have done better.

If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.

Feedback is oxygen. It's lifeblood. We can't grow and develop without it.

Your belief system needs to include the idea that feedback from others should not be feared but desired.

Rather than resisting the other side's criticism, invite it.

Washington grew as a leader because he engaged in searching self- criticism. "I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors," he once wrote. "The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults or remove prejudices which are imbibed against him."41 The one thing Washington could not abide was when people published criticisms of him without first giving him a chance to respond privately

Learning is relatively easy when the link between cause and effect is clear. But complex systems often sever that connection: causes remote from effects, solutions detached from problems, and feedback delayed or misleading (Cyert and March, 1963; Senge, 1990).

moviegoers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is. In this example, small chance influences created a snowball effect and made a huge difference in the future of the song. Again, it's the butterfly effect.

Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.

There is one thing that freezes a musician more than the deadliest physical cold, and that is the spiritual chill of an unresponsive audience!

User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

My people keep telling me I shouldn't write letters like this to critics. The way I see it, critics get to say what they want to about my work, so why shouldn't I be able to say what I want to about theirs?

Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. — A stitch in time saves nine.

stop looking for who's to blame; instead you'll start asking, "What's the system?" The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.

You can't navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.

The balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state. The lower the desired state, the less discrepancy, and the less corrective action is taken. The less corrective action, the lower the system state. If this loop is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to a continuous degradation in the system's performance.

The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.

The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.

Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.

Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.