Feedback loops and the power of nudging
Walt (not his real name) was a relatively recent hire as a field analyst of a mapping company focused on car navigation, in this case building such maps for expanding the footprint in Latin America. That basically meant that Walt was largely on the road, working somewhere collecting input for enriching the map database attribution for a period, then going back to his home and staying for a rest period.
There was in fact a group of such analysts like Walt, as the company was accelerating investments in the region. Because of that, such an activity was by far the most expensive of the operation, easily consuming half of the entire budget.
To make matters more complicated, all of that was done in a context of evolving technologies, where the analysts were adopting new ways of working, different tooling, while pressured for maintaining good efficiency levels.
Putting in simpler words, there was a lot of stake and there were various risks for different angles to be considered. Not a situation where it would be wise to run sort of blindly and not have a hold on the quality of the output of the work.
As responsible for quality, training & methods, I was tasked by my then boss to come up with a sensible way to fix that. And so I did – by designing and deploying what I ended up calling our "fieldwork quality framework". It was a framework because it had different aspects to it, combining the measurement of efficiency (km surveyed/day), with semi-automated checks as well as detailed manual inspection of a sample of things that couldn't be checked more automatically.
By those were the means to the end – which was rather built upon one single overarching concept: feedback loops. Convinced that people are willing to the right thing, but that they are not always told where they didn't, and how they have done it instead, I've designed and deployed twofold feedback sessions:
Group: where we would look at trends of all the analysts, at both aggregate and individual (anonymized) level, and where we would also take the opportunity to cover some of the patterns of errors we've observed, to tackle them structurally.
Individual: where we would open up who were them in the individual level results, but also take up a more detailed and context-relevant focus on their errors individually.
The results were outstanding – not to brag. We not only could observe an improvement in efficiency (as we would expect as they would become more experienced and used with the new tooling, and all of that), but also an improvement in quality. The combined effect ultimately also meaning more cost-effective (directly, with efficiency gains; but also indirectly, with fewer efforts spent in quality assurance and fixing in the office later on). Win, win, win, for pretty much any angle that mattered you would look from.
But on an individual level, to me, there was an additional outcome which I pretty much cherished to this day. And interesting enough, which ultimately also does speak about feedback loop as a concept.
With tears in his eyes (truth be told, possibly at least in part influenced by some level of alcohol, being in an end of year company party), Walt came to me to deeply appreciate for how I had helped him to evolve and thrive. He just had received a company award for being both the most efficient field analyst (he was from the get-go a fast guy collecting) and achieving the highest level of quality (which was an issue at first, with him being consistently last or at least on the trailing group).
He also confidentially shared he was afraid at some point that once I would be calling him for the individual feedback session, he would be let go. Silly, Walt… I wasn't even his boss formally, I couldn't do that. But more importantly – I had confidence in him, he was an efficient guy, he just had to be more careful while collecting to not miss out on the quality side. And that's precisely how I would frame and encourage him on a regular basis, while also giving factual examples and input on the things he could improve and how.
That happened nearly 10 years ago (if my memory is not failing me). It still sticks with me because it meant so much – apparently for him as well, as it surely did to me. It was one of the most telling and inspiring experiences I had with the power of feedback loops. And since then I could point so many other times when I could rely upon that to drive sensible change and improvement.
Quite often, that doesn't even come by directly tackling some issue. But just by holding a kind of mirror against, so that reflective conversation can follow. Change often comes in oblique (indirect) fashion.
…Nudging is a thing…
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact