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Importance of feedback and organizational learning

Anonim

In "Quality is a state of mind" I expressed the need to expand our communication capacity with clients, if we wish to improve our understanding of their needs and expectations. And, although this is vital, everything will be useless if we lack the systemic mechanisms that allow us to extract, in real time, the best possible use of the information obtained.

Throughout more than a century, from the areas of physics, biology, mathematics, sociology, computer science and others, renowned scientists such as Rudolf Clausius (entropy), Ludwig von Bertalanffy (General Systems Theory), Ross Ashby (Law of Required Variety), Humberto Maturana (autopoiesis), Niklas Luhmann (Theory of Society) or Stafford Beer (Management Cybernetics) have contributed revolutionary ideas that, timidly and insufficiently, have filtered into the countryside. of business administration.

According to these ideas, both living beings and human societies-of which organizations constitute a special type-respond to the definition of open systems, those whose activity includes the continuous exchange of matter, energy and information with the environment that It surrounds them - as opposed to closed systems, where little energy is exchanged and the transfer of matter and information is minimal or does not occur at all. A classic example of the latter is the thermostat.

Like such open systems, their viability largely depends on their adaptive behavior, guided by mechanisms that provide them with immediate information on the consequences of their actions on the environment. These mechanisms constitute what we know as feedback or feedback.

In elementary form, a feedback subsystem includes one or more appropriate sensors to capture certain types of data and a fast path for the immediate communication of the same to a control center, whose task is to evaluate this data and decide the most appropriate actions. to be executed based on them. The faster and more accurate that feedback is, the more likely the system will survive; otherwise, it will be consumed by entropy.

En un organismo animal, por ejemplo, los órganos sensoriales captan distintos datos del entorno, que son enviados al cerebro a través del sistema nervioso para su análisis y toma de acción, como parte sustancial de su capacidad para aprender y sobrevivir. Si este mecanismo falla, el ser se vuelve incapaz de adaptarse al ambiente y, finalmente, enferma o perece.

For this reason, another of the undesirable legacies of the Classic Theory of Administration is the treatment of organizations as closed systems and the development of controls that operate in a deterministic and mechanical way, as is characteristic of such systems. Consequently, their feedback mechanisms are not designed to provide continuous and probabilistic information about their actions on the environment and their decisions are deprived of this essential input to manage truly adaptive systems. Entities with these characteristics definitely cannot learn and only survive thanks to the investment of huge doses of energy (money).

Therefore, angular contributions to the management of organizations such as those made by Peter Senge in his Fifth Discipline (systems thinking) or by Chris Argyris on organizational learning, are half way. They lack a true feedback process that allows companies to make real-time decisions to correct deviations (negative feedback = complaints) or affirm a healthy trend (positive feedback = praise), systematically taking into account the opinion of their customers. Only a process with these characteristics will be able to make viable the so-called intelligent organization, which for the moment constitutes little more than an expression of wishes.

In its Guide on Auditing to customer feedback processes, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, October 2004) says verbatim:

"Customer feedback is one of the main performance indicators that can be used to judge the overall effectiveness of the QMS."

And it proposes the following questions:

"What is the desired result of this process? What information about customer insights is actually available? How does management use this information to make improvements to products, processes or the QMS? How is the data collected to feed the process? How reliable is the information? How is the data analyzed? How does the information generated by this process feed back to the QMS as a unit? What are the links with other QMS processes? "

The most appropriate answers to these questions will elude us if we continue to conduct continuous improvement of customer satisfaction through regular inquiries, questionnaires or surveys. It should be clear that the consequence of our current actions cannot be usefully assessed a year from now. To manage our organizations we must develop techniques, processes and tools for analysis and decision making of a continuous and uninterrupted cycle, for the same reason that we cannot run a marathon with our eyes closed or opening them every ten minutes. In this sense, he cautiously adds the aforementioned Guide:

“Therefore, it is important that the organization tries to see things from the customer's perspective and monitor customer perceptions; measurement of customer satisfaction may be adequate in some situations, but it is not a direct requirement of the standard. "

In the knowledge society, the 21st century organization cannot survive without learning and cannot learn without continuous feedback. Everything we know about open systems says so.

Importance of feedback and organizational learning