Thermostats, Minions and Midgets - A Rant about Feedback

As your office heats up in the hot July sun, a thermostat signals the air conditioner to start cooling things off. In mid-January, when it's minus thirty outside, the thermostat signals the furnace to start blowing hot air. When talking about feedback with managers, the thermostat analogy comes up quite often and the hot air begins to blow.

Managers give feedback to employees, or so they claim. But most of what managers give out to their minions is actually judgement, evaluation, or criticism, which is quite different from feedback, quite different from what a thermostat does.

Thermostats send information about the temperature of the building to the other parts of the HVAC system. They don't pass judgement on the ability of the air conditioner to cool. They don't evaluate the furnace on how well it's doing its job. They provide feedback, from one part of the system to another part of the system, to help the system maintain an appropriate temperature. With an appropriate temperature, your minions can be more comfortable and productive as they strive to do your bidding.

In business, we design systems and processes to help our minions achieve the corporate goals, whether we produce midgets or provide services. If producing midgets (as opposed to the more common example of widgets), true feedback might be in the form of a control chart showing the heights of the midgets coming off the production line. This control chart might be provided to the Midget Extrusion Machine Operating Minion so he can tell when the machine is starting to drift out of spec. This feedback helps the minion understand how his part of the process is performing and allow him to take appropriate actions to make sure the midgets all meet the appropriate height specification. This is feedback, one part of the system giving information to another part to help it do its job.

Rather than blowing hot air and chilling people's passion with your judgements and evaluations, work on developing true feedback loops that help your minions produce more midgets, or whatever it is you do.

What kind of midget were you thinking about?