An insight from 1948. Feedback, according to Norbert Wiener

I am reading Norbert Wiener. The further I get, the closer his method feels: join different fields, look for analogies, and find the mechanisms that keep showing up. One of those mechanisms, for Wiener, is feedback.

He studied it in biology and in engineering. The formula fits a business just as well.

What feedback is, for Wiener

Wiener describes feedback as a control loop:

🎯 goal → 📊 measurement → 🛠 correction → measure again.

This is not about feelings. Not “tell them off”, “praise them”, or “shake the team up”.

It is a signal that tells the system: we are off the goal → we get back on the path.

In essence, feedback is the mechanism that keeps a system from falling apart.

Why this is critical for companies

1) Feedback lowers the internal chaos

Wiener thought that any system without correction slides toward entropy.

In companies that looks like this:

• blurred goals,

• an endless “I thought you thought”,

• different expectations between departments,

• decisions “by feel”.

Correction is the antidote.

2) Companies with short cycles grow faster

The faster the cycle “goal → fact → correction” runs, the faster the development.

McKinsey’s research (2020) supports this:

companies with short management cycles grow 30–50% faster.

3) Feedback makes an organization self-regulating

Wiener wrote that a mature system is one where the corrections are built into the processes.

The manager there does not play at manual control.

The manager sets up loops in which problems get corrected before they become crises.

Two types of feedback

Wiener has:

➕ Positive (amplifying)

It heats the system up.

In a business that is:

• fast growth in demand,

• hype,

• viral marketing.

Good at the start, dangerous at maturity. It can overheat the system.

➖ Negative (stabilizing)

It returns you to the goal:

• metrics,

• weekly reports,

• correcting the funnels,

• managing costs.

This is the company’s nervous system.

How this gets put into a business

Three working loops:

1. “Goal → fact → correction”

The most basic cycle.

Example:

🎯 cut the share of returns by 10%

📊 fact: −3%

🛠 correction: find the causes → packaging → product cards → fix the causes

That is pure negative feedback.

2. “Manager → employee”

Feedback between people is the management of a deviation from the goal.

Only without the emotions.

A Harvard Business Review study (2019):

teams where feedback is given regularly and on the facts raise performance by 30%.

The principles:

• no verdicts,

• only fact → effect → correction,

• in short cycles.

3. “Company → market → company”

Wiener wrote about the need to take the outside environment into account.

In a business that is:

• customer interviews,

• NPS,

• voice of the customer,

• competitive analysis.

A company that gets no feedback from the market starts living in a fantasy. In the language of Rick and Morty, it “gets stuck in an infinite loop of cannibalistic incest”.

The Magnit case

In 2022–2023 Magnit was going through a change in how the chain was run.

Forbes Russia quotes the company’s chief operating officer, Sergey Ryzhikov:

“For a long time we ran the chain as a set of separate stores.

When the volume got too big, manual control stopped working.

We needed a system that would react on its own.”

What they did:

1. A daily feedback loop for the stores: sales, stock, write-offs, speed of the shelf.

2. A move to automatic ordering (predictive negative feedback).

3. One correction loop: data → signal → change → result.

Results published in Magnit’s annual report:

• better order accuracy,

• less out-of-stock,

• better turnover of stock,

• growth in like-for-like sales.

This is almost a textbook Wiener:

not motivation, not charisma, but feedback loops set up properly.

The main point

Feedback is not communication.

It is a control mechanism that stops the system falling apart and helps it learn.