Get Feedback and Use It

I once had a professor who demonstrated the power of feedback this way. He sent a student outside and then hid an object in the room. He then brought the student back, blindfolded, and asked him to find the object without being told what the object was.

We all knew the location and identity of the object, and every time he moved towards it, we were allowed to clap once. This was a demonstration of positive feedback. It took a long time for him to find the object.

We then did the exercise again with another volunteer, but this time, we were able to also stomp our feet to provide negative feedback, meaning that the volunteer was moving in the wrong direction.

This volunteer succeeded quickly. The lesson was that in an ideal situation, you receive both negative and positive feedback.

The Lean Startup movement is all about getting specific feedback from actual customers as early as possible in the process of launching a new business. This is in direct contrast to the old way of starting a venture, which was to spend months writing a business plan that almost certainly was not going to describe what would really happen.

People think differently. You can’t succeed without getting the perspective of many other people, otherwise known as feedback.

Of course, it can be much harder to use feedback than to gather it. People – myself included – tend to fall in love with their own ideas. They are impatient – myself included – to get something done, rather than to study the best way to do it. Both of these are serious vulnerabilities.

Think of feedback as insurance against a disaster.