rdn32

Complaining about corporate jargon is almost too easy to be worth the effort. But I did want to have a little whinge about my own pet peeve: the misuse of the terms “positive feedback” and “negative feedback”.

The misuse I’m talking about is using “positive feedback” and “negative feedback” to replace the words “praise” and “blame” respectively. I don’t know exactly who’s fault this is. Perhaps it doesn’t matter: after all, who wants to play the blame game?

At one level, the basis of my dislike is simply the pointless waste of syllables. That’s not really much different from complaining about people saying “utilize” when they could say “use”.

Then there’s the fact that this terminology is taken from control engineering. I studied this as an undergraduate, so I have a personal reason for being annoyed by technical language being abused.

However, I also think that these notions of feedback might be genuinely useful if they had wider currency, and that it’s a shame that they don’t. (My choice of degree was influenced by having read Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an ecology of mind, which used engineering concepts to illuminate cultural dynamics.)

Simplifying a bit, negative feedback is what allows a system to correct its own behaviour and so maintain a steady state. For example, having a thermostat in an iron means that it heats up when it is too cool, and cools down when it is too hot. In contrast, positive feedback (such as when the output of a loudspeaker gets picked up by a connected microphone) can potentially allow create runaway behaviour in a system. (Be warned that in control engineering things are, quite literally, more complex.)

Putting this back into corporate setting, let us continue to identify “negative feedback” with “blame”. That would imply that if blame is avoided, then corrective action won’t be taken, making it impossible to maintain an even keel. Things might get really out of hand.

That doesn’t sound good.

But you’ve got to accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative. I have every confidence that, in the real world, going forward, if mistakes were made then lessons would be learned.