Feedback as Steering, Not Scorekeeping

Definition

Phase B of the ABCs treats feedback not as a final grade delivered at the end of a plan but as a continuous steering input, checked on a fixed cadence (monthly, quarterly, yearly) and drawn from several different areas at once — customer information, employee satisfaction, supplier feedback, operations, financials, and innovation — rather than a single easy-to-grab number like revenue.

In the Book

Tip #4, "Are We There Yet?", opens by warning that organizations are often "too patient" and "wait until the end of the journey before measuring their progress." The book's central image is driving: on a straight highway your hands make small, constant adjustments to the wheel; skip the constant small checks and "you've driven into someone's wheat field and crashed the car." It explicitly warns against measuring only what's easy ("Measure what's important, not what's easy") and lists customer, employee, supplier/partner, operational, financial, and innovation measures as the balanced set to track together — financial data is "important to the journey" but "shouldn't be the only thing we measure." The Einstein epigraph closes the tip: "Not everything that can be counted, counts. But everything that counts, must be counted."

Why It Matters

A single end-of-period score tells you that you failed only after it's too late to fix cheaply. A steering system — frequent, multi-dimensional, cheap-to-check measurement — turns failure into a small steering correction instead of a crash, and it prevents the common trap of optimizing one easy-to-measure number (usually financial) while the dimensions that actually predict long-term failure (customer and employee signals) go dark. The same logic transfers to any plan with a delay between action and outcome: the more the feedback interval shrinks and the more dimensions it spans, the smaller each individual correction needs to be.