What do Amazon®, Google® and Facebook® have in common, other than being internet companies?
Feedback.
A fundamental component of social systems, feedback – both volume and quality – determines a system’s success. Feedback lets system administrators and fellow members know what an individual likes, doesn’t like, and why. To be effective, though, feedback must be timely, accurate and direct. And the less distance between the individual system member and the source of the particular benefit offered by the system, the more accurate the feedback, and the greater the opportunity to fine-tune the system’s operations to respond to each member’s perceived needs.
These three companies have figured this out, and taken the feedback principle to its most effective level seen by humanity today. They interact directly and personally with each individual member of their commerce systems, capturing and analyzing in great detail the member’s preferences as that individual uses the system to fulfill their needs, as well as offer their feedback to other members in their circles, and more generally, in reviews they post on the system. These companies – well known to anyone who has searched for skin products, just to see an endless array of similar advertisements pop up when they are on their internet browser – then tailor their offerings to more and more of what we already think we want, and what our circle of friends want as well.
But aside from figuring out ways to market more and more products and services to people, feedback has the potential to greatly streamline and improve delivery of all kinds of services and products to the people served by a particular social system. Healthcare, government spending, food distribution, and other systems that provide benefits to their respective populations, need a more direct, timely and accurate mechanism for gathering meaningful feedback. This would inform their administrators to effect changes to the respective system in furtherance of providing a continually more responsive benefit basket (a term defined in the Capillary Effect principle found elsewhere on this site) to satisfy their members’ needs.
Does government, though, have the courage and fortitude to listen to feedback? The current drug, gender, tax and product liability laws have been shown that government (both legislators and law enforcement) ignore feedback until it rises up in the form civil disobedience that forces government to hear from its membership. When it does observe member behavior as each individual seeks to satisfy their needs, the response is often to declare such need as wrong, and proceed to stamp it down.
This engenders disrespect for the laws and practices of society, and does nothing to solve the frequent problem of members seeking benefits (another Capillary Effect defined term) that often cause considerable damage to themselves and others around them (think: opiate crisis facing the US today).
Government needs to improve its listening skills, and respond accordingly, in order to achieve a stable, law-abiding and productive citizenry.