Compensating Feedback

2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the horse Boxer always had the same answer to any difficulty: “I will work harder,” he said. At first, his well-intentioned diligence inspired everyone, but gradually, his hard work began to backfire in subtle ways. The harder he worked, the more work there was to do. What he didn’t know was that the pigs who managed the farm were actually manipulating them all for their own profit. Boxer’s diligence actually helped to keep the other animals from seeing what the pigs were doing. Systems thinking has a name for this phenomenon: “compensating feedback”: when well-intentioned interventions call forth responses from the system that offset the benefits of the intervention. We all know what it feels like to be facing compensating feedback—the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back; the more effort you expend trying to improve matters, the more effort seems to be required.

Examples of compensating feedback are legion. Many of the best-intentioned government interventions fall prey to compensating feedback. In the 1960s there were massive programs to build low-income housing and improve job skills in decrepit inner cities in the United States. Many of these cities were even worse off in the 1970s despite the largesse of government aid. Senge proposes a feedback mechanism: low-income people migrated from other cities and rural areas to cities with better aid programmes. Eventually, the new housing units became overcrowded and the job training programs were swamped with applicants. All the while, the city’s tax base continued to erode, leaving more people trapped in economically depressed areas.

Senge also proposes that food assistance can be “compensated for” when lower mortality increases demand faster than food production grows. This is a proposed feedback mechanism, not evidence that food assistance necessarily causes more malnutrition; other conditions determine whether that outcome occurs.

Similarly, periodic efforts to correct the U.S. trade imbalance by letting the value of the dollar fall are often compensated for by foreign competitors who let prices of their goods fall in parallel (for countries whose currency is “pegged to the dollar,” prices adjust automatically). Efforts by foreign powers to suppress indigenous guerrilla fighters often lead to further legitimacy for the guerrillas’ cause, thereby strengthening their resolve and support, and leading to still more resistance.

Many companies experience compensating feedback when one of their products suddenly starts to lose its attractiveness in the market. They push for more aggressive marketing; that’s what always worked in the past, isn’t it? They spend more on advertising, and drop the price; these methods may bring customers back temporarily, but they also draw money away from the company, so it cuts corners to compensate. The quality of its service (say, its delivery speed or care in inspection) starts to decline. In the long run, the more fervently the company markets, the more customers it loses.

Nor is compensating feedback limited to large systems—there are plenty of personal examples. Take the person who quits smoking only to find himself gaining weight and suffering such a loss in self-image that he takes up smoking again to relieve the stress. Or the protective mother who wants so much for her young son to get along with his schoolmates that she repeatedly steps in to resolve problems and ends up with a child who never learns to settle differences by himself. Or the enthusiastic newcomer so eager to be liked that she never responds to subtle criticisms of her work and ends up embittered and labeled “a difficult person to work with.”

Pushing harder, whether through an increasingly aggressive intervention or through increasingly stressful withholding of natural instincts, is exhausting. Yet, as individuals and organizations, we not only get drawn into compensating feedback, we often glorify the suffering that ensues. When our initial efforts fail to produce lasting improvements, we push harder—faithful, as was Boxer, to the creed that hard work will overcome all obstacles, all the while blinding ourselves to how we are contributing to the obstacles ourselves.