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Aug 12, 2026
006 Feedback Is Infrastructure
006 Feedback Is Infrastructure
00:00
13:05
Transcript
0:00
This is Harvest the Signal, where the smallest signals can change the biggest systems. And now, here's your host, Jody Lynn Owen. What is the system trying to teach us?
0:12
That's the question behind every field note, and this week's is Feedback is Infrastructure. I'm Jody Lynn Owen, and this is Harvest the Signal. Let's start with a story as I love to do.
0:28
I'm gonna take you on this one back to pre-World War II Honolulu, Hawaii.
0:34
Nineteen thirty-eight, Beth Slingerland takes over as director of the lower school at Punahou School, one of the best-resourced schools on the islands.
0:44
Some of her students are clearly bright, engaged, capable in every subject, and yet they cannot read. She doesn't jump to any conclusions.
0:55
She looks for what the system is failing to sense about these students, and she starts working with two other educators, Anna Gillingham and Bessie Stillman.
1:06
Now, they had spent years building a one-on-one method for teaching dyslexic children to read. It's multisensory, slow, exact. See the letter. Say the letter. Trace it. Feel it in the hand and the mouth at once.
1:24
It worked. But it only reached one child at a time. Slingerland thought it could reach a room.
1:32
She adapted the method for whole class instruction, and in nineteen sixty, not very far from my own neighborhood in Renton, Washington, she taught her first class of teachers how to run it.
1:46
Not one tutor, but a trained cohort, a repeatable format, and a screening tool to catch the pattern early. She wasn't just noticing the signal anymore.
1:58
She was building the pathway that let other teachers notice it too long after she left the room. A friend of mine trained at Hamlin Robinson School, the Seattle school built to run the Slingerland approach.
2:11
She described it to me. How a student sees a letter, says it, traces it with a big arm movement, feels it in the muscle, the vision, the sound, the movement, the touch, each carrying a different piece of the same signal.
2:26
Watching her demonstrate it brought me straight to operating systems because learning isn't the accumulation of information. Learning is the integration of signals.
2:39
This is as true for an organization as it is for a seven-year-old learning to read.
2:45
Most organizations already collect enormous amounts of information: complaints, patient stories, denied claims, dashboards, surveys, on and on. Collecting is not the hard part. Turning what they collect into learning is.
3:02
So think about your own body. Pain is not a design flaw. Pain is information. A healthy nervous system does not eliminate painful signals.
3:13
It just carries them, integrates them, and turns them into coordinated action before a small injury becomes a catastrophe. Organizations like the body can feel pain too.
3:25
The complaint or the near miss, the resignation, frustrated patient, those are not just problems to eliminate. We don't want to cut them off. They're nerve endings.
3:36
They're places where the organization can sense reality, or they're places where the organization can sense what is happening in real time. But sensing is only the beginning.
3:48
A nerve ending that never reaches the brain cannot protect the body. A complaint that never reaches decision-makers who are interested and invested cannot improve an organization.
4:01
Information without integration, it's just noise. In midwifery, no single number tells you how labor is going, not the heart rate tracing alone, not the exam alone.
4:13
You have to read them together along with a dozen or more other data points or you miss what's actually happening. And those same principles show up everywhere information has to become a decision.
4:27
Modern aircraft fuse dozens of sensors. Autonomous vehicles combine cameras and radar and GPS and all kinds of things before they decide what is real.
4:38
The brain constantly integrates vision, hearing, touch, balance, and movement before it concludes, "Mm-hmm, this is what's happening." No single pathway is enough.
4:48
A patient complaint is one sensor, and a difficult meeting is one sensor, and a quarter's financial performance is a sensor too. Together, they reveal patterns that none could reveal alone.
5:01
This doesn't mean more sensors, less problems. A hospital with twenty dashboards and no way to read them together isn't better sensed than one with two.
5:10
The rule needs both halves: pathways that let signals in and infrastructure that brings them together. Sensing without integration, it's more noise with better formatting.
5:23
That's why meetings can really matter, not because they're about communication, but because they're really good sensing events. Every question asked, every hesitation, every disagreement is a chance to detect reality.
5:37
A meeting that suppresses those signals doesn't just feel unpleasant. It degrades the organization's ability to sense. And here I would point you to a book I love called Thrive by Mark Smutney.
5:50
It is a facilitator's guide to running meetings.
5:54
He gives you the outlines for creating meetings that stay solution-oriented and don't miss all of the signals that you want to hear when you're running a meeting or a company or when you're in leadership.
6:07
Speaking of meetings- I have heard a lot of chatter lately in founder circles about where feedback should happen. Always in private to protect dignity or always in public to protect shared learning.
6:21
And I appreciate the question, but I don't love it. Because first of all, I'm not really one for either ors. I think there's a time and place for both kinds of feedback.
6:33
And I also really want to know about what happens when you share your feedback.
6:45
Does it travel, connect, move along the waypoints, meet other signals, and then change your organization in some way? Does it just get stuck in the space between you and that person?
6:58
Culture really matters, but culture isn't only a set of beliefs. It also is a set of predictions people have learned from watching what the infrastructure around them actually does with those kinds of signals.
7:11
When information travels, integrates, and improves things, people learn that their reality and experience matter. When it disappears into silence, they learn something else.
7:24
Leadership then isn't only just making the decision.
7:28
It starts with detecting the signal, then integrating it, making sure it gets integrated, and using all of that information to improve the next decision or the decision that comes out of that space
7:44
and ultimately improve the organization. It's designing systems that pay attention to the whole length of the signal from the moment it emerges from the noise until the moment a decision is made.
7:56
Beth Slingerland could have spent her career noticing one child at a time. Instead, she built a training, a screening tool, a format other teachers could run without her in the room.
8:08
Almost 90 years later, a school built for exactly that purpose is still training teachers in it, and a friend of mine is still tracing letters into the air with a classroom full of students.
8:20
That's the difference between sensing and infrastructure. Sensing ends when you leave the room. Infrastructure outlives you. And that is what Harvest the Signal is all about.
8:32
Seeing the whole signal from the time it emerges from the noise and all along the waypoints until we understand where it was taking us and what we must do with that information.
8:45
The question we pose in this field notes is this. Where are your organization's nerve endings? And where do those signals disappear before they become learning? One more signal.
9:01
That's your cue that I'm about to drop something new for listeners. So years ago, many, many years ago, before I had a license, I worked as a birth doula.
9:12
And this was at a time when the profession looked nothing like it does today. The role of the doula could be summed up in saying that it was emotional and physical support for the birthing parent.
9:25
We did not interact at all with the larger health system. We weren't a part of it.
9:29
And our voice was absolutely not welcome as a contributing factor to the experience of labor and delivery in the hospital from the hospital's perspective. So I was there with a family and the mom was tanking.
9:46
I could see it. She was very pale and quiet and none of the brightness that she normally exhibited over the time that I had gotten to know her was there. I asked her, you know, are you feeling okay?
9:58
And she just sort of deflated. I asked her husband if she looked right to him and he said absolutely no. And he was very worried. So the nurse came in and I told the nurse, hey, she's not looking right.
10:10
And the nurse turned away from the mom and me and looks at the monitors and she says, no, everything's normal. Everything's fine. But my client kept getting quieter and quieter.
10:21
So I asked the nurse again and she dismissed me and then gave me a look that made it clear it was time for me to be quiet. My role there was not to talk and it certainly was not to talk to her.
10:34
So I didn't have the standing to argue with her. And I guess, frankly speaking, in that moment, I just made a choice. I might get kicked out of this hospital and lose an enormous portion of my livelihood.
10:47
But everything I could see and everything I felt said this was not normal. I did not have the clinical training at the time to understand what was happening, but I knew something was very, very wrong.
11:00
So I left the room and I went and found the charge nurse instead who had had a lot of experience working with me over the years. And we had a friendly relationship. She listened to me.
11:13
She came in the room, looked at the mom for about three seconds tops, turns around, goes over to the cables and the machines and she starts wiggling cords around one at a time.
11:25
Well, one of the lines had worked loose from its port and the second she pushed it back in, the alarm went off. The machines had never been wrong. They'd never been connected. The signal was real the whole time.
11:39
It just never made it into the system that was supposed to be reading it, be that the machine or the nurse or both. The alarm that finally goes off isn't what this is about.
11:51
It's about the cord that was loose the whole time and whether anyone in the room is willing to go looking for it before the numbers catch up.
12:01
If today's field note changed the way you think about how your organization senses what's really happening or any of those wiggly cords in the organization, please let me know. I do read every reply personally.
12:16
In fact, the next Harvest the Signal may begin with something you've stopped accepting but haven't yet put into words.
12:23
You can connect with me on LinkedIn or on threads at Harvest the Signal and let's keep this conversation moving.
12:29
Speaking of moving, I would love to be the voice in your ear while you are walking the dog or driving to work. We can explore patterns hiding in plain sight together. So please hit subscribe and we'll do it again.
12:41
I'm Jody Lynn Owen and until next time, keep looking for the signal. This has been Harvest the Signal with Jody Lynn Owen. The smallest signals can change the biggest systems.
12:54
Be sure to like, follow, and share so you never miss an episode or the opportunity to compare your field notes with your colleagues.
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