Let’s talk about closed loop

After talking about grippers last week, let’s talk about grippers, and this week we’ll talk about closed loops.

What is a closed loop? A closed loop is to do one thing, with a beginning and an end. To use a popular saying, "Everything has an explanation, everything has its place, and everything has its echo."

Let's talk about closed loops. This "loop" is actually called the "Deming Loop", and one is called Deming. American management scientists proposed the "PDCA cycle", which is a closed loop in management, that is, planning, execution, inspection, and processing.

In fact, the idea of ??"Deming Circle" comes from the "closed-loop control system" of information theory. The closed-loop control system is a feedback system. The starting point is the information input terminal and the end point is the result output terminal. Through a certain loop, The output returns to the input.

The popular understanding is that if the business is compared to a round pot, the two handles of the pot are the business handles. When you reach out and hold the handles, your body and the pot are connected to form a ring, which is a closed loop. .

For example, O2O closed loop refers to guiding customer flow to offline consumption through online marketing and promotion. At the same time, offline users will also be guided to online for feedback, that is, from online to offline and back to online, forming a closed loop.

It is easy to understand closed loops, but it is difficult to understand that there are closed loops in everything you do. There are many reasons. It may be that some things are difficult to form a closed loop, such as listening to a group of big guys chatting aimlessly through audio. It is more likely that people in the organization have perfectionistic tendencies.

The usual approach of perfectionists is to delay taking action until they find the optimal solution. This will cause drag and hinder the formation of closed loops. Many projects in the organization have a beginning but no ending. Most of them are caused by perfectionism.

Many Internet tycoons have thought of many ways to combat perfectionism in their organizations.

Zuckerberg’s office at Facebook has this slogan: Done is more important than perfect. The purpose is to urge employees to act quickly and complete the closed loop first.

Bezos, the Amazon CEO who announced his retirement some time ago, was even more outrageous. He directly bet with D below him, "Look, I know we don't agree with each other, but are you willing to bet with me?" "The average employee is not unwilling, but afraid to take a gamble with the boss, and finally returns to the closed-loop thing.

So, is there a good way to form a closed loop?

Don’t worry, let’s switch the perspective and see how a group of ants close the loop.

Ants go out to look for food. At the beginning, each ant randomly chooses a route and leaves a pheromone mark. Other ants that find food also leave behind pheromones. As more and more marks were left, finally, a miracle occurred, a shortest path appeared, that is, the ant colony found the optimal solution.

How do ants do it?

Because the shorter the path, the more times there are round trips in the same time, and the more pheromone marks are left. Ants are smart, and other ants will go to the shortest path.

This is the famous "ant colony algorithm".

In the organization, our small closed loop is like a small ant. A single closed loop is simple, but when multiple closed loops accumulate, an algorithm is formed, and the optimal solution is generated in the algorithm.

So, when doing things, don’t pursue perfection, don’t think too much, don’t talk too much, do it before talking, do it in a closed loop first, and then talk about it. We can gradually approach the optimal solution in iteration after iteration.