⏳Delays in feedback

Every feedback loop takes time to report back. While it is silent, the person acting sees no result and tends to act again, harder. When the results finally arrive they arrive stacked, and the system overshoots. A long delay in a balancing loop produces oscillation without anybody making a mistake.

The everyday picture is a shower with a slow boiler: cold, so you turn it up, still cold, up again, then scalded.

Example: training. Strength answers the work I did about six weeks ago, so week two of a new block always feels like nothing is happening, and that is exactly when I want to change the plan. The finger behaved the same way after March. Feeling fine was a report on last month.

Often confused with: slowness. A slow system that reports honestly is easy. The trouble is the gap between acting and finding out.

What I concluded from it: 💎 Delays make a sensible reaction look like the wrong one.

Taught to me by Meadows in 📕 Thinking in Systems; my notes on that part of the book are 📖 Meadows on why systems surprise us.