The Learning Loop | Customers, Etc.
Do you value learning as the most important reinforcing feedback loop at your company?
Many of us have had entry level jobs with stories that sounds like this:
You’re ready to go on day one. Having always been a high achiever, you really want to nail this “working” thing. You’re eager. You ask questions, quickly admit the few mistakes you make, and do your best to raise the bar for the task at hand.
After six months, and feeling proud of your work, you go to your boss and somewhat sheepishly ask for a raise.
“Hey, so I was thinking… I’ve been doing this job for a while…”
Your manager responds, “You’ve been doing an outstanding job. It’s amazing having you on the team.”
“…and I was wondering if might be able to get bump in my hourly pay?”
Sitting back in his chair, your manager says, “I see. Look, I would love to give you a raise—you’ve definitely earned it—but this job only pays twelve-fifty an hour. We sometimes have openings for associate manager roles that you would be eligible for in a few years. I hope you’ll stick around and consider applying when the time is right. I can see you really being a good fit.”
Smiling slightly, and also a tad disappointed, you mumble “I understand” as you get up to leave his office.
From a business perspective, this might make sense, but what would the system look like if they were consciously willing to invest in your learning?
Balancing or Reinforcing
In last week’s post, called Balancing or Reinforcing?, we looked at the difference between balancing and reinforcing feedback loops. One key difference between these loops in a business context is that with balancing loops, you want to minimize the cost needed to achieve a specific goal, whereas reinforcing feedback loops attract investment because they grow.
A naïve comparison of balancing and reinforcing feedback loops in a business context might look like this:
That’s overly simplistic, but the point of the illustration is to highlight that if you want to attract investment in a particular area of the business, you have to identify your reinforcing feedback loops. It doesn’t make sense to invest in a balancing loop. One way to do that is to find reinforcing loops that are adjacent to the balancing loop and are tied to core metrics of the business. Here’s one for customer success:
But when I ended the post last week, I said there’s a reinforcing feedback loop that’s arguably more important than any of the reinforcing feedback loops we’ve highlighted thus far (yes, even Sales).
Discovering the learning loop
Let’s go back to our basic support inbox, where we have Tickets in Inbox on one side and Inbox Productivity on the other.
As a brief refresher, as Tickets in Inbox increases, that causes Inbox Productivity to kick into gear, which in turn reduces the number of Tickets in Inbox. It balances out as you try to reach some version of inbox zero.
But we all know it’s not so simple. When you first start a new task, you might be kind of slow, but the more you do it, the higher your level of productivity until you reach an upper limit. The part in between is where learning happens.
We can model this out as a causal loop diagram:
The work done in the inbox makes you smarter. As you smarter, it makes you more productive, which increases the throughput of the number of tickets you can process.
This is also where some businesses stop. They have an employee who’s become really effective in the queue, but all they see is the balancing feedback loop and their knee jerk intuition is to not invest there.
And if you’re doing a lot of learning and feeling more productive, that’s where you might feel like you should ask for a raise:
This can feel frustrating when you’re the person leveling up and doing the learning, but in some (many) contexts it can make perfect sense.
Limits to applications of learning in well-understood roles
If the job at hand is well-understood and isn’t likely to change, there may only be narrow gains to be had by continuing to invest in improving the system. Imagine a store checkout:
Sure, if you’re designing an innovative new concept grocery store, you might expect the learning process to greatly inform the design of the checkout system. But in a normal grocery store where the process is mostly figured out, there’s a limit to how much you would invest because you already know what peak efficiency looks like.
Before we move on, I want to point out that just because the immediate applications of learning may be limited in certain contexts, performing the job well and personal learning is often its own reward. It’s okay to have a job, enjoy doing it well, and not be in pursuit of the next thing. It’s also okay to take your learnings and experience and look for new opportunities. Discerning that choice is a topic for another day.
Applications of learning in a developing system
Now let’s revisit our original diagram with Tickets in Inbox, Inbox Productivity, and Learning. Imagine this system exists in a business that is going to be growing, adapting, and maturing, such as at a venture capital-backed companies.
When we revisit our original diagram, where else can we apply Learning? If we add Self-service Documentation, that can reduce the number of Tickets in the Inbox (B3). Similarly, spending time connecting with the product team to improve Product Quality also reduces the number of Tickets in the Inbox (B4). Applying some of the Learning to creating Training Resources for Onboarding New Team Members creates a reinforcing feedback loop (R5), insofar as new team members need to be onboarded.
We’re still not quite done, however. We want to make sure we appropriately account for the costs of the team.
How much does it cost to provide support to customers? The primary function of the cost of support is almost always the size of the team needed to support customers. In this model, Tickets in Inbox directly impacts the Size of Team, which of course increases the Cost of Support. However, Size of Team also positively impacts the Inbox Productivity of the team—a larger team can answer more tickets—which reduces the number of Tickets in Inbox (B6).
In this system, not only are we investing in the productivity and collective learning of the team, we’re also investing in the systems that reduce the fundamental pressure that causes the team to need to grow.
This may seem somewhat obvious, but to further illustrate the importance of all of these loops, let’s remove the application of learning and only look at how the Tickets in Inbox affects the Size of Team and Cost of Support.
The narrowly-focused team
What does the system look like if we remove all the applications of learning we illustrated above?
When we remove the other applications of the Learning loop, the only thing that balances the number of Tickets in Inbox is Inbox Productivity (B2). Yes, while Learning among team members increases Inbox Productivity (R1), there’s an upper limit to how productive an individual team member can become, which means the only way to reduce the number of Tickets in Inbox after a certain point is by increasing the Size of Team (B6), which in turn increases the Cost of Support.
Put another way, if the only place you apply learning is to your own productivity, the cost of the team is going to grow linearly relative to the number of the tickets in the inbox. That’s why it’s so important to consciously apply learning to other areas of the system which affect costs.
Invest in reinforcing loops that affect balancing loops
We talked at the top of this post about how it doesn’t make sense to invest in a balancing loop—and that’s true—but it does make sense to invest in the reinforcing systems that keep those balancing loops balanced. This means you’re able to systemically lower costs even as the business scales.
For a growing company, the learning loop is one of the most (the most?) important loops to invest in. It’s never enough to just do the tasks at hand. You’re always building the systems in which the tasks are just a part. What’s more, those systems look different at different stages of growth. By consciously investing in learning, you set up your organization to scale and adapt more effectively to changing demands and internal challenges.