The Planning Lady

In Chapter Five of Elizabeth Sawin’s book Multisolving, she asks readers to reflect on effective balancing feedback operating in either their life or work and what brings the system back into balance when destabilized. In my last post I discussed the idea of reinforcing feedback loops, a change in one direction creating more change in that same direction. A balancing feedback loop is the opposite, where a change in one direction creates a compensating change in the opposite direction.

The prompt reminded me of a podcast episode with Veronica Davis where she was talking about the substantial time and energy is takes when your work is the type that’s constantly advocating for change or improvement. She described that to maintain this level of effort, full and complete breaks are required. So when she goes on vacation she shuts out everything, letting her staff know that she will be unreachable for that week. This total disconnect is a type of balancing feedback to the system of day to day work. It is a way to bring back energy levels to match the need of working towards positive change.

Next readers are asked to identify crises resulting from balancing feedback loops that are too weak to close a gap. My professional work is in affordable housing and working with our homeless outreach system. Homelessness is a system all over the U.S. that has balancing feedback loops too weak to close a gap. The goal is to end homelessness with the measure being the number of people experiencing housing insecurity. We measure this annually with point in time counts in January. What is not working as it should is a combination of issues including a lack of affordable housing options, high construction costs, housing production not keeping pace with housing needs, and a general lack of supportive services for the complex issues that unhoused individuals face to obtaining housing.

Readers are then asked to identify areas of work/life where we feel stuck and identify the balancing feedback loops responsible. This was a more challenging question to answer as the term stuck implies a major challenge. The best example I could think of is active transportation infrastructure in Lincoln. It feels like anyone advocating for safe bike lanes is pushing against a wall and the balancing feedback loop responsible is funding. There’s a balancing loop that keeps funding at a stable level devoted primarily to vehicle infrastructure that is hard to push in the opposite direction.

The last few questions revolve around a series of balancing feedback loops asking readers to identify different benefits of each. This exercise was easier than the others because benefits are a more straightforward topic. For example the benefits from creating forest reserves to address declining hectares of global forest include increased biodiversity, more habitat leading to increased populations of plants and animals, a decrease in CO2 levels, and increase in species diversity.