Matthias SpeicherIn short
Many organisations split feedback into two loops: the fast one at the front line, and the slow one that corrects structurally. That split takes apart something that is a single process. In truth it’s a spiral, not a circle. A circle turns at the same height. A spiral climbs. The difference decides whether an organisation gets better or just stays busy. What’s missing between the two loops is a layer that civilian vocabulary has no word for.
There’s a common model for handling customer feedback. It splits things into two loops. One solves fast and operationally, right at the front line, the individual customer’s specific problem. The other corrects more slowly and structurally, so the problem doesn’t recur. Two circles, an inner and an outer.
The split sounds clean. But it takes apart something that is really a single thing. A continuous process that should start higher with each turn than the last.
As far as I know the model doesn’t explicitly split the two loops into climbing and falling. What it mainly leaves open is one question: how do you build something from two loops that actually creates progress, rather than a figure eight that keeps spinning faster while getting nowhere? Two circles rotating on their own, unconnected, only accelerate the standstill.
Circle or spiral
A circle turns at constant height. Rotation without gain. You’re in motion, but you don’t get higher. A spiral climbs. The same motion, but with an upward direction. It can also descend, though, and that’s the uncomfortable part. Whether it climbs or falls, you only notice if you look at it as a spiral and measure its height. See only the rotation and you mistake the descent for business as usual.
The difference isn’t cosmetic. It decides whether an organisation gets better or just stays busy. Solve the same customer problems one by one every day and you’re turning a circle. The engine runs hot and moves nothing. Learn from the problems you solve and remove the cause, so the friction never arises, and you climb a turn higher.
The fast loop on its own is reactive circling. The same problem at the front line gets fixed individually, again and again. It’s a tissue in a dyke breach. You catch drops while the dyke keeps breaking. The only thing that scales is the other motion: eliminate the systemic fault so the friction disappears. Improve the dyke instead of catching every drop.
The Toyota Production System put this into a formula that holds here. A problem isn’t bad. What’s bad is its recurrence.
The layer that has no name
For the spiral to actually climb, you need something between the two loops. A coupling link. Without it, the fast and the slow loop each turn on their own, nothing connects them, and instead of one climbing motion you get two circles at their own separate heights.
This middle layer does two things at once. Downward, it translates strategy into a sequence of priorities, so the front line doesn’t solve just anything, but the right thing. Upward, it’s the return channel. It plays back which friction is becoming visible below, and it recognises whether the sum of the many individual fights still supports the strategic goal at all.
In military thinking this layer has a fixed place and a name. The single fight at the front line is the tactical level, won here and now. The return channel that corrects the system is the operational level. And above it sits strategy, what you turn up for in the first place. Three levels, clearly named, each with its own task.
In civilian, corporate vocabulary the middle one is missing. Strategy has an owner, the board. Operations has an owner, the line, the day-to-day. The translation layer in between has none, because the language doesn’t provide for it. And what has no name gets no role, no budget, no responsibility. It falls through.
That’s the real gap in many organisations. At the top lives declared clarity, the strategy on the slides. At the bottom lives the operational doing. Between them lies a fog bank where the translation ought to happen and mostly belongs to no one. Not because that translation is unnecessary, but because it’s unnamed.
Why the decisions are missing in the fog
What’s missing in that fog bank can be pinned down more precisely. I distinguish two kinds of clarity. Declared clarity describes intent, goals, ambitions, mission statements. It looks excellent on slides and on the wall. Operative clarity, by contrast, means setting priorities, accepting trade-offs, and deriving decisions from facts. It makes a system able to act. Between the two yawns the gap where both performance and cohesion begin to erode.
You can think of it as a triangle. Clarity gives orientation, performance delivers execution, harmony builds trust. These three aren’t leadership styles and aren’t opposites, they’re system properties, and they only work together. Harmony without performance leads to stagnation. Performance without harmony breeds fear. And clarity without decision stays theory. At the centre, where the three overlap, sit the decisions. They’re exactly what goes missing in the fog. Not because no one knows what they want, but because no one translates the declared clarity into decisions. Performance then emerges as the result of shared alignment, and harmony follows, not as a goal, but as a consequence of reduced uncertainty.
NPS is an altimeter, not a steering wheel
At this point a metric almost always turns up that gets sold as the answer to everything. The Net Promoter Score. It measures whether customers would recommend a product, and it tends to get treated as if you could steer with it.
You don’t have to discard it. You just have to place it correctly. NPS measures whether the spiral is climbing. It’s an altimeter. It tells you the height you’re at. It doesn’t tell you how to get higher. You steer not by the altimeter, but through the operational level, through understanding why the customer does what they do. NPS is one indicator among several, not a cockpit. Altimeter, not steering wheel.
This isn’t a takedown of the metric. It’s placing it cleanly. Mistake the altimeter for the steering wheel and you fly a circle at constant height, wondering why the number won’t climb.
Listen, learn, act, repeat
What the split model breaks into two circles, I’ve described for years as one continuous process. Listen, learn, act, repeat.
The breaking point isn’t the listening. Plenty of people can listen. It’s the acting, and above all the repeating. Gathering feedback and not acting isn’t just wasted effort. It’s deceiving the customer. The customer notices that they were asked and nothing happened, and that’s the moment you lose them. They took the time, and the answer was silence.
And it’s the repeating that separates the spiral from two circles. It names the continuous character. Not two separate loops, but one motion that starts higher with each turn.
From reacting to anticipating
The difference between a circle and a spiral is, in the end, the difference between reactive and proactive. Reactive means standing at the end of the chain and cleaning up when the customer gets in touch and it’s almost too late. Proactive means the system itself triggers before something happens, and reaches out to the customer before the customer has to come.
The catch is organisational. Proactive touchpoints cost effort, and in the day-to-day no one voluntarily reaches out to customers when nothing’s on fire. So they have to be part of the standard package, built in, not an extra you afford when time allows. Otherwise the system stays reactive, however often it calls itself proactive. What isn’t firmly anchored doesn’t happen in daily life.
Why this belongs together
The ownerless customer journey and the missing middle layer are the same gap, seen from two sides. Once from the process side, the friction at the handovers between the silos. Once from the organisational side, the unnamed, unfilled layer between strategy and operations.
In both cases the ownership of the whole is missing. And in both cases the same motion results: a circle that turns without climbing. An organisation doesn’t get better because it does a lot. It gets better because, from what it does, it starts a turn higher each time around.
Circle or spiral. Height or just rotation. That’s the question.