Innovation Advisory · Framework 10
5 questionsThe Feedback Loop
Five questions to stress-test whether the loop between your programme and the people it serves actually closes — or whether it collects feedback into a dashboard nobody reads.
Who counts as an accountable stakeholder in this programme — and who does not?
A feedback loop with beneficiaries only closes for the people your list of beneficiaries includes. Every other group — non-participants, refused participants, partners' staff, the community around the household — is outside the loop by design. Name the excluded groups. Their absence from the loop is a policy decision, whether or not you meant it to be.
What form of feedback fits the population, not the platform?
A WhatsApp bot works if respondents already use WhatsApp. A phone survey works if respondents have phones and time. A community meeting works if the community meets and trusts the space. A drop box in the ration shop works if the ration shop is visited. Choose the form based on where the respondents already are, not where your dashboard prefers them to be.
Who inside the organisation actually reads incoming feedback — and what is their authority to change something?
Feedback that lands in a Google Form nobody reviews is worse than no feedback: it produces a paper trail of consent without any of the responsibility. Name the person whose inbox is the destination. Name the decision they can make on their own. Name the decision they must escalate. If any of those three is unclear, the loop is theatre.
What has changed in the last cycle because of feedback received?
The right unit here is a concrete change: a delivery mechanism revised, a schedule shifted, a message rewritten, a partner replaced. If you cannot name one change from the last cycle, one of three things is true: the feedback was not useful, the feedback was not read, or the feedback was read and refused. All three are worth being honest about.
What feedback did you decline to act on, and why?
This is the hardest and most important question. Every programme refuses some feedback — sometimes for good reasons (safety, mandate, sequencing), sometimes for bad ones (cost, discomfort, inconvenience). A closed loop names its refusals and their reasons. An open loop pretends every voice was heard. The pretending is what erodes the loop over time.
How to use the loop
Question one is a boundary check. Question two is a channel check. Question three is a routing check. Questions four and five are the loop itself — the two moves that turn feedback into either a change or a documented refusal.
Most programmes fail on question five. The polite habit of pretending every voice was heard is the thing that erodes trust in the loop over time. Naming what you refused, and why, is the move that keeps the loop honest across cycles. It is also what makes the next round's feedback truthful, because respondents can see that their earlier feedback was actually processed rather than absorbed.