What is kaizen feedback loops?

Kaizen feedback loops is a concept in personal epistemology: The ability to build and tune feedback loops is the ability to continuously improve.

Example: A software team ships a feature and waits three months for a quarterly business review to learn whether it worked. By the time data arrives, the engineers have moved on, the context has evaporated, and the feedback is too stale to inform the next decision. A different team instruments the same feature with real-time usage metrics, runs a weekly retrospective against those metrics, and adjusts their approach every seven days. After three months, the first team has completed one feedback cycle. The second team has completed twelve. The difference in outcomes is not proportional — it is exponential, because each cycle's learning compounds into the next. The second team did not work harder. They built a tighter feedback loop.

This concept is part of Phase 24 (Feedback Loops) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for feedback loops.