Your point about feedback is well made – coaching is specifically focused on providing ways of capturing timely feedback and using it to adapt or improve, the way we learn naturally. You do something, observe the result, change it and see what happens.

So much of our “feedback” in organisations is qualitative or instructional not observational facts and all too often too infrequent to be be acted on. Tapping into the sources of data we can track from our daily activity, perhaps mashed with rypple.com style micro-feedback is a fascinating way of thinking about your day to day work.

Thanks for making me think, and inspiring me to go see what my trackable activities can yield. Emails, tasks completed, minutes in meetings, days holiday, conferences spoken at vs attended the possibilities are endless

As a child I would think about how interesting it would be to see ALL the data about myself – a map of all the places I’d ever been and when; all the meals I’d ever eaten; or the people I’d ever met…

It seemed like an unimaginable amount of information, the stuff of daydreams and fantasy… the sort of data God might have available, I suppose? Whatever’s used to judge the worth of our lives, perhaps.

But now that there’s a realistic prospect of data of that magnitude being available, we need to start thinking about how to manage it, and use it to guide our choices.

For example, all of the advice about getting out of debt (a subject close to my heart!) tells me to start tracking spending NOW, and monitor and categorise ALL of my incomings and outgoings. Creating a feedback loop. Iterating.

Financial data, of course, is relatively easy, it’s just numbers… but imagine being able to do that with other, more intangible things!

What we eat.

Where we are.

Who we talk to.

All the text we’ve ever written.

God’s data…