One of the main advantages of the Prodsmart system is having all the information about your factory’s production in real-time. Every time someone finishes an operation, or a set of operations, and reports it on the system, all the information gets updated. You immediately know how a production impacts the overall performance of the factory’s output.

Now, you might ask, why do I want to know the impact of every single operation in the overall picture?

For the same reason a top athlete wants to know how fast he was every time he runs.

For the same reason a marketing director wants to know the ROI of every action her brand does.

For the same reason a TV celebrity wants to know the ratings of her shows.

For the same reason a politician wants to know how he’s doing in the latest poll.

Because, as it says so in the title, short-term feedback leads to long term improvement.

If you operate in an environment where there is no short-term feedback, what you do today doesn’t really matter because you’ll only know how well you did tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or weeks from now.

And then the results of what you did comes in and you get kind of disappointed because it shows that you didn’t do very well. And even if you want to try again so you can do better you’ll only know weeks from now how you did this time. And the process goes on with very little improvement in a lot of time.

What if instead you knew how well you did as soon as you’re finished with the current task? You can try again immediately, compare with the previous attempt and see how well you did. And again. And again. And again. You’ll see immediate improvement.

(Some people might even argue that this is the reason why software nowadays gets better faster than anything else. Every time a software engineer sees that his solution doesn’t work – because a user complained about it or because he can actually see it not working – he can correct it, upload it and fix it. Build, test, learn. Learn, build, test. Over and over. Companies that can build, test and learn faster than the competition usually transcend it.)

And you’ll want to do better every time you do it, whatever it is that you do, because you’ll get a sense of improvement. Of growth. You might even enjoy it.

We’re wired to enjoy our time doing something if we can see that we’re getting better at it.