Delays in Feedback Loops Cause Oscillation and Overshoot
When feedback takes time to arrive, systems overcorrect. The longer the delay between action and observed result, the wilder the oscillation and the harder the system is to control.
"Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve." Donella Meadows
This principle is brutally simple in theory and devastatingly common in practice. A shower with a slow-responding water heater oscillates between scalding and freezing because you keep adjusting the knob before the previous adjustment has taken effect. The same dynamic plays out in software systems, supply chains, and organizations.
In control theory, Philipp Janert explains that any form of "memory" in a system buffers, caches, queues, averages slows down signal propagation and introduces lag. The feedback principle works best when deviations are detected early, before they have had a chance to grow. If you only detect a problem after items have propagated through an entire queue, then by the time you learn what is happening, it is already too late. The backlog requires additional resources to clear, but those resources must be decommissioned before the queue drains completely, or you overshoot in the other direction. This is why queueing systems are "inherently unstable" they are feedback loops with built-in delays.
The same pattern appears in organizational decision-making. Meadows noted that the stitch-in-time principle early detection enables small corrections is precisely what most organizations fail at, because their metrics lag reality. Monitoring completed requests tells you about the past; monitoring incoming requests tells you about the present. Noisy but fast signals often outperform smooth but slow ones, because the delay introduced by smoothing outweighs the benefit of a cleaner signal.
Takeaway: The single most important thing you can do to stabilize a system is to shorten its feedback delays measure earlier, act smaller, and correct more frequently.
See also: Leading Indicators Beat Lagging Ones | Queues Do Not Smooth Load They Defer Pain | Monitor What Matters Not What Is Easy