The Feedback Loop That Doesn't Close
The approach is right, keep going.
Nobody tells you that the hardest part of doing the right thing is that it doesn’t confirm itself while you’re doing it.
In Moneyball, Billy Beane figured that out in a dugout full of people telling him his new approach was broken. I figured it out, staring at a deck that shipped without my name on it.
The Oakland A’s are losing, not by a little, but by enough that everyone around Billy Beane is telling him his approach is broken. The scouts are in the dugout, shaking their heads. The manager is running the old plays. The scoreboard keeps saying the same thing. This isn’t working.
But Billy has seen the numbers, he knows what they say, and they say the approach is right.
So he stays in it.
The 20-game winning streak doesn’t come because Billy found a new idea. It comes because he stayed in the invisible work through the period where everything visible contradicted it. The scoreboard was wrong about what was happening. But the numbers couldn’t prove that. They could only keep being right in ways nobody could see yet.
The silence was loud. It was in the newspapers. It was in the locker room. It was in every conversation with every person who thought they understood baseball better than a spreadsheet.
He stuck with his approach anyway.
Earlier this year, I was brought in to help a company find its story for a new product launch. The product was strong, the team was smart, and they had real differentiation to stand on. But nobody was naming it. Instead, the message sounded like literally every other company adding AI to their product. I took their story and built a new architecture beneath it that highlighted the competitive differentiation in a way that had been missing. I delivered a draft deck and narrative that went in a different direction than they were initially heading.
Then they took it from there.
What happened next is what’s supposed to happen. A senior leader found the verbal version of what my framework had mapped and made it stronger than I had. The deck that shipped followed the outline almost exactly and was better than my draft, more specific to their exact buyer. It was good work. The kind that holds.
And for weeks, I wasn’t sure I’d contributed anything.
Not because nobody said thank you. Because the work did what good work does. It disappeared. The framework didn’t survive as a framework. It became how the team was thinking. Nobody told me the new direction came from what I’d built. Nobody traced it back. The loop didn’t close.
I found myself doing something I recognized, but couldn’t immediately name. Reconstructing backward from the evidence. Some might call it spiraling, I’ll call it reconstructing. Reading the final deck against my original framework. Tracing the argument back to see if it held. Building a case, quietly, in my own head, that the work had mattered. Because nobody was going to hand me the verdict.
Billy Beane does the same thing in every losing game of that stretch. Reading the evidence against the approach. Reconstructing backward. Building the case, quietly, that the approach is right. Because the scoreboard wasn’t going to hand him the verdict either.
The difference is that Billy eventually got his. The 20-game winning streak came. The book came. The movie came. His loop closed in a way most people’s don’t.
Mine probably won’t. The executives moved in a new direction, and they experienced it as their own thinking. That’s what it looks like when it works. I’ll never get the clean confirmation that my framework was what pushed them there, because by the time it worked, it had already become part of how they were thinking.
The feedback loop that closes cleanly is actually the exception. Most of the work that matters most operates on a delay, or never confirms itself at all. The outcome exists. The origin is invisible. The link between them is real, but usually not provable.
There’s usually some evidence that points somewhere. The deck follows the argument. The argument holds in rooms I wasn’t in. None of it proves anything. All of it points.
At some point, you stop waiting for the loop to close. You start learning to work with pointing instead of proof.
IF YOU CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS EITHER
Read: The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel
The chapter on staying in something imperfect for a long time beats finding the perfect thing. Different domain, same argument.
A note: this is the second in a series on invisible work. The first essay was about the work that looks like nothing. The next one is about what it actually means when the work disappears and why that might be the point.
If you’re new to my work, I recommend starting here to understand what The Layer Beneath is building towards.
Interested in the behind-the-scenes origin story of why I’m building this?
Read Notes from the Build to understand where the idea came from.
Check out my site to read more about the framework, the narrative lens, and me.
A fascinating read 🙏🏽🤍
This felt very real—I’ve definitely caught myself trying to trace things back just to prove the work mattered. Learning to trust it without that confirmation is the hardest part!!