Permaculture principle 4: Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

Permaculture principle four is apply self-regulation and accept feedback — here’s how it can be used as a practical thinking tool to guide more ethical marketing and business decision-making.

This is Part 5 of a 13-part series: How to Use the 12 Permaculture Principles in Business and Marketing. If you’re new to the principles, start here. Or, you can view the full series here.

What ‘apply self-regulation and accept feedback’ means

While the permaculture principles were originally developed to guide the design of farms and gardens, they’re actually universally applicable. Let’s look at the traditional definition, then reimagine what ‘observe and interact’ means for ethical business and marketing.

Land-based definition

Pay attention to negative feedback loops and make changes that promote self-regulation, preventing harmful excesses or inappropriate behaviour.

Marketing definition

Learn from mistakes and accept feedback from others and yourself, then adjust your marketing strategy to stay sustainable, ethical and effective over time.

Proverb

The sins of the fathers are visited unto the children of the seventh generation — reminding us that negative feedback or unwanted impacts can often be slow to emerge.

Translating this principle to marketing

The third permaculture principle is a bit trickier to get your head around, as it requires a base-level understanding of feedback loops, a part of systems thinking.

Stick with me here, as this stuff can shine a light on why things grow, decline or stay the same in your business and marketing.

Feedback loops are essentially cause and effect in action. Two types exist:

• Reinforcing loops (positive feedback): These drive momentum or amplification, leading to exponential growth or runaway decline. For example, increasing sales leads to a higher marketing budget, which brings more sales. Or repeated bad client reviews lead to fewer clients, financial stress and worsening delivery, which creates more bad reviews.
• Balancing loops (negative feedback): These push back against change to create stability, keeping things within specific target limits. For example, you expand your services too quickly and quality suffers, so you narrow your focus back to what you do best.

Positive feedback loops, such as steadily growing income or increasing impact, can indicate we’re on the right track.

Negative feedback loops, such as customer complaints or falling sales, are often useful warning signs or handbrakes showing where improvements are needed — if we’re willing to listen.

It can be helpful to understand negative feedback loops as a self-regulating force, discouraging excessive growth or inappropriate behaviour before real damage occurs.

Such loops offer a beautiful way to practically apply the permaculture ethic of Fair Share, which sets limits to consumption so we don’t ‘overharvest the yield’ to the detriment of others.

‘Apply self-regulation and accept feedback’ encourages us to learn from mistakes and failures, listen to criticism, take personal responsibility for our actions (or inactions) and make considered changes when necessary, rather than ignoring problems or continuing with rigid plans.

Ideally, we tune into these feedback loops regularly and make small adjustments often, preventing little things from developing into bigger problems that require much more work to fix.

Feedback can also reveal hidden costs or longer-term impacts.

For example, storing large client files in cloud-based systems has a hidden environmental cost. The ‘feedback’ of rising storage fees can act as a signal to reduce the data kept online by archiving unused files to an offline hard drive, which reduces the environmental cost, too.

How to use ‘apply self-regulation and accept feedback’ in marketing

The most obvious feedback loops in business and marketing come directly from your clients, community and other people you work with.

Let’s look at examples for both reinforcing (positive) and balancing (negative) feedback loops.

Reinforcing feedback loops in marketing

Drives momentum or amplification, leading to exponential growth or runaway decline.

When reinforcing loops amplify positive growth:

• Glowing client testimonials and Google reviews that attract more aligned clients
• Referral programs that reward happy clients for spreading the word to others who quickly become happy clients
• SEO content that builds domain authority over time, attracting more traffic and links
• A newsletter that consistently delivers value, increasing shares of your work
• Social proof that compounds: the more you have, the more trusted you appear

When reinforcing loops accelerate a downward spiral:

• Discounting to attract clients, until underpricing becomes your reputation, bargain-seekers become your audience and you have to discount further to compete
• Burning out and creating little or low-quality content, which leads to falling engagement, visibility and income, which deepens the burnout
• Taking on a poor-fit client to fill a revenue gap, which erodes your confidence and leaves less time for marketing, resulting in fewer enquiries and another revenue gap to fill

Balancing feedback loops in marketing

Pushes back against change to create stability, keeping things within specific target limits.

• Too many client enquiries arriving at once, prompting you to raise prices or pause promotion until capacity catches up
• Falling enquiries or slow sales triggering a promotional push or outreach effort to bring numbers back to target
• Open rates and unsubscribes signalling when email frequency needs adjusting
• Sales objections and repeated questions revealing gaps in your messaging or offer
• Refund requests and cancellations pointing to misaligned client expectations
• Client feedback forms catching friction points before they become bigger problems

How to gather great client feedback

Great reviews are one of the easiest reinforcing feedback loops to kick-start and lean on in your business.

For full details on how to gather helpful, detailed and strategic customer reviews and feedback, see my How to Get Glowing Client Testimonials guide.

But don’t overhaul your entire business or offering based on one bad review.

When assessing feedback, remember to look for overall patterns, rather than reacting to outliers.

For example, if several clients mention that your onboarding process is confusing, tweaks are likely needed. But if one nightmare client leaves a scathing review? That’s probably more about them than you.

A word on dealing with difficult feedback

I know how hard it can be not to take negative feedback to heart — truly, I do.

As a sensitive and neurodivergent business owner, sometimes even mild criticism can knock me sideways for a few days. In those moments, I turn to Kristin Neff’s self-compassion practices.

Once I’m feeling more grounded, I return to the permaculture lens and ask: Is this a meaningful pattern, or just a one-off? And would the needed changes align with the way I want to be and work in the world?

Then, and only then, I decide whether a change is warranted.

What permaculture thinkers say about this principle

“Being open to feedback, and learning to hear it without feeling criticised is important to our development as humans. Honesty and clarity are essential qualities in giving and receiving feedback.” — Looby MacNamara, People and Permaculture

“Feedback… is how designers learn. It’s how they ascend the steps of mastery from good to great.” — Adam Brock, Change Here Now

“The system is unsustainable, but we each must recognise this as individuals and change our own lives first.  We must regulate our own actions to reduce consumption and waste, rather than waiting to be regulated by someone or something else.” — Liz Beavis

Other closely connected principles

The 12 permaculture principles work best as a set of interconnected design prompts.

Each offers a different lens, and the combination creates depth, balance and a tempering effect — the holistic approach at the heart of systems thinking.

For example, ‘apply self-regulation and accept feedback’ is closely related to:

• Principle 1, ‘observe and interact’, as we can’t really accept feedback without also observing the results and impacts of our actions.
• Principle 6, ‘produce no waste’, which can help us take self-regulating action when feedback reveals we are over-consuming or wasting resources.
• Principle 7, ‘design from patterns to details’, which encourages as to look for broad patterns in feedback, rather than making changes based on one outlier.

Ready for the next principle? Browse the full series here.

And a quick side note: this series is adapted from a lesson from inside my Permaculture Marketing course, in case you’d like to go deeper.