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.
Table of contents
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 unwanted impacts of today’s actions can be slow to emerge and may only be realised much further down the track.
Translating this principle to marketing
The fourth permaculture principle is a bit trickier to get your head around, as it requires a basic understanding of feedback loops, a core systems thinking concept.
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.
That means you can make better decisions about what actions to take — to reverse unwanted downturns, to get your business out of stasis (or keep it there, if that’s what you want) and to create the kind of healthy growth that begets more healthy growth.
Feedback loops are essentially cause and effect in action. Two types exist:
- Reinforcing feedback loops that accelerate whatever is already happening, whether that’s exponential growth or runaway decline. For example, a popular video on social media goes viral, gaining even more popularity. Or, falling income causes you to discount prices, eroding your pricing reputation and leading to even less income.
- Balancing feedback loops that push back against change to restore stability, keeping things within a certain range. When something moves too far in one direction, the balancing loop nudges it back. For example, you take on too many clients and start to feel burnt out, so you reduce numbers back to a more sustainable level.
Reinforcing loops are often called positive feedback loops, while balancing loops are often called negative feedback loops.
But that doesn’t really have anything to do with how good or bad they are; both types can be useful or harmful depending on the context. A reinforcing (positive) loop driving increasing income and impact is a wonderful thing. A balancing (negative) loop of customer complaints is equally valuable as a warning sign indicating your usual quality may have dropped.
Balancing loops, though, are naturally self-regulating, helping discourage excessive growth or inappropriate behaviour before real damage occurs — so they’re especially important to notice and listen to.
Overall, ‘apply self-regulation and accept feedback’ encourages us to tune into these loops regularly and understand their impact on our business and clients.
We can then take personal responsibility for our actions (or inactions), learn from mistakes and failures, listen to criticism and make small adjustments often, preventing little things from developing into bigger problems that require much more work to fix.
How to use ‘apply self-regulation and accept feedback’ in marketing
Let’s look at some examples of what reinforcing (positive) and balancing (negative) feedback loops can look like in a business and marketing context.
Reinforcing feedback loops in marketing
Drives momentum or amplification, leading to exponential growth or runaway decline.
When reinforcing loops amplify good 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 restore 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
Great client feedback: an easy reinforcing loop to foster
Great reviews are one of the easiest reinforcing feedback loops to kick-start and lean on in your business, but asking for them is a bit of an art form. You might enjoy my How to Get Glowing Client Testimonials guide, packed with tips for gathering helpful, detailed and strategic customer reviews and feedback
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, do 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, Eight Acres
“Permaculture promotes a necessary shift in perspective. Our desire to climb the capitalist ladder, our glorification of grind culture and our obsession with hoarding wealth are all ways of being in the world that need to be left behind to make space for a more hopeful future.” — Maya Blackwell, Permaculture
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? Explore principle 5, ‘use and value renewable resources and services‘ or 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.
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About the Author: Koren Helbig
About the Author: Koren Helbig
