People often use the phrase, "positive feedback," to mean the mere act of praising good (or even mediocre) work. In technical settings, the phrase has a more precise and rather different meaning: positive feedback makes small changes self-reinforcing, with an everyday example being the howls and screeches that come from a public-address system when the microphone gets too close to the speaker.

The power of positive feedback came to mind earlier this morning, when I joined a standing-room-only crowd at Northrop Grumman's Space Park complex in Redondo Beach for the 4:30am'ish end of the LCROSS mission: a pair of lunar impacts, the first of a spent upper-stage rocket and the second of an instrumented probe designed to sniff the debris plume for water.

As we neared the moment of impact, several people involved in the mission were sharing their lessons learned from this fast-track project that achieved under-budget, ahead-of-schedule results—despite aggressive targets that some thought unlikely to be met. "People said we couldn't do something this small, this fast," was the recollection of one of the engineers. "When we announced that the spacecraft was ready for delivery early, it ricocheted all the way up to NASA headquarters."

I found myself thinking of positive feedback. When you know you're trying to do something in two years, rather than ten years, you feel more motivated to work for an extra twenty minutes to get something done today—instead of planning to do it before lunch tomorrow. The extra effort feels as if it's worthwhile.

I wonder if this may be one of the reasons that cloud computing projects get done more quickly than anyone expects, or even believes to be possible. An extra twenty minutes, before morning coffee or during a working lunch or squeezed in before you go home, can make a contribution that's really tangible when you're working in a high-leverage framework like Force.com. Every action yields perceptible progress.

This is pretty much the polar opposite of the joke (at least, I think it's meant as a joke) that asks "What's a man-year of effort at [insert big slow organization name here]? That's 700 people saying they can get it done before lunchtime." Massive, legacy-burdened projects always seem to take longer than anyone thought, and throwing more people at them just makes them take even longer.

People ask me how Force.com achieves fivefold acceleration of development, compared to platforms like Java or .Net: I tell them it's not just the programming model. It's the whole environment in which reusing data, and multiplying the value of existing processes by linking them easily with additional resources, gives every increment of effort more impact than it's ever had before. Positive feedback indeed.