In purposeful activity, feedforward creates an expectation which the actor anticipates.
In the context of the Macy Conference, Richards remarked "Feedforward, as I see it, is the reciprocal, the necessary condition of what the cybernetics and automation people call 'feedback'.
This enabled the word to then be introduced to more specific fields such as control systems, management, neural networks, cognitive studies and behavioural science.
It often involves giving a pre-feedback to a person or an organization from which you are expecting a feedback.
Feedforward is the concept of learning from the future concerning the desired behavior which the subject is encouraged to adopt.