Introduction: We can all think of situations where we are bombarded, or even overwhelmed, by demands from the environment. Air force pilots struggle with task saturation, a condition where there are just too many things to deal with all at once, with a concomitant loss of effectiveness.
How does your company cope with keeping its “eye on the ball” while simultaneously juggling everything on its agenda? How do you parse through the welter of data coming from all directions and focus on what’s relevant, on what’s right? How do you handle half a dozen “number one” priorities?
Too much information clogs the system and slows response time. It buries important issues in the debris of background static. Successful companies have their filters working to reduce the noise.
Fundamentally important to establishing a well-calibrated filter is a clear understanding of the business idea and its implications. The more people you have who share the common perspective, the fewer there will be introducing irrelevant noise into the system.
What can you do about it?
Set up a realistic system for what to gather and what to save. Identify what information is necessary to the business and what is superfluous. Establish priorities. Be smart. Be realistic.
Diagnosing The Causes Of Too Much Information
Information Overload indicates such underlying problems as:
- People don’t know what’s important versus what isn’t – the company hasn’t rationalized its information flow, everyone passes on too much information
- People are operating like individual thinkers rather than working to make the company’s thinking better
- People aren’t clear about their own informational needs
- People aren’t empowered to act to shut off redundant or non-essential information
- Other issues that you can identify
Remedying the Problem – Action Steps
- Clarify information needs at each handoff point along the company’s value chain – within each function and as it’s needed across boundaries. This can be done in a company wide meeting where each group talks about its work and their information needs (and overloads) as they see it, out loud and in front of everyone else. Listen for redundancies, surprises and misconceptions.
Once they are identified resolve them. The end result should be that:
- People understand the roles that others play
- People understand how their part fits into the whole
- People understand the information each function needs to play its part efficiently.
- Leaders work to align the handoffs between people and across functions
- The management gains a comprehensive understanding about how the workers understand (or don’t understand) their role in the business idea
- Create areas of shared knowledge rather than having everyone feel responsible for knowing everything. We can learn from physicians here. They have to stay on top of information about disease, research, drugs, etc. Often they form journal clubs, where each person reads some things and not others.
Then once a month they have lunch together and share what they’ve read and its implications with the others. They break the reading load down to a manageable load. Of course, anyone can read anything on their own, but they don’t have to feel the pressure to read everything.
This can work in your company if you have specific people cover marketplace developments, issues related to the assumptions underpinning the business idea, strategy and leadership issues, as well as functionally specific issues that are then discussed from a company wide perspective. Divide and conquer.
- Develop an information capture plan. Create a high-performance team to reassess your company’s reports and information sharing efforts (they may not rise to the level of a plan!).
What reports aren’t read by anyone? Are there some parts of reports that are valuable while other parts are frequently ignored? Does everyone need to be on every distribution list that they are on? Do people need to be on lists that they are not on now? Are there old reports that have outlived their usefulness?
Are there other ways to package the data that would be more valuable? Add your own questions based on your peoples’ observations about information and its usefulness in their company.