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	September 19, 2005

The Psychology of Information, or Why We Don't Share Stuff Lately I've come to the realization that the problem of under-use and misuse of information has little to do with technology or 'knowledge management' and a great deal to do with human nature and culture. I use the definitions of data, information and knowledge shown at right. Information means literally "to put form to" and knowledge comes from the same root as the word "cunning" which suggests application, not collection. So, for example, laboratory sample results are data, a theory of the cause of a disease stemming from that data is information, and a vaccine for the disease is knowledge. Another example: Test scores of grade three students are data, an analysis of the learning needs of those students is information, and the resultant learning curriculum is knowledge. For the most part science and art are in the 'sense-making' business and their product is models, information, representations of reality, yielding products that are interesting and sometime useful. Most modern organizations are in the 'application' business, using information to create technologies (in the broad sense of the term) designed to improve people's lives. Whether most technologies actually do make the lives of people better (other than their owners' management and shareholders) is of course open to debate. I spent much of my last year, as global Knowledge Innovation leader at a major professional services firm, looking at what I call 'information behaviours', and I concluded that what impedes the sharing of information in most organizations is our personal and shared culture, rather than inadequacies in technology, knowledge management, or learning programs. Here are the cultural factors that, I would hypothesize, cause most 'knowledge failures': Bad news rarely travels upwards in organizations: Everyone dreads telling the boss bad news, and the boss doesn't really want to hear it unless a plan is already in place to deal with it. It also doesn't travel down either -- executives are famous for soft-pedalling bad news, or for living in denial until it's too late to fix the problem. People share information generously peer-to-peer, but begrudgingly upwards, and sparingly downwards in organizational hierarchies: In hierarchical organizations, most people hate preparing reports for 'superiors', since at best they are paperwork that has no value to them personally, and at worst they are self-incriminating. And information in most organizations flows down only on a need-to-know basis, which is why the grapevine is generally a faster and more accurate source of information than the boss. People find it easier and more satisfying to reinvent the wheel: It's interesting to see how people hate filling in forms, but quite enjoy designing them. And it's easy to rationaliize why a standard organizational template or methodology just doesn't apply, freeing the employee to create something new from scratch. Most people have little outlet for their creative skills, and often jump at the chance to make up something new. People only accept and internalize information that fits with their mental models and frames: Ask people after a presentation what they learned and what they thought was the central message, and you'll find that most people will respond with something that reinforces what they already believed, which is often very different from, and sometimes even contradicts, what the speaker actually said. People cannot readily differentiate useful information from useless information: Most people are not very good at separating what's important from what's not. This is due to a combination of inability to process anywhere near the volume of data and information thrown at them, and an endemic poverty of imagination among adults in our culture. As a consequence, data and information stored 'just in case' tends to be underutilized, while data and information provided 'just in time' tends to be over-relied upon, since it is easier to see its value in the context of an urgent problem or deadline. The true cost of acquiring information and the cost of not knowing are both greatly underestimated in most organizations: The modern worker spends as much as 30% of their time acquiring and searching for information, at least half of it wasted. And as Katrina and 9/11 and the Iraq War and Walkerton and the Poultry Flu have shown, the cost of not knowing can be astronomical, and not knowing can lead to catastrophic and preventable results. People know more than they can tell, and tell more than they can write down: This is one of Dave Snowden's famous heuristics. We all have expertise and understanding of things we cannot express in words, and what we can express is much more effectively expressed orally and iteratively than by capturing it in some database. People can internalize information presented graphically more easily and fully than information presented as text, and understand information conveyed through stories better than information presented analytically: Ultimately our brain can only process information by analogy to one or more of our senses. This is why we trust face-to-face conversations more than telephone conversations (we are, largely subconsciously, processing a huge amount of data from people's facial expressions and body language). It is also why we like charts and photos much more than text and 'bullet points', which force us to create our own mental images before we can be informed by them. And of course, if you must use text, stories lay out the images and other sensory stimuli behind the information for you, much more effectively than other formats of information presentation. Most people want their friends, and even people they don't know, to succeed, and people they dislike to fail and this has a bearing on their information-sharing behaviour: The more politics are at play in the office, the more likely the flow of information is likely to be impinged. People are averse to sharing information orally, and even more averse to sharing it in written form, if they perceive any risk of it being misused or misinterpreted: Experts and executives can be the worst bottlenecks for information in organizations, because they fear that if someone misuses some information that they originated, they will be held accountable for the miscommunication. So it's safer not to share such information with anyone People are generally reluctant to admit they don't know, or don't understand, something: The higher in the hierarchy you are, the more this applies. So higher-ups tend to consult with other higher-ups, leading to groupthink, and to delegate searches for information to underlings somewhat cryptically. And often executives who are 'too busy' to use the technology tools they expect their subordinates to use are just too embarrassed to admit they don't know how to use them effectively. People don't take care of shared information resources: The poor condition of many centralized repositories -- obsolete, incomplete, and undecipherable content, and low use -- attests to the fact that the Tragedy of the Commons also applies to information. In some organizations, internal competition mitigates against open sharing of information: Many organizations have internal performance evaluation systems that pit employees against each other for limited promotions or bonuses 'marked on the curve'. In such organizations, information behaviour #2 above is mitigated by immediate peer-to-peer distrust, and, especially in such organizations, there is often more open sharing of information with people outside the organization than there is within. Some modest people underestimate the value of what they know: Many modern organizations effectively discourage unaggressive people from sharing what they know, by browbeating them, by not giving them the opportunity to communicate what they know, and even by stealing their ideas and information and claiming it as their own. We all learn differently: Some people internalize information better by hearing it, others prefer to learn by reading, and others (like me) learn best by writing things down. Whether it's a formal training program, a group meeting to convey or capture information, or a database full of indexed (but probably context-poor) information, the format is likely to be suboptimal for most of the people involved. Rewards for sharing knowledge don't work: They can produce short-term increases in contributions to databases, but the quality is often poor and the quantity falls off quickly. What have I missed? What other 'information behaviours' are at work making it easier, or harder, for people to share what they know with others? With all these psychological barriers to the sharing of information, sometimes it's surprising that the people, especially in large organizations, are able to communicate with each other at all. So what can we do? In a follow-up to this post I will explore some of the techniques that are, or might be, used by organizations to 'work around' these impediments to learning and sharing of knowledge. But we can't expect technology to do the heavy lifting here. In fact, over-engineered tools can actually make the problems worse. And behaviour can be extremely difficult to change -- people behave the way they do for a reason. More effective workarounds might include: personal productivity coaching (studying how each individual learns and uses information, and helping them work more effectively in the context of their personal work environment and style),  flattening the organization (to make it more transparent, with fewer levels for news and information to navigate),  providing staff with informal places to meet and exchange information with peers,  providing more information in graphic, dynamic model, mindmap, single-frame and story formats, and in weblogs and other context-rich 'containers',  studying complexity theory to understand why oversimplification can lead to disastrous decisions, tapping the 'wisdom of crowds' and the wisdom of wallflowers whose voice is rarely heard in organizations,  stamping out 'learned helplessness' in the workplace,  developing better filters for data and information, and better ways of organizing, indexing and archiving it so it can be found when needed later,  finding better ways of abstracting and canvassing for information,  eliminating reward and performance evaluation processes that encourage people to hoard or fight over credit for information and ideas, or interfere with collaboration,  keeping information tools simple and intuitive, and  developing mechanisms to record, index and archive conversations, which can be the organization's most valuable and context-rich sources of information and insight. What other techniques have you found that help overcome the many behavioural obstacles to the sharing of information? 8:07:22 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2005 Dave Pollard. Last update: 01/10/2005; 5:38:24 PM.