Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity

Information Overload or Uncertainty Overload?

Michael LoBue writes: The New York Times recently reported on the formation of a new special interest group, the Information Overload Research Group – see June 14, 2008 article by Matt Richtel.

What knowledge or information worker doesn’t want this group to succeed?  What “soccer mom (or dad)” doesn’t want them to succeed?  None – we all want relief from information overload!  Or do we?

When I reflect on my own working experiences, not trivial as I’ve worked in every sector of the economy in a wide variety of jobs and levels of responsibilities for more than 30 years, it’s not information overload that has the greatest impact on my ability to produce – especially my ability to produce the right results.  No, it’s uncertainty.

It’s also not any uncertainty, it’s uncertainty about what matters to me, which may be different than what matters to my colleagues, co-workers and clients.

Clearly the volume of information and the way it arrives (e.g., text, audio, print, video, etc.) have an impact, but I sense the real culprit is whether or not that information gives me a sense of uncertainty about what matters most to me.

Taking this one step further, as a manager, what information flows should I be concerned about that might increase the levels of uncertainty of those in my organization?

I suspect a good bit of research about uncertainty exists in the fields of economics, psychology, sports competition, management and decision sciences.  I seem to recall reading of a study some years ago about airplane delays and how passengers became anxious when sitting on a plane after pulling away from the gate, but clearly not proceeding to the runway to take off.  As I recall the research demonstrated that passengers will calmly wait a good deal of time if the pilot (person of perceived authority) provides the passengers with seemingly accurate information about the status of the flight.  Absent this useful information the passengers experienced high anxiety and agitation, clearly affecting their judgments and behavior.  Sound like a work environment today?

Perhaps it’s less about information “overload” and more about our information "diet"?

Dr. Guus Pijpers' issue paper entitled Using an Information Profile deserves another read...

Does Web 2.0 Drain Productivity

Daniel W. Rasmus writes: According to CIO Insight (read Edward Cone's the article, Is Web 2.0 Too Much of a Good Thing?,  here) the plethora of choices on the web is stealing productive time from workers. First of all, of course it is. It has nothing to do with Web 2.0 and everything to do with workers who will find a way to be distracted by anything new. Computers, e-mail, games. Remember those one button screen flashers that immediately put up a fake spreadsheet when the boss walked by (to cover up a game of on a DOS computer?).

Web 2.0 (and I reiterate how much I hate the term - given my history in aerospace I remember the web when it was .2 so we are way beyond 2.0 now) can be a means of driving productivity, but the real choice is now which tool, but how much exploration. Productivity, to some degree, relies on repetition, finding the right tool and using it ever more effectively, which then drives down the cost of the same act. Switching tools all of the time makes on less productive, but so does ignoring innovation - their might be a better tool that would save even less time. The trick, in this specific case, for productivity improvement is to find something that works and work it to its maximum, for the task which it was chosen for.

I would suggest that you spend 30 minute each week learning, and that means exploring the web as well. If you find a better tool, adopt until you either find a much better replacement or until it fails to meet your needs (because circumstances have changed).

If you want to stay productive, limit the amount of time you spend looking for bright shiny objects, and spend time creating bright shiny insights. Its OK to go shopping for something new, but only if you have the budget.

In productivity, everything has a budget - which is one of the challenges for the knowledge economy - if you can't measure the outcome of knowledge work, how can you determine the best budget for productivity vs. innovation?

The Economics of the Blind - How Deep Do Models Need to Go?

Daniel W. Rasmus writes: I'm cross posting here with my future of work blog because I think this is an important question for the IIIP's audience. I look forward to your opinions.

 

When it comes to economics, we act like the proverbial blind men and the elephant.  Eric Kristoff block about a new London Business School & Nokia/Siemens study on connectivity that points to being connected as a key to innovation and productivity (read his post here).

No single metric is sufficient, but at the risk of building highly complex simulations of interactions, from personal to global, how do we get a handle on what will provide us with insights into the levers of prosperity for the 21st century. Pure growth models ruin the environment and are ultimately unsustainable, and more sustainable models will take years to develop - in the meantime, we need to run this planet on more than intuition. Perhaps we should spend more to understand the cause and effect of our inventions than what we do now, rather than focus on innovation, which leads to more variables.

New is good is the new credo of the knowledge economy, but that credo runs the risk of creating a chaotic economy that will be known not for sustained growth, but for rapid cycles of prosperity and decline (very rapid) defined by our inability to grasp what is happening or where. Like physicists tracking a particle's position and velocity, we will be able to tell where something happened, but by the time we arrive it will be over.

So how deep should our models go? - And how deep our pockets. If change is the only constant, should we not be spending as much to understand change, as we do to bring it about?

The Limits of Productivity

Posted by Daniel W. Rasmus:  I just posted a blog entry on my Future of Work blog about the limits of productivity. I would be interested in this communities feedback. You can find the entry here:  Limits to Productivity?

Virtual Innovation

Dick Reilly writes: "First he locks himself in a room, preferably in a hotel in Puerto Rico, shuts off the phone, pulls down the blinds, has his meals delivered, and does not speak to a soul for a couple of weeks. In this meditative isolation, (he) engages in what he calls 'backtracking . . . I think about everything I done in the past five years, look in each nook and cranny, down to what I put on my toast in the morning.'"[1]

Clay Christensen coined the term, disruptive innovation[2] to refer to a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant status quo in the market. The quote above is from a disruptive innovator whose identity I will reveal later (no skipping!).

In our forthcoming book, “Uniting the Virtual Workforce[3]” Karen Sobel Lojeski and I discuss some of the issues surrounding innovation when people are working in geographically dispersed teams. The overarching question is, Can innovation be as successful when those doing the innovation are not collocated?

The answer depends on how innovation is defined. Our definition is the same as that used by IIIP – “imaginative activity that is fashioned to produce outcomes that are both original and have creative value”. We like this definition because it allows us to consider a very wide range of activities that span everything from the very front end of innovation to the launch of a new service or product.

The front end is where innovation starts.  If you ask people whether it’s best to generate new ideas collaboratively in a group or allow people to work alone and independently, they will invariably choose the group.  But it turns out that the very front end of innovation – generating ideas – is best done individually.  Quite a bit of research has shown that if you want a lot of original, new ideas, it’s better to have individuals work at it alone than in a group.  Two reasons have been cited by researchers for this contra-intuitive finding.  The first is fairly simple. In a group, only one person can speak at a time, so in given amount of time fewer ideas can be expressed.  The second is a bit less obvious and has to do with the apprehension that people might feel about expressing their ideas in a group.  This fear of being criticized dampens the expression of ideas by more timid souls.  But we believe that there is a third reason that has not been studied very much.  It was suggested to me by Jonathan Sharples at the Oxford Institute for the Future of the Mind. He introduced me to the work of John Gruzelier, a neuropsychologist at the University of London.  Gruzelier has been studying the effects of neural feedback designed to put people into a relaxed state characterized by “theta waves” in an EEG.  What he found was a remarkable improvement in creativity for musicians who underwent neural training that allowed them to put themselves into a relaxed state.

Companies, desperate for innovative ideas, spend billions on research on better ways to develop new products, so it’s surprising that nobody has looked at the role of brain activity in innovation (we could not find any published research), and very little research on how working virtually affects innovation. Both of these areas need to be studied, especially when it comes to the fuzzy front-end, the pipeline for innovation. Even better we might study how these two ideas can be combined. Teach people how to put themselves in a relaxed state and allow them to work in a virtual environment that reduces the apprehension of criticism and let the ideas flow. This might help answer the question posed at the beginning. It may be that the virtual workspace is ideal for the front end.

As promised, the quote that I began with is from Frank Lucas, a disruptive innovator portrayed by Denzel Washington in the film American Gangster. Lucas disrupted the market for heroin in the US[1] by completely changing the supply chain. He offered a superior product for a much lower price and was making about a million dollars a day before he was “disrupted” himself. Setting aside the ethical, moral and legal issues Lucas was a true innovator. I did some research on his life after I saw the film and thought that the similarity between his approach to getting ideas and the work of John Gruzelier was striking.

[1] Jacobson, Mark. The return of Superfly. New York Magazine, August 7, 2000.

[2] Christiansen, C.M. The Innovator’s Dilemma. New York: Harper Business Essentials, 2000.

[3] Sobel Lojeski, K., Reilly, R.R. Uniting the Virtual Workforce: Transforming Leadership and Innovation in the Global Enterprise. New York: Wiley, In Press