Information Overload: The Silent Drain on Creativity and Efficiency

Maartje van Krieken: Hey, thanks for tuning in today. I'm glad to have you here. We are talking today about the very important subject of inflation, not the financial kind of inflation in the markets, but information inflation. I don't think any of you is going to contest me when I say that we are being inundated in ever increasing streams of volumes of information in different forms, whether we want to or not, and that this is a true challenge in a business environment. The staggering statistic that that really threw me is that 90% of the data that we have today, 90% has been generated in the last 24 months. Well, that sounds nuts, and even is that 90% is 85 or 80, and if those 24 months might be 36 months, that is still a totally staggering number. But if you start to think about it, it's maybe not entirely crazy, because as an example I was I'm thinking about pictures on my cell phone, the amount of pictures, first of all, I can have on my cell phone without it becoming a problem and me having to throw them, half of them out. And that changed drastically, one, two, the resolution of the pictures that I have today and the data that's attached to these pictures, right? So the ability to search for where they were taken and the date they were taken, etc, has changed definitely in the last 36 months or 24 months. And yeah, the files are much better. So if you talk about data volumes, it's not actually that weird to think that so much of the data we have has really only been created recently. Not all of that data is discrete, separate new facts, right? But you could also understand how AI is contributing to this so much allowing people to reprocess the same data into new stories and different stories and different populations. And so yeah, there is so much more content being put out there. There is more channels on which we communicate. There is better technology. And so if you add that all up, information inflation is absolutely staggering. And for sure, in the double digits, triple or quadruple, even really, if, if we're talking about 90% in 24 months. So information inflation a huge contributor to black build up, as I called it, in the corporate arteries in doing business. It's a nuisance factor. It's a pain factor. It it adds to the bandwidth we have to deal with things. And so it's a it's a contributor to finding yourself in a slow build up to the negative kind of chaos, right? Not the chaos in which we reap opportunities, but the chaos in which we're overloaded and against a contributor to finding yourself in a business emergency. Unfortunately, information inflation or information overload is also a factor that severely affects your ability to climb out a business emergency or recover, and I'll talk about that specifically to date, too. So should you want to address the issue? Two thirds of employees report that they feel threat, constant influx of information. Two thirds, that's huge. And I think if I think about it, I could easily see how half of my time I'm kind of feeling that it's too much coming at me. So that's not a crazy number, but it's really it's very high. Then the impact on leadership, leaders overloaded with data, so the ones who identify to be in that 66% leaders overloaded with data are 35% more likely to suffer from decision paralysis and are delaying organizational progress, according to Deloitte. So yeah, again, a big number then in terms of innovation and actually making progress in growth employees in information heavy environments, which I kind of would dare to say is every environment these days generate 30% your creative ideas due to cognitive overload. Yeah, so the information overload or information inflation, directly negatively impacts creativity, so access to more is not actually inspiring and all, it's paralyzing. And then, last but not least, employees spend a quarter of their time, on average, a quarter of their time, According to McKinsey, managing unnecessary and redundant information, yeah, quarter of their time hosting businesses, billions in lost productivity. And so safe to say. That if you can reduce that 25% to 20% or 15% right, even if you can't annihilate it all together, if you can reduce that percentage, that can have a huge bottom line impact on your visits. Major topic. That's why you should want to address the issue? Well, this is an emergency room, so let's talk about symptoms. Then, what are the symptoms? And yeah, I think we can all rattle them off pretty quickly, right? It's reduced decision making, quality, paralysis by analysis, decreased productivity, increased stress and burnout, loss of focus on priorities, losses to give strategic vision, breakdowns in communication, because more communication typically does you know, in volume doesn't typically lead to better alignment or better engagement. It leads to frustration and disengagement, fragmented attention because you cannot absorb it all decrease innovation, as we just quoted, increased error rates, impaired crisis response, over reliance on technology, etc, etc. So, yeah, it's one of these diseases that you could say, yeah. These are also symptoms of lots of other things. The conclusion is, as we, I think, already came to at the start of the episode. Yes, you're definitely suffering from an affection called information inflation or information overload. We all have it all the time, everywhere. It's going to be a chronic condition. And, yeah, it needs addressing. It needs attention, and it needs some of your dedicated time. The types of information that in this context I want to talk about is any and all the information relevant to business, so internal communication and collaboration, all the emails, calls, Team updates, project management tools, policies, procedures, but also all your operational performance, insights, all your alerts and newsletters and things like that, all your productivity, data and whatever it is that your operation generates or runs on. Then of course, everything around the market and the external environment, so industry, news, legislation, customer data, etc, so there's plenty of that, and then all the communication and engagement with stakeholders, so the more professional nature, and of course, also all the learning and technology updates that affect how you grade and your business. So there's a lot of it we also need to acknowledge, but I don't want to go into that in depth, that on top of that, all of us also consume staggering amounts of information outside the workplace, right and and that taps into the same capacity that people have. So we also need to acknowledge that the information inflation also happens in the personal sphere, in terms of social media platforms that people try to follow, the amount of information that people get presented with and try to follow now in in the pursuit of a hobby. So if somebody is following football football scores, or somebody is a runner, or somebody follows certain TV series or comical trends or gaming trends or or anything like that with any of these subjects, there is more information available. There is more you can follow more you maybe been told to you should follow so that taps into the same capacity. And so remember that in addressing this in the workplace, you cannot control what people fill their time with, but if you reduce what is, what you subject yourself and other people to during work hours or in or in the process of getting the work done that should help productivity, and maybe it's a tool that also take back into their personal lives.

So yeah, a tool. Let's go to the remedies. Then, what do we do about information inflation, and how do we manage it as a chronic condition? Because it's a chronic condition, I would say that you need some kind of periodic health check. Just know that you have it, know that it's potentially not lethal. It can be, however, very damaging, if you don't keep a certain level of control on it. And so the main overarching solution to this is that I believe you need, yeah, a periodic review. I call that the chaos cleanse. It's actually a master class I offer. So I think as an organization, you need to choose to, let's say, once a month, set aside time with your leadership team, as a leader, with your team, to look at the hygiene of how you operate. Look at the hygiene around managing information, information overload, managing, decision making, where is there redundancy in the way you operate? Give yourself the 8020 challenge. Look at priorities. What is it that you can stop doing? I will guarantee you that every time you have this meeting, you will have somewhere between the last meeting and this one, or the last review or cleanse session added more to your plate. So this is the time and the moment to take stuff off the plate, because you can do anything, but you can't do everything, and so information inflation should be subject of those sessions, and you should have the discipline to to there's different ways to go about it. You can go run by checklist every month, or you can choose. You can agree every month on two or three initiatives that you're actually going to work between then and the next meeting to reduce tackle information inflation and reduce its impacting your organization. So that brings me then to the next subject, which is, what are the things to look at? What are the things to think about and to challenge yourself on to try and keep the impact of information inflation as minimal as it can be, right? What is it then that you should consider looking at in those monthly reviews? What are the topics to go after? The first one I want to bring up is streamlining communication. Of course, most of us have learned that more communication is better, that you can almost never communicate enough. Unfortunately, most a lot of that messaging was generated before we all had the ability to respond to 1700 emails and three seconds flat. And so there is, these days, a lot of cross communication, a lot of communication on the same subjects, on different platforms. And so this is not the same message being reinforced, and hence creating additional clarity in alignment. This is something being communicated and then others already running away with that and taking it further, whilst the message maybe hasn't reached other groups. So examples are you start an email about a subject with five people on it, and then that subject and the discussion involves, and then people do or don't get added to that email trail, who then have missed previous iterations. Some people would have responded to the original email. Others are responding to subsequent emails, and some of them send emails at the same time. So then it becomes an incomplete information set. Then there is examples of where a group of people are maybe sharing lessons learned, right? So people who are running different operating units on different continents or in different parts of the country, and they have a chat room. There is also stuff being sent by corporate through email. Then there is stuff being disseminated through training sessions or information sessions or monthly calls, which are then recorded and disseminated. And so if, if I'm then running an office in city X, and we're trying to go for consistency, and I'm I know that there's been a recent change on the way we're instructed to do X, Y reset, then I have email to check, then I have a chat group to check, then I have recordings from meetings to check. That takes a lot of time, and the chances that I find easily the most up to date and latest guidance are actually, is actually very limited. So streamlining communication. Have a think about protocols. What gets communicated through which channels? How can you make information searchable, right? So it chats, typically, if there's on teams, for instance, if you have a teams chat, there is a search bar function. But if your chat, if there's one chat group, is very generic, that makes it very hard. So maybe it's simple to have a few sub chat groups about specific subjects, but then that depends on the discipline of individuals and both. Or maybe you use tools like Slack, which is a system that structures in your communication and makes things more searchable. You can be it's easier to do focus team up days to disseminate information where you're where you're want to be sure that everybody has the latest and greatest. So maybe communication templates saying, if it's need to know, it's always coming from here and we all. Is whenever ready to acknowledge it, for instance, so that we know that you've seen it. You know, this is the place where we keep the latest and greatest, whatever works for you. But you need some good hygiene around the communication. Then the data itself. You want to look at your data management and the efficiency and effectiveness of that. Can you use aggregate reporting tools? Are you still asking for different but similar reports in different places? Are your teams reporting up different lines at different times with different sets of information? Did you put reports in place that were there to temporarily manage an issue so you had a business disruption, or something wasn't functioning well, or you have a new project, and so you temporarily wanted to see some extra KPIs. Do you continue to run these right? Do you have redundancy because you you didn't strip that back down? Is information entering your business in different places, the same information and being hence processed in different places. So for instance, if it's competitor information or market trend information, can you go back to the old fashioned way when that data came in through magazines and newspapers and most larger companies had one person who would be the recipient of all that smart copy data and process that into management briefs that were then copied and sent out to the relevant leaders. Right? Can you can you go back to the equivalent of that where there is one person, pre processing the data and then sharing that with others and then saying, if you want to dive deeper, this is where it sits. Can you centralize where the data sit, have better access control? Can you use technology to actually see which people are using the same data or processing the same data? Maybe you find out that there is information or data doesn't get processed or used at all. Can you put some tracking on read a read function on the reports and stuff, right? What information or data gets generated and then not opened and never read? Right? That if you run reports like that, can you strip out some inefficiencies out of systems? So, yeah, where does your information sit? Google needs to have access to it, and how many different places does it get processed.

Then a different way to look at information inflation, and where you have room for improvement is that you should really prioritize it right. And I think the the cleanse, the chaos cleanse, every month, or even if you going to do it every week and just put shorter time to it, should also really look at prioritization. So, and I think there's two kinds. There is two kind of filters. There is your steady state operations. So what is it the minimum that you need to do to keep your business running? What is the minimum amount of information that you need, that you really need to keep your business running every day. And then what's the second tier? The nice to have information. And again, there in Is there information that is temporarily first tier because you have a new product, or you've had a lot of pickups or quality issues somewhere, and so you need some extra data to make sure that the improvements you made are working, but at what point do you no longer need all that extra so look for first or second tier information, and are some of the what are these numbers really telling you? Because we can generate so much information these days, but if we don't have benchmark data. So if we don't, if we can generate the information today, but we don't have it from last year, or we don't have a history, and we're going to start tracking it. There's potentially too much, right? So can you automate it and let the system tell you where it starts to see weird trends and only or by deviation? Do you really want to bring all of it into discussions or conversations every month. What of it you can review on an annual basis or an exception basis, so you might want to track but not use until something goes wrong, and what's the stuff that you really do need to look at, because it will make a big difference in how well you operate. So go by criticality. Consider something like the Eisenhower matrix, right, which is around what must have, nice to have, etc, and then the second filter is for the new stuff, when the growth. So I will bring that back to decision making. So apart from keeping your business running as is, what decisions are you trying to make and what is the information that's relevant to that? What information will help you flesh out your opportunities, get better insight and the risk associated with decision, or quantify the risk or the opportunities so that you can make better insulin decisions from. Remember more information is not better. You want information from the right sources that are as factual as can be. The loudest voice is not always right. And remember that with due to algorithms, typically you find more of what you look for already, which makes that voice kind of louder, but not necessarily more, right? So what's the information that will really help you put more meat to the bone around the decision, so that you can actually make a decision, right? And then delegation, and most important of all, in this day and age, technology, right? The same technology that generates all this information can also really help you reduce and structure the stream in the way it gets to you and the way you manage it in your organization. I'm a big fan of AI. I think it totally has a place. AI is really good at processing big data sets. So yeah, if you generate a lot of information, you can help use it to help prioritize. So for instance, if you are an organization that gets customer tickets or something, right then you can feed it into the system and let it tell you which ones are the biggest priorities. What are some of the common trends? It can look for keywords. It can, you know, so that you can set put a similar cluster of tickets with the same individual, so that he's working on the same subject, and probably can work faster or have it detect the urgency in what's on your plate. I think you should also really look at decision making roles. You can put alerts out in Google, so if you're a smaller business and you want to keep up with trends, then you can put some alerts in in your search engine that when there's new articles or news about certain subjects coming out, that you get an alert instead of you perusing ample sites. I think we should also really trust that information gets presented to us in so many ways that if it's relevant to you, you will hear it right? So that's the filter that's already built into you. So if you are working on innovation around blue tech, right around title systems, and capturing energy from title systems, or something like that, well, yes, you probably go to conferences and read some magazines and so you're staying up to speed on the macro trends. But, yeah, there's always this worry that there's other stuff happening, or that you're competitive of doing stuff that you that you don't hear or see. I think you should really have a certain level of trust that because you're it's so in your brain that any messages around that topic you will hear and tune up much less than anything else, and because information is presented in 700 ways to you, time because you are working on this subject, trust that the algorithms will throw it out in front of you, and you might miss the first time the subject gets brought up or the news comes out, but I'm pretty sure that Within the first 24 hours, you have a good chance that it gets presented to you in three different ways, or four or five different ways, or even more, and that you will pick that up without actively being out there with you. Yeah, so the information you do need to know is going to come to you, and there is very little information that really is going to make. This depends difference in 24 right? That that is business critical information, and I would like to vote that you're tracking that anyway, most other stuff, if you find out 24 hours too late, you're probably not too late. So use technology, process the data to but also to track where it's used, who's using it. Maybe put some some change filters on it to make sure that you know who's playing with with it and altering it and where else it maybe gets stored, so that you can capture misalignments, because people are working with different processed versions of the same data sets, etc. There are so many tools out there, and so just if you don't know how to what the solutions would be that are helpful to you, then think of it in terms of pain points. Have a conversation in these monthly checkups. Say, Okay, what is it that's going wrong or that's posting us? And if you can define what's hurting. I'm sure we can find you the specialist that has a tool or a system that can fix that, right? So you don't need to know the answers. If you can define what your need is, it can be addressed very easily, right? So just identify, if you can identify where there is a challenge, it becomes much easier to come up with a fitting solution. And then I think the the last topic that you could have a look at is the way that you conduct your meetings and your collaborations. I'm a great fan of creating something like decision sheets. For instance, we've talked about that plenty, or I've talked about that plenty. Let me that so having standard formats in which decisions are put. Forward in meetings. I think that also extends to a standard way in which proposals are put forward in a meeting, making sure that people get stuff to read beforehand. So you can reduce the amount of meetings and the meetings are about discussing by exception, right? Stuff written down compared to just articulate it sticks better people, then they can also process it in their own time or hand. And if people all have access to the same stories on time, then in the meeting, you can go by exception of what actually needs discussing, and you can cut away with some of the standard stuff that that happens and creates a lot of creep where there's this update sometimes, if in a very fast paced environment, it's, you know, there are always over. You have to kind of keep everybody abreast of what's going on. Yet, at the same time, if you have large teams, and you've gotten to the habit of everybody giving a five or 10 minute update. Typically, everybody takes the five or 10 minutes. And because department a, it just did, a did their 510 minutes and actually had a lot of good stuff through reports, then department B is kind of like, well, I don't want to, so they're, they're going to find something to mention, right? And they're going to fill the time with. And so there is a lot of talk in meetings like that. And you Yeah, you cannot really control what people take away, right? People will filter by what they found interesting or which point they were not tuned in or they were not tuned out.

And so instead of taking what's critical and what everybody needed to hear, people will all take the variation that people take away from those sessions is is huge. So again, certain level of protocols standardization in what gets shared, and potentially have a conversation about good personal book practices, right? Do you? Do you want to encourage people in your organization to take time where they're away from technology or where they have dedicated work time blocks is there? Is there times that are reserved from meeting and collaborating, and other times where people actually get time to get on with the work or can schedule their own activities, which then has to be respected by others. Is there some etiquette around how quickly people are supposed to respond to things and how information is shared within team and how information is managed, and do you have enough dedicated resources to support that, or are you making everybody try and be disciplined in the way that information is stored and set in the systems, right? Because that typically adds to a nuisance factor. Not everybody loves that cannot work the same way as others do, and that directly is visible in the quality of how information is managed and stored and the hygiene that people and discipline people maintain around observing some of those roles around it, right? If it's really hard to store stuff in shared systems, people are going to end up having their own log done on version on their desktop. We all do that, right? So you have too many barriers gonna not be as good, right? So can you put some dedicated people in place. Can you maybe outsource it? Can you, can you put some, take some of the pain around the subject of weight? So I think that's enough to create a bit of a checklist of subjects to work through and to think about. Again, I think information inflation is an affliction we all have. It's chronic. We just need to learn to live with it. But learning to live with it is not not doing anything about it. I would say that having some dedicated time periodically, I would say every month, and the amount of time is more dependent on the size of your organization, but having a discipline every month to do a bit of a chaos cleanse and have a look at what you can do to keep the information installation at bay, to keep the nuisance factor under control, and to make sure that in your organization, it's less than 66% of the people who report feeling stressed, by the post influx of information, and that it's also less than 25% of people's work week that they are managing unnecessary and redundant information, because these numbers are staggering, and it's hurting your business. So if you could use some help for entrepreneurs, of course, I have office hours that you can come into and check into, and we can have a discussion about how this, what this could look like in your organization. Also happy to tackle this subject in individual coaching, business coaching, if that's what you want to do, but if you want to work this subject with your organization, in your team, then I. Have a chaos cleanse masterclass, highly interactive, where I talk about the things that need a review and attention on a monthly basis to avoid that chaos plaque buildup. So yeah, reach out if you could use some help. And we're in this together, right? We all, we all suffer from the same affliction. So thanks for tuning in today, and I look forward to seeing you back here on the next episode. Thank you.