How to Overcome the Information Juggernaut

by David Brewster

Published on this site: August 31st, 2005 - See more articles from this month

Forget your million dollar babies. A boxing bout only lasts a hour or so. The real battles happen in the world of management where ideas and concepts are in constant combat for years. The current Big Idea is king. But in the shadows, old concepts conjure their comebacks. It's about to happen again.

Our underdog is 'gut-feel': allowing instinct or intuition to have a bearing on one's decision making. In the weight division of knowledge, 'gut-feel' has been on the back foot against 'information' for over twenty years.

Information has delivered blow after blow as it has become easier to store in great quantity and much easier to share. Information, we are led to believe, can provide the cure for all manner of cultural and corporate complaints. In fact it is now widely assumed that information can provide all knowledge.

Information in books - particularly how-to guides - offers itself as an elixir to everything from stagnant sales to unstable staff to soaring costs. "We write it, you read it: problem solved"

Information management tools like intranets, ERP systems, CRM databases and their kind are presented as the ultimate business solution. "Capture the data, do the analysis: your crystal ball awaits".

Information, in the form of documented regulations and procedures, promises to remove all risk. (And if it doesn't, the cure is yet more documentation).

Information has also delivered powerful punches in education. Witness the decline of apprentice-style on-the-job training and its replacement by classroom-based and even on-line education.

Against this onslaught, gut-feel could only stay on the ropes and try to run down the clock.

But then came the knockout blows. The collapse of large organisations like Enron and Worldcom in the U.S., and HIH and Ansett in Australia, were all characterized by a level of gut-feel decision making. True, there may have been more laziness and corruption than true intuition at play, but gut-feel was left down for the count.

Yet, despite this pummelling, it seems there's life in the old boy yet.

Canadian studies have found that most MIS systems still fail to deliver managers the information they really need. So most decisions (two-thirds, according to one study) are still made on gut-feel anyway.

And the release of a new book - 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell - is forcing us to look at gut-feel and instinct in a whole new light. A central argument of the book is that a lot of apparent gut-feel is actually based on real but rapid processing within our brains - not our guts.

Gut-feel, it seems, is not the simplistic street fighter we thought it was. And too much information can over-complicate. Seems to me its time for the referee in all of us to step in and balance things up.

David Brewster is a Simplicity expert, writer, speaker and advisor to business. He helps managers and business owners succeed by finding ways to simplify the way they work, the products they create and the way they communicate. His client's work more effectively and have more, happier customers. More articles, downloads and resources are available at his website: http://www.businesssimplification.com.au