“If you let anyone create any information there will be so much information that there is no way we can keep track of it all.”  We hear this all the time.
Answer: Intuitively it sounds right but is flawed because information overload is already a fundamental feature of nature.

Experiment: Stop what you are doing.  What do you hear?  What do you see?  What is your body feeling?  Notice what is happening around you.  Is there any movement?  What about extemporaneous background sounds? Did you hear and see those things only a few moments ago?  Sure you did, but did you notice them? Certainly not all of them, if any of them at all.

Why? Focus and filters.  When we read a book we usually focus on the book.  This creates a natural filter where only the words from the pages come through.  They are so alive that they give us meaning and they tie up our brains, dropping all other senses.

In a similar manner, we too must focus and filter.  In 2008, Clay Shirky gave a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City entitled, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.“  In it he says, “We are to information overload as fish are to water. It’s just what we swim in. Itz Acrobean, a man who would know once said, ‘If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem.  Maybe it’s a fact…’ What’s changing now is the filters we have used (over the last 500 years) are breaking.”  He goes on to say that the solution won’t come from tweaking the old filters, but in creating new ones.

The goal has never been to “keep track of it all.”  Ever since you were born, filters have kicked in and you had to focus to make sense of the world.  We purposefully, then and now, have let information pass us by and rarely are we the worse for it.  Nothing has changed.  To make sense of the barrage of information which we allow to confront us every day, we must have personal filters and a deliberate focus.  We become overwhelmed when either the filters fail or become lax or if we lose our focus.

Yet with the way in which we need to filter has changed.  The six o’clock news filtered stories and gave us what they wanted us to hear.  The newspapers had the same model.  So did your mother.  Now, there is not a lot of information that is not freely available to us.  Instead of the filter on the front end – before the information gets to us – we must learn how to expand our innate subconscious filter to include a deliberate prefilter.  Because this is a conscience effort, and we are humans, the filter can be fickle.  That is where our focus, our self-discipline, must come into play.  We must focus on constantly reevaluating and retuning our filters and taking in their product.  And there is a fine line between reevaluation and absorbing the filtered information.

If we spend too much time reevaluating the filters, the beneficial information will pass us by.  Yet too much time spent on only consuming the products of our filters will trap us in a narrow world which is constantly changing.

This balance is an art.  In trying to gain the right balance we will fall off to one side or another.  Suddenly the pain of too much jolts us back.  For example, too much evaluating what to filter and what not to filter eventually leads us to frustration as information overload.  And the opposite is true. Relying too much on our set filters, we might see a link to a new source of information that should be added to our filter, throwing us into a reevaluation mode.  Thy cycle is never ending.

So instead of throwing our hands in the air and saying we suffer from information overload, we must learn to dynamically adjust our filters and focus.  This takes self-discipline and experience.

We must learn to expand our innate and natural filters and focus to accommodate this onslaught of information.  How do we help others do this? We let them fail and we help them focus.  With the sense of purpose that comes with focus, filters will be more natural.  We should help lead them to this.

Allow them to decide what is important to them.  This was a fundamental flaw of corporate knowledge management.  KM tried to filter and focus for us, thus creating an unnatural delivery and flow of information, as well as the interaction with the information.  If we take the stance that we are all in charge of our personal knowledge management (PKM), the corporate KM becomes an aggregate of our PKMs instead of an imposed structure. The last #KMers tweetchat on PKMs was fascinating.  Check it out.

The matter of information overload comes back to supply and trust.  Give others the tools and knowledge to succeed and they will surprise you.

The response from my AH-HA! moment in the last post was amazing. I hope others benefited from it.

In the comments, ‘Wilson’ had some insights:

“…I don’t think this will help convince (nor should it, IMHO) a CxO or mid-level manager to embrace a social network platform. I still see the chasm of understanding re “enterprise 2.0″ tools very much represented in managerial statements such as “Of course we value and encourage collaboration and knowledge share, but that Facebook kind of stuff isn’t the way to do it.”

I agree with you 100%.  It will take much more than this.  And what will convince them to embrace it? DON’T TALK ABOUT THE PLATFORM – or the tools or the shiny new toys, or compare it to Facebook or Twitter or anything else.  Talk to them about the pain they are seeing now and how it can be overcome.  Tell them the story.  Get them to buy in emotionally and intellectually.  Buying in logistically will happen naturally as an effect.

EXAMPLE:

1) A CxO knows that the regular reports created every week are not read by most people, including those it targets.  It is a waste of time and effort, yet tradition and the culture says that the reports must be created – and so they are.  But clearly, some information in the report is worthy to some people.  Show this CxO that by opening up the communication, we can let people target the information they need.  And, if there is any question about the information, they can go directly to the person and ask for clarification.  The ‘report’ becomes a gateway to more understanding through interaction with the people instead of the end product itself.

2) In a recent “Social Media / Networking 101″ class I did recently, I told them that I asked a question on Twitter and received back a quick response.  Some didn’t understand why I used Twitter to ask a question instead of using Google.  “It would have been faster”, they claimed.  “For some things, I am sure,” I answered.  “But the question I had was about something so new that the answer would never have been found online.  It would only have been found in people’s heads.”  For them, there was a big Ah-Ha! there.  I could see in their eyes the lights turn on.  In fact, I received an email the next day from someone who attended with his own Ah-Ha!:

When I do a regular internet search, I’m either added or doomed by my choice of words for the very rule-based machine search that ensues.  In Twitter, I benefit from the interpretive skills of fellow human brains that read and interpret my need and thus are able to better design a relevant response.

Bingo.  What sold him was NOT Twitter, but what can be accomplished with it and how it can help him now.

That should be our focus: the WHYs and the HOWs (as I have written before).  The WHATs come later, naturally.

Watch this video. Take the time, let it run in the background as you work.  But keep your ear on it.

Is KM Dead?

This might become a semantics battle, but he points out some specific things that are dead:

• One size fits all.
• Documents and repositories = Knowledge
• Knowledge resides outside of people
• ROI of knowledge
• The central repository that is controlled by a central department is good for an organization.

Do you think he is right?

(Here are some links to more discussions on the topic.)