When I was thinking of this headline for this post, I had no idea how cool and ambiguous that it would look…And that is what makes this post more relevant.
The first rule of everything is:
Things are not always as they seem.
But sometimes things are exactly as they seem.
The first job of humans is to figure out which is which. And really it has been that way forever. Technology doesn’t really change that. Survival has often depended on making better assessments of the current situation. Is that ferocious bear or a cuddly teddy bear?
The second job of humans is to figure out what to do about it.
- You can accept it and work within the defined boundaries.
- You can try to fight it or protest it and try to change the rules.
- Or maybe you can reframe the situation to make it work better for you (see notes on reframing)
Information is no longer a scarce and hard to access resource. Information is abundant. It is easy to generate, publish or access.
What is difficult is the ability to glean insight from information. While artificial intelligence promises an answer, it may not generate good answers.
However, a lot of authority and autonomy has been handed over to AI, and the likelihood is that trend is likely to continue.
The world is generating information way faster than humans or even machines can really process it. There is more and more information is required. More documentation, more disclosures and more notices, yet people have less and less time to read them and absorb them. People sign things without reading them all the time.
There is a lot of silliness about this…The producers of certain content want to make sure that they tell information consumers everything that they think they should know. And it gets into the TLDR category.
Other times producers of content want to keep information short and concise, but often this lacks enough detail and it is too vague.
This is related to the communication architecture and communication culture of the organization and to the industry. Some industries and professions develop their vocabularies – some necessary for clarity, but other times it is a barrier to entry (to maintain exclusivity).
AI doesn’t solve this issue. It can create more content and it can distill content, but does the communication between parties really improve? If two AIs interact on our behalf has any knowledge sharing really transpired. By law do we know what our AIs know? Is that our intellectual property? While the copyright issues are being worked out, but the knowledge management questions are different.
Knowledge is fraught. In some instances, it behooves you to share information, but other times it is best to keep information secret. Every individual and every organization grapples with these issues all the time.
Explicitly or not, every organization has a communication architecture, communication infrastructure and a communication culture. These factors contribute greatly to the information dynamics of the organization and information dynamics are a great proxy for the health of an organization.
Conveying just the right amount of information is the challenge
Provide sufficient context – not too much background
Use accessible and transparent language
Don’t hide behind jargon, don’t obfuscate important details
and offer just enough detail.
The information should visually appealing and easy to digest in a short amount of time
Don’t ask for information that you are not going to use.
If you make videos, they need to be edited – just cause it is easy to post a video, don’t just post stuff.
Respect people’s time, don’t waste people’s time
Time is the most precious limited resource that we have and the definition of waste is not cut and dried.
