Editorial
In his 1985 polemic against television, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman identifies what he called the “information-action ratio.” This is the amount of information someone receives on which they can take direct action.
A low ratio means that most information someone receives has an impact on them and they can take action to affect it in some way. A high ratio means that most information someone receives has no impact on them and they can’t do anything about it anyway.
If you were a farmer in the 1800s, you might see a huge storm on the horizon. This is information that affected you, and that you could do something about — you could get the animals in the barn, you could close the shutters, etc. In fact, due to the limits of technology, most information you received were things you needed to know about, and could do something with — you saw things with your own eyes, or were told them by someone with direct knowledge.
However, you’d never hear about a storm in the neighboring state, and that’s fine — you don’t have any property there and you don’t know anybody there, so you simply don’t need the information. It didn’t affect you and you couldn’t do anything about it.
Fast forward to today, and the information-action ratio has swung to the other end of the spectrum — it’s now absurdly, comically high, meaning we’re getting more information than we can possibly use. This has progressed through the evolution of media, from the newspaper to the telegraph and on to the radio, television, the internet, social media, mobile devices, screens in every room of the house, etc.
Along the way, our expectations have changed. We stubbornly believe that we should be informed about everything, and the idea of not knowing about something we can’t take action on is almost antithetical to good citizenship. This has “trickled up” to the people who gatekeep the information — if the readers want everything, then we need to give them everything.
Postman wrote of the changes brought about by technology:
[The] sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became the context for news. Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.
I’d conservatively wager that over 90% of the information we receive in our workplaces is non-actionable. Someone, somewhere might be able to use it, but we certainly can’t. All it does is obscure what truly matters and what we can actually change.
Most organizations exacerbate this with their internal comms strategy. Under the guise of “wanting to keep employees informed,” they blast a fire hose of information that’s of low contextual quality — not overall low quality, because it’s important and actionable to someone in the organization … just not most of the people it's sent to.
We exacerbate this by our framing of “the intranet.” References like this monolithicize our intranets. We have a tendency to talk about it in over-arching terms — we use the definite article to refer to the One Intranet to Rule Them All. We speak of it like the Oracle of Delphi, as if it’s the single source of delivering information. A communal well of information that everyone shares and everyone regards with the same sagacity.
Instead, I’m going to offer that there’s something much more important: the tiny intranet walking around in the head of every employee. You have as many intranets as you have employees to comprehend it. This mental space is the smallest intranet in the world, and the only one that really matters.
In “The Paradox of Choice,” Barry Schwartz discusses the “endowment effect” and “loss aversion” of behavioral economics. These theories state that humans don’t like to lose things once we feel like we “own” them. And too many choices means too many chances to lose something.
Schwartz tells of an experiment selling gourmet jams and jellies in a special display at a grocery store. The test found that when fewer options were offered, more product was sold.
If we apply the endowment effect and loss aversion to this, we can see that customers presented with 28 possible variants were confronted with the fact that any selection meant the “loss” of 27 other options. While if there were only two choices, the amount of loss was much smaller.
Let’s apply this to information acquisition –
We can consider all action-oriented information we’re exposed to as that which we “own.” However, we discard information all the time – we have to, because our information-action ratio is so low that we simply can’t maintain it all. Sadly, every piece of information we mentally discard or force ourselves to ignore is a “loss.”
(Note the phrase “action-oriented information.” By this, I mean information that requires action from someone, whether or not that someone is the person to whom it's sent. Instructions about the changing expense report process are action-oriented — the person who’s exposed to it knows that it requires someone to do something, and they need to figure out if they're that someone. However, rest-assured that a heart-warming story about Mary’s charity work is not action-oriented, and doesn’t carry the same cognitive load.)
Consider when you’re reading a dense, fascinating self-help book. Do you ever get anxious that you’re simply not going to remember it all? Do you ever suffer from “intellectual FOMO”? Do you ever get to the point where you realize you can’t possibly take action on it all, and you’re destined to “lose” most of it? At this point, you simply become a little numb to it all, and let it wash over you. Sure, you might make a mental note or promise to go back through it with a highlighter, but that’s rare, and you simply resign yourself to not remembering most of it.
| There’s an entire genre of books, blogs, and tools about “How to remember everything you read.” And I’ve noted with some interest that an emerging genre of books, blogs and social media posts says the exact opposite — what I call “chill productivity,” which boils down to, “You can’t keep track of everything, so stop trying because it’s just making you sad.” |
More than a decade ago, I tidied up my RSS subscriptions and wrote about it. Some deletions were easy — these blogs tended to publish a lot of noise. But two blogs in particular were problematic, because they published a lot, and what they published seemed so good to me.
I wrote:
These two blogs forced me to confront a sad fact — sometimes, less is more. Too much good content can be intimidating and stressful. […] both The Atlantic Cities and Stowe Boyd suffered from the fact that they were both so good and had so much volume. With both of them, I just felt like I couldn’t keep up, and — worse — not keeping up would cause me to miss a lot and I would feel bad about this.
Seems paradoxical, but it’s true. Too much information causes stress. We worry that we’re losing too much. This is the endowment effect and loss aversion at work. Mentally, we “own” all the information sent to us, and forcing us to abandon too much of it can make us numb to the entire channel, or even completely reject it.
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So here’s the critical point: we need to reduce the amount of information sent to most employees, not increase it. Our success as internal comms professionals should not be gauged by the volume of information we distribute, but rather by how low we keep the information-action ratio.
There’s no single “Intranet” (proper noun, naturally). Our notion of “the intranet” is outdated. There’s a small intranet walking around in the head of every one of your employees, and that’s the only intranet that matters. Our goal should be to keep that intranet as spare as possible, delivering to that employee only the relevant information they need to do their work.
Personalization, segmentation and customization are the keys to chipping away at reducing the sky-high information-action ratio that damages your employees’ relationship with your channels. Any action-oriented information sent to someone who can’t make use of it should be considered a defect of communication strategy. Like any defect, it should be a core goal to reduce this as much as possible.
Your intranet shouldn't be used to carry as much information as possible. It should be used to filter the entire domain of information your company communicates. Its goal should be to protect your employees from useless information, not expose them to as much as possible.
Make it a shelter from the storm, not the thundercloud itself.
The sad alternative is what I call “information volume backlash.” When employees start discarding information, their eventual solution will be to disregard the channel entirely. This is the first step a lot of intranets take toward irrelevancy.
Editor's Note: Read other approaches to intranet information delivery:
- Less Content, More Clarity: Why Less Is More on the Intranet — In a world of constant notifications, channel creep and inbox anxiety, the best internal comms teams are brave enough to say: “No one needs this message.”
- Are Your Messages Hitting the Mark? Time for an Internal Comms Audit — If you don’t know how many employees receive your internal communications or who takes the time to read them, you're probably due for an audit.
- Information Overload Is Bad for Your Health — Information overload has become as much a part of the workplace as the technology that is creating it. Here are ways to manage it.
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