I have been doing a good deal of thinking over the last week about the whole area of information sharing, knowledge collection and sharing, information creation, etc.

Hand-up anyone who thinks we have got this area sorted? Not many then.

Hand-up anyone who thinks that we will ever get this area sorted? Not many their either.

Why is it so difficult?

The main issue is clearly not our ability to get information from point A to point B because we can do that in abundance.

The issue is obviously the gap from the eye to the brain, the finger to the brain, the ear to the brain and the nose to the brain. Once in the brain there are huge issues getting the information to morph into knowledge.

We have had this issue for thousands of years now. It started when we started talking. The problem with talking is that it needs to be repeated every time someone wants the same information and that people have this ability to undertake memory housekeeping and forget things. So we created drawing and writing to stop us having to repeat things and we created singing to help people remember. Later on in time we created ways of recording what we are saying and seeing. Then we realised that passing all of this information around way difficult so we created this thing called the Internet so that everyone could read and hear and see everything.

Then we realised that the problem with having access to everything was that we had moved the bottleneck right up into our own heads. We discovered that we weren’t actually very good at getting our heads around all of the information available to us. Without consuming the information we have no way of knowing that the information is relevant and there isn’t enough time to consume all of the information available. Actually there isn’t enough time to consume even the tiniest proportion of the information.

So we went about inventing and boy could we create. We created pages, links, applications, wikis, blogs, collaborative workspaces, instant messaging, document stores, calendars, email, databases, search.

But none of them resolved the problem because the issue was still in our heads. That didn’t stop us though, we were convinced that if we just had a way of viewing the information, if we just put it somewhere else we could resolve the problem. Each of these new mechanisms did change the way that we worked, communicated and shared knowledge but the change was never the change we were expecting.

Every time though we really wanted to communicate we reverted to our best and most efficient mechanism for communicating – we gathered in the same room and talked to each other.

Stu has written an article on a concept called iNotice. I was going to write a comment, but the comment got so long I changed it into a post.

 Could we not have a feature in our instant message solution which allows me to be added to a list of people who wants to contact them?  Perhaps it could add me to a “need to chat urgently” group in sametime or change the colour of my icon?  I’d call this functionality an iNotice, potentially link it to an SMS.

I think that the challenge that iNotice really faces is human nature. What people are trying to do in using the ‘do not disturb’ type functionality in their Instant Messaging client is to protect them from interruptions. The challenge is that if you knew what an interruption was before it interrupted you then you could decide whether or not to accept it. The problem is that you can’t, by definition. You rely on the person interrupting you to give the interruption the correct priority. Unfortunately, whatever mechanism you provide for interruptions will become abused.

It reminds me of a very old manufacturing story where a factory was struggling with getting the urgent parts through their systems. Their planning means that there was always some urgent parts. The answer – a ‘red list’ for the really urgent stuff, which was given special treatment. Unfortunately human nature meant that soon everything became urgent and was on the ‘red list’. The director responsible for manufacturing soon got fed up of this and introduced an extra-special list which required his signature. Soon the director was so fed up with the number of requests that he had to sign that he delegated it. Soon everything was on the extra-special list.

Soon afterwards the director retired. The new director who took his job abandoned all of the lists. Interestingly the Japanese had a different approach; they fixed it so that everything was urgent and called in Just-in-Time.

Interruptions are exactly the same, it doesn’t matter how many hurdles we put in front of people, soon everyone will circumvent them. We can create extra technologies or we could try to change human nature. I see GTD as a Just-in-Time approach for information workers which doesn’t require more technology, it requires a different approach.

I have done some research into the use of PowerPoint and into good presentation techniques. Today’s Bug Bash made me chuckle.