Brain Food
Sometimes enough is really enough. I keep coming back to this this chart, from page 165 of Peter Moreville’s excellent book Ambient Findability, which shows what most of us already know in our bones, that after a point too much information** becomes a liability rather than an asset. As knowledge workers, we want to be floating on the top of that parabola, getting just enough information but not too much. It’s a tightrope act.
The next issue I inevitably ask myself after seeing the chart involves information quality; I can only process so much, so I want it to be high quality. But if I stop watching reruns of Big Bad Beetleborgs* and do nothing but read Immanual Kant, is that really the way to go? My gut tells me that the golden path wins out here, but a diet of comprised solely of junk information might not be optimally nutritious.
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:42 pm
I don’t believe this.
And neither do you. Look at the graph, and think about what this means.
We know that making a decision without any information is a bad idea — that the decision is bound to be wrong. We get some information; we get a better decision.
According to this graph, if you get TWICE as much information as you really need, you’ll be just as badly off as you would be if you had no information at all. Surely, that’s wrong! In fact, I bet it’s quite unusual for information overload to reduce decision quality at all — much less reduce it to the point where you’d be better off deciding in pure ignorance.
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:21 pm
Point! Yet it would seem that at some point decision quality would, if not decline outright, level off dramatically. The amount of new information gleaned from every new source becomes smaller and smaller.
I’d offer a modified version of the graph, which is incidentally the same graph I would draw if you asked me to chart a student’s ability over time on the saxophone:
I feel a little bad for taking the original chart out of context in the book , for it was meant as a description of Calvin Mooers’ law, and came with an interesting tidbit about infomania from New Scientist. which would lead to me to think that all the information was not related to the decision at hand.
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Yes: perhaps Morville is charting the first derivative of devision quality, the rate of improvement. But even then, the graph is wrong:
- a little information may be a dangerous thing, but it’s a lot better than none, so the the y intercept should be positive.
- the overload extreme should asymptotically approach zero; even if overload can degrade information quality, way too much overload isn’t going to make anything worse.
November 8th, 2005 at 8:38 pm
Mark,
I use your software (Tinderbox), and respect your opinions. Kinda like watching and waiting for the next Tinderbox.
But to the subject, I will add another perspective. If you assume that each manager knows *when* enough is enough, ok. But the sweet spot is knowing when you actually have enough to make an informed decision.
In business time is money, and if I as a manager wait too long to decide, my ROI went south on that decision.
I agree it doesn’t start worsening your decision, but the quicker I can make a decision (again, informed), I move on to the next opportunity, preserving investment.
November 17th, 2005 at 10:10 am
Jeffrey, I feel like saying that I do not think that you’re in the “lazy manager” group that Mark is talking about when he links to you on his website. That was a very bad formulation and not what you deserved for posting an interesting post.
I happen to agree with your point of information overload. This is clearly an interesting discussion to bring up, without having to be labeled lazy for your opinion.