Understanding the Relationship Between Information Sharing and Long Term Success
If a tree falls in the woods, and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
No matter how you slice it , information cannot exist without a receiver. Claude Shannon famously said that information is surprise. By which he meant, information only exists when there is someone around to learn from it. His job (he was a mathematician who was also an engineer) was to parse words in a phone line from “noise.” Part of this was determining what we mean by useful versus useless data. If nothing new is being transmitted to you, then you are receiving only data, not information. Information must be new to the receiver in order to be informational. If you download a movie to watch and you’ve already seen it, then there is no information in the movie, only data. If you realize that you slept through the best part the first time, then some information is coming through the “noise.” Put another way, if I write a series of letters, like sdklfj, that is not informational, because it has no meaning to us. If I write a different six letter combination, Madrid, you will suddenly find it informational. Shannon’s theory of information relied on a receiver to understand, in order to parse information from data.
The receiver was one of the missing aspects in Michael Buckland’s seminal work on information in 1991, titled Information as Thing. He tried to define information, but missed the fact that for every different definition he put forth, the one fundamental requirement that all definitions shared, was actually a person to perceive it. Again, the receiver is the main player and the definitional component.
Even Jacques Derrida, the inventor of deconstructing concepts, agreed that context is the most important aspect of communication. Context is impossible without a changing cast of receivers to perceive a piece of information and decide on their own meanings.
But, beyond the theoretical, what are the implications of this in the real world? Well, they’re big. I have worked in libraries, museums, archives, communications departments, marketing departments, and IT, and the main thread of continuity in my work has been that in order to be successful, you need to be able to convey actual information to the right audience. You need to understand who your receiver is, what their context is, and how to get to them.
In the workplace, we use goals to help frame our “progress.” For some, especially those in revenue-generating businesses, goals are tied to revenue. This is easily reduced to “find the right buyer at the right time.” But for areas of work that do not generate revenue, the goals are usually framed as value-generating. This can also be stated as cost-savings, but I think that’s actually a misunderstanding of what value is. Value isn’t just saving money, although that is often an outcome of generating value. Value is helping the organization and the people who run it be more efficient with their time and their energy.
In order to help people be more efficient, and fulfill our organizational goals, we need to be able to surprise people with new ways to think about their work (Shannon was right all along). If you have a stated goal to create content, but you don’t think about who is receiving the content and what their context is, why are you creating the content at all? If you create a new way of working with technology, but you haven’t discovered who your users will be (or what system will receive the information), or how the technology will further the actors’ goals and contexts, you might as well have not done the work, because information requires a receiver.
Organizations rely on information. Actual information, not just data or noise. Which means that organizations rely on the humans who receive data, decide it’s information, and then change their behaviors or contexts to adapt. If an organization is not aware of their informational pathways, of how knowledge and understanding flow around organizations, they are only generating noise.
