Are we in an era of information overload instead of information empowerment? U.S. President Barack Obama recently said:
“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,“ Obama said at at Hampton University, Virginia. “With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.“
Since we’re very focused on social media in the context of work here at FMYI, let’s take a closer look at this from that angle. A recent survey found that although 52.3% of U.S. workers agreed that social media helped them learn more in less time, only 37% felt they got more work done. No doubt we have more information at our fingertips that we can learn from; the question is, are we leveraging new ways of sharing information to achieve goals in the most effective way possible? I think there are three key issues at play here:
1. We need to manage the information firehose.
Think about all the streams of information you manage daily. Emails. Text messages. Instant messages. Social networking sites. Phone calls. Voicemails. Snail mail. Face to face meetings. Water cooler talk. Videos. We’re surrounded by content, and if we wanted to, could immerse ourselves in it 24/7. Being deeply involved in social media definitely exposes you to more content. But it takes time to filter, sort, read, scan all the feeds. It’s not a given that “social business” is also synonymous with “effective business” especially with workplace collaboration. We need ways to better aggregate all the streams and filter it down to only the most relevant items needing our attention.
2. We need to have more creative tools for innovation.
In terms of the workplace, it’s not enough to just launch brainstorming discussion forums for sharing ideas, or talk crowd sourcing but rely on simple voting mechanisms. Technology needs to help connect ideas with people who have the skills and experience to make them a reality, or provide guidance with suggesting ways to get projects done more efficiently, or set up meetings on the fly based on need, or provide intuitive dashboards that help interpret activity going on and where people can best invest their time.
3. We need to work in a whole new way.
Old habits die hard. The only way to create lasting change is to put yourself in an environment that is conducive for the change. Just like it’s sometimes hard to tackle a brainstorming project while in the office because of all the day to day distractions (necessitating an afternoon trip to the neighborhood coffee shop), in order to work more efficiently or generate new ideas we’ll need to embrace a more flexible work structure. President Obama himself has been a supporter of workplace flexibility. We’ll need to build communities around this concept, and build workplaces to maximize the results.
I believe achieving these is essential to the future growth of our economy. What do you think? We’ll be talking about examples in the coming months that illustrate the power of these solutions to mitigate the information overload we experience today.
