1. Bad news rarely travels upwards in organisations: Everyone dreads telling the boss bad news. It also doesn't travel down either -- executives are famous for soft-pedaling bad news, or for living in denial until it's too late to fix the problem.
   
   
2. People share information generously peer-to-peer, but begrudgingly upwards, and sparingly downwards in organisational hierarchies: most people hate preparing reports for 'superiors', since at best they are paperwork that has no value to them personally, and at worst they are self-incriminating. Information in most organisations flows down only on a need-to-know basis, which is why the grapevine is generally a faster and more accurate source of information than the boss.
   
3. People only accept and internalise information that fits with their mental models and frames: Ask people after a presentation what they learned and what they thought was the central message, and you'll find that most people will respond with something that reinforces what they already believed, which is often very different from, and sometimes even contradicts, what the speaker actually said.
   
   
4. People cannot readily differentiate useful information from useless information: Most people are not very good at separating what's important from what's not.
   
   
5. People know more than they can tell, and tell more than they can write down: We all have expertise and understanding of things we cannot express in written words, and what we can express is much more effectively expressed orally and iteratively than by capturing it in some database.
   
   
6. People can internalise information presented graphically more easily and fully than information presented as text, and understand information conveyed through stories better than information presented analytically:. This is why we trust face-to-face conversations more than telephone conversations (we are, largely subconsciously, processing a huge amount of data from people's facial expressions and body language). It is also why we like charts and photos much more than text and 'bullet points', which force us to create our own mental images before we can be informed by them.
   
   
7. Most people want their friends and even people they don't know, to succeed, and people they dislike to fail and this has a bearing on their information-sharing behaviour: The more politics are at play in the office, the more likely the flow of information is likely to be impinged.
   
   
8. People are averse to sharing information orally, and even more averse to sharing it in written form, if they perceive any risk of it being misused or misinterpreted: So it's safer not to share such information with anyone
   
   
9. People are generally reluctant to admit they don't know, or don't understand, something: The higher in the hierarchy you are, the more this applies. So higher-ups tend to consult with other higher-ups, leading to groupthink, and also delegate searches for information to underlings somewhat cryptically.
   
   
10. Some modest people simply underestimate the value of what they know:  

So what can we do:

• flatten the organization
• introduce personal coaching
• develop trust and better team working
• provide staff with informal places to meet and exchange information with peers, 
• provide more information in graphic, dynamic model, mind map and story formats, and in weblogs and other context-rich 'containers', 
• tap the 'wisdom of crowds' and the wisdom of wallflowers whose voice is rarely heard in organisations, 

Contact your nearest Ology Business Coach now.

Written by Leigh Dorling, Ology Coach, Derby, UK

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