#32 - Why managing your information flow is important!
9 Oct 24
Optimising the organisational flow of information within your Company allows you to present information to the right people at the right time. This facilitates optimal decision-making using the latest information.
Get it wrong, and your efficiency reduces as team capacity is impacted due to the overhead associated with collating, processing and presenting information multiple times.
Get your 'Battle Rhythm' right, and this may give you the edge over your competition!
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#32 - Why managing your information flow is important!
What?
Information management is more important than we think.
It concerns the flow of information around an organisation to maximise efficiency.
It ensures that the right information reaches the right people, at the right time, to facilitate optimal decision-making.
It also allows stakeholders to be kept in the loop in a timely manner, without taking too much overhead out of time required for actual productivity.
More time briefing/talking = less time doing/producing value.
Get information flow wrong, and it could have major repercussions for a business.
Why?
The reason it is so important is, if the flow is wrong, not optimised or inefficient, then decision-making slows down considerably. And this impacts operational delivery.
It also means that decisions are likely being made which could be based upon stale or just plainly incorrect information.
This means that a business will quickly lose its competitive edge and fall behind its competitors.
The trick is to design a system where the latency of information is minimal. Information can be retrieved at the optimal time to feed the various meetings; to get it to where and when it is needed.
How?
So, how can this be done?
The military are very good at this. They have to be because efficient information management is a battle-winning tactic. It literally could mean the difference between life or death.
The military structure their meetings so that they are linked. That is, so that information latency is minimal, and that information can be accessed and used when it is needed, ideally multiple times.
They call this structure the 'Battle Rhythm'.
Let's say you are a team leader in a large organisation. You would want to run a weekly team meeting, to keep a check on progress of issues etc.
But you may also need to attend a meeting with your boss, along with your peers, who are also team leaders.
Therefore, you would want to position your team meeting at an appropriate point in the week where the meeting works for you and your team.
But you also want to position it in relation to where your boss' meeting is scheduled.
That way, the information you learn from your meeting can be used to feed your boss' meeting.
You would use an abridged version of what was discussed at your meeting to feed into your boss' meeting.
It negates the need to waste time trying to obtain update briefings on what you have already been told.
It also prevents you from asking your team for information twice in the same week, and so doesn't divert them away from what they should be spending time on i.e. adding actual value.
It's not always possible to streamline information perfectly. But you should strive to get as close to perfect as you can!
In Summary
I hope that you enjoyed reading this newsletter and that it has given you food for thought.
Thinking about how information flows around your organisation is time well invested.
Streamline it as much as possible and the overhead associated with collating, processing and presenting that information reduces and so frees up your team's capacity.
Have a great week!
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