Too much information to process
Aristotle postulated that “nature abhors a vacuum” to express the idea that unfilled spaces are contrary to the laws of nature and physics and that every space needs to be filled with something.
This image, of stuff rushing in to fill a void, is often evoked for a range of purposes. For example:
- Art critics see an overcrowded, over-detailed piece as evidence of artists’ compulsion to occupy empty spaces on a canvas;
- Gardeners warn not to leave an open patch of soil because weeds will seize the available space;
- Psychologists explain that people make hasty judgments and decisions to fill empty spaces within themselves;
- And when a successful business or political leader steps down or retires, we complain about how less worthy successors rush in to take their place.
But what about when we complain about senior leaders “making decisions in a vacuum”? Is that another example of the phenomenon that Aristotle was talking about? Do we mean that leaders recklessly decide things just to fill the emptiness of their strategic canvas with something? Is the “tyranny of the blank page” so overwhelming that any decision, any strategic choice, any plan will do?
Two vacuums related to decision-making
To clarify what making a decision in a vacuum means, consider two distinct metaphorical vacuums at play in decision-making. The first is the empty space that’s waiting for answers. Most senior leaders don’t abhor that vacuum at all. In fact, they have built their very successful careers on a reputation and track-record of being really good at diligently filling the strategic void with the best possible answers amongst options that have been served up from research, observation, experience, data, information and knowledge.
The second vacuum is the decision-making space itself. It’s where all that research, observation, experience, data, information and knowledge lies. It’s where choices are weighed and made. And it’s where decisions are often poorly made, without requisite inputs.
You don’t have to go as far back as Aristotle to remember a time when we thought of the decision-making space as a vacuum. Only a few decades ago, knowledge was considered power because it was scarce. Data was scarce. Information was scarce. You couldn’t just fire up your device to access whatever you needed whenever you needed it. Data warehouses weren’t bursting with insights. Research was expensive. Analytics took forever. When decision-making occurred in that vacuum, it was for good reason—the demand for answers couldn’t patiently await the necessary inputs.
Today, however, it’s hard to reconcile the crushing abundance of inputs with the notion of a vacuum. The decision-making space is overcrowded with data, information, and knowledge. Everybody has access to far more stimulus than they can process. The problem today is not emptiness, it’s a deafening cacophony of inputs. How can senior leaders find great answers that give their organizations an edge when any hypothesis can be both proven and disproven by available data, when everybody has access to the same information and knowledge, and when there’s never enough time or space to make sense of it all?
What’s missing is requisite processing power
In the past, when we said that senior leaders made decisions in a vacuum, we certainly meant absent the necessary data, information, and knowledge, and we also meant absent the right people with the right mix of perspectives, experiences, opinions, personal knowledge and knowhow, stake, influence, and so on. Even without sufficient data and information, senior leaders could overcome the vacuum by involving the right mix of people in decision-making.
Now, when the problem has flipped and senior leaders are dealing with an overabundance of inputs, the importance of involving the requisite variety of people holds even more so.
It is still essential to involve all the right people for all the same reasons as in the past; what they see, hear, know, and believe is as important as ever to take into consideration when making good strategic choices. But now, the additional and even more compelling reason to do so is because their collective processing power is required to handle all that noise and produce clarity.
We’ve talked about requisite variety many times before and how and why it can lead to better strategy and execution (for example, read this World Economic Forum article). We’ve explained how W. Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety—”only variety can destroy variety”—requires that you involve the right mix of people in setting strategy because they bring so much to the table that you can’t otherwise access, and because they will come away aligned and mobilized to execute as a result.
Now the argument goes further. Bring those very same people into your decision-making space and also reap the benefit of the amazing processing power between their ears. Connect those people together, collide them effectively, and you can turn their individual brains into a mega-brain with the requisite processing power to do justice to the abundance of inputs (much as the SETI@home distributed computing software connected and made use of volunteers’ computers to aid in the search for extraterrestrial life).
Talented people are not scarce in and around your organization, they are abundant. Data, information, and knowledge are no longer scarce, they are abundant. Expand your decision-making space to include both, and you will reap the benefits of all that abundance - in better choices and better follow-through.
