Step 5: Gather the Right Information: Look Through the Lens of Your Hopes

Overview

The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

—Daniel Boorstin

Step #5 integrates the results of the previous steps. Step #1 yielded a broad and balanced working group whose members share a commitment to proceed with open minds. Step #2 identified the members' underlying hopes and aspirations. Step #3 sharpened the issues of importance to examine. Step #4 guided members to identify innovative options.

Step #5 helps group members gather the information they need to choose the best solution from among the options they've generated. Ineffective information gathering plagues many groups dealing with tough issues. Although the participants espouse shared objectives, they readily tend to fall back into old patterns of factional dynamics as they proceed. The upshot of this is that they unnecessarily create adversaries and fail to reach effective agreements.

Corporations have their own institutional biases. For example, when a tough issue arises that concerns a struggling product, a manager will often react by sending marketing off to gather information about customer demand, asking operations to analyze the requirements for delivering the product, and directing finance to run the numbers on the investment and its returns. This type of "silo" thinking may leverage each group's expertise and align with the organization's functional structure, but it also reinforces imbalances and adversarial behavior. The finance group might show up with reams of spreadsheets to validate its skepticism of marketing's statistics. The operations group might fail to see why it needs to make product changes and, therefore, resist finding a creative solution for retooling the production line. Such oppositional dynamics often work at subtle levels. They can be so deeply engrained in the corporate culture that workers take them for granted or fail to recognize that they exist.

Another difficulty with functional or interest-driven information gathering is that often people collect only information that is readily available or that others have gathered. When they don't screen the information on the basis of how it relates to their own objectives, they tend to collect either too much or too little information or they don't gather what they really need. Those engaged in information gathering need a clear organizing principle to aid them.

Issues that are allowed to fester may signify the presence of an information gap. In this case, participants and decision makers lack the understanding they need to find and implement an effective solution to the problem being considered. For example, a reorganization may show strong financial returns, but until those involved in it grasp the implications of how they will work together within the new structure, there's little support for its implementation.

The method that groups employ to gather information dramatically affects their problem-solving results. Although interest-driven approaches to collecting data can be effective ways to get day-to-day work accomplished, solving tough issues for the long term requires a better approach—one based on the shared hopes of the group's participants.