Staff in offices, universities, schools and almost everywhere else are communication victims. The management in my own university is excellent at communicating to its staff. There are attractive magazines full of good news, regular staff meetings in which college heads present their challenges and achievements, all backed up by daily emails from an array of administrators to guide staff about their business. Yet a recent survey of staff has found dissatisfaction with ‘communication’. What could be the solution? More attractive magazines? More meetings? One answer that has not been considered is less (but more useful) information. As I noted in my posting on the First Law of Information, information is costly. Staff believe that all information emerging from senior management must be important, and therefore it must be read and understood. They do not have the time to do this in addition to all the other emails they receive daily, so messages accumulate in inboxes unread.
The cost of information is felt most acutely by staff when it is required from them. There are routine statistics to be completed, forms to be filled on staff and student progress (including one for every single meeting with a research student!), surveys of staff satisfaction, and one-off requests for information which have descended the management line (usually with shorter and shorter deadlines at each stage of transmission). Staff usually see these requests as a chore to be completed quickly, and do not therefore strive tirelessly for accuracy in collecting and recording the required data. This leads to the second law of information:
2. Data is always less reliable than you think.
Scientific texts emphasise the potential pitfalls in gathering data, and careful scientists have standard routines for checking its validity and reliability. Gathering research data from people is particularly troublesome because of their capacity to fabricate, to rationalise, to forget, and even to avoid telling the truth as an act of politeness. Even in a world where people did none of these things, there would still be lag between events occurring and data being collected, inconsistent application of rules for categorising data, and missing data. Yet these limitations are usually ignored when organisations collect and process information from their staff or from the public. Instead of using wide confidence intervals when reporting the information they have collected, organisations glibly report data to an exact percentage point. There are earnest debates about small changes in statistics from one reporting period to another, even though these are probably within confidence intervals.
Interpreting data would be difficult enough if it was simply a matter of general unreliability, but there is the far bigger problem of biassed unreliability. This is the third law of information:
3. Data that is collected to measure performance loses validity.
I will deal with this in the next posting.
The cost of information is felt most acutely by staff when it is required from them. There are routine statistics to be completed, forms to be filled on staff and student progress (including one for every single meeting with a research student!), surveys of staff satisfaction, and one-off requests for information which have descended the management line (usually with shorter and shorter deadlines at each stage of transmission). Staff usually see these requests as a chore to be completed quickly, and do not therefore strive tirelessly for accuracy in collecting and recording the required data. This leads to the second law of information:
2. Data is always less reliable than you think.
Scientific texts emphasise the potential pitfalls in gathering data, and careful scientists have standard routines for checking its validity and reliability. Gathering research data from people is particularly troublesome because of their capacity to fabricate, to rationalise, to forget, and even to avoid telling the truth as an act of politeness. Even in a world where people did none of these things, there would still be lag between events occurring and data being collected, inconsistent application of rules for categorising data, and missing data. Yet these limitations are usually ignored when organisations collect and process information from their staff or from the public. Instead of using wide confidence intervals when reporting the information they have collected, organisations glibly report data to an exact percentage point. There are earnest debates about small changes in statistics from one reporting period to another, even though these are probably within confidence intervals.
Interpreting data would be difficult enough if it was simply a matter of general unreliability, but there is the far bigger problem of biassed unreliability. This is the third law of information:
3. Data that is collected to measure performance loses validity.
I will deal with this in the next posting.
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