Happy independence day to our American friends!…
Today I want to draw your attention to a phenomenon that is quite familiar to us physicists, but has a place in driving solutions to information overload as well. I refer to the decay to a rest state.
In physics, this is often seen when a system is pushed up to a high energy state: it will lose energy and “decay” to its state of equilibrium. Thus, a mug of hot coffee – a critical item in a knowledge worker’s routine – will lose heat and eventually reach room temperature if you don’t drink it promptly. You need to pump in energy continuously, perhaps by keeping it on a Mug Warmer, to keep it hot.
So how does this apply to Information Overload? Actually it applies to most efforts to change organizational behavior by one initial push. Say you deploy a training program to educate your group to improve their email behavior. Experience shows that what will happen is this: at first, people will be energized by all the new ideas and motivated to apply them. Email effectiveness will go up, work will be more efficient, and people may even get to go home early and see their children awake. But then, as the months pass by, the behaviors will start to decline, and after a year or two everything may go back to where it started – high load, low effectiveness, and devastated Work/Life balance. The equilibrium state…
You see it happen in many programs. Prof. Leslie Perlow reports seeing this decay, within 6 months, at the end of her famous “Quiet Time” pilot, described in her book “Finding Time”. I’ve also seen it happen with a number of training programs we’ve launched at Intel over my career. This decay is a strange phenomenon because there is nothing to be gained by it; everyone is worse off in the “rest state”. So why do smart workers allow it to happen?
Prof. Perlow ascribes this to the lack of a sufficiently comprehensive change in all the related cultural aspects: if the underlying causes of a destructive behavior pattern remain, they will drive people back to where they were. In addition, there is the simple fact that many modern organizations are in a state of constant churn, with reorganizations, mergers, and personnel movement causing new people to come and others to leave a group, diluting the learned lessons. And if a senior manager who was supportive of a change is replaced with one who is not, subordinates will instantly respond to the new manager’s priorities.
So what can we do? For starters, it is important to try and integrate the desired practices as deeply and widely as possible into the organizational culture, affording them protection from the buffeting currents of short-term change. And as long as management remains supportive, you can simply do what the mug warmer does – pump in new energy, that is, maintain the desired state by providing ongoing leadership, role modeling, and periodic refresher training. This last is not expensive, and should be considered as a requirement when you plan a deployment of a training-based program in Info Overload space.
Speaking of physics, I am reminded of the “square-well problem” of quantum mechanics. The fact that one needs sufficient energy and umph to push the electron state from one level to the next (i.e. one training session is rarely enough to do the job, and the motivation to change has to be there… change or die).
Also perhaps there is an analogy in the phenomenon of tunneling. You see, one training course would be hardly expected to push the majority of employees to a sustained new course of action. But there will be a few who do take a strong reaction to the stimulus and who can be leaders of a new paradigm, if so encouraged.
Tunneling has a strong dependency on the height an width of the barrier, if I recall my solid state physics… and in a large organization those can be pretty high and thick!