I was delivering my Information Overload Jump Start workshop to a manager forum and we were discussing the reasons they were sending all those unnecessary messages to each other, when one of the participants made a perceptive comment: “We use”, she said, “the Offense System of addressing email!”

What she meant, she elaborated, was that when in doubt you simply copied anyone in the organization who might be offended if you left them out. And since this is the path of caution, you bet they were sending to everybody and his brother – simply to be on the safe side! Consider what this meant:

• Those few who needed the message got it normally.
• Those few who didn’t need the message but would be offended got it, thereby becoming less productive (but full, perhaps, of a satisfying warm feeling of being loved).
• The rest, those who didn’t need the message and would in fact not have been offended, became less productive and did not even feel the love.
• The sender, having caused so much harm to their coworkers’ productivity, would still be happy in the expectation that no one would get cross with them.

There is an alternative system that I might advocate instead: I might call it “The Necessity system“. In this system, you send the message only to those few who have a real necessity to read it; the proverbial “Need to know”. Everybody else is allowed to do their job undisturbed.

And what do you do about the few non-recipients who might, in fact, take offense? You handle them – you explain to them, politely but firmly, that none of you is getting paid to waste the stockholders’ money by reducing productivity. Or, if one of the complaints is justified, you apologize and send that person the message…

So – which system does your organization use?