“Good Enough” Information: Threat or Opportunity?

1. “Good Enough” Information:Threat or Opportunity? Maggie Weaver Shaftesbury Associates

2. The Good Enough “Revolution” – in ICT We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher. Robert Capps, Wired Magazine, Issue 17, 2009 The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine

3. and since 2009 . . . .

4. . . . the implication still holds: We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. Robert Capps, Wired Magazine, Issue 17, 2009 The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine That year, Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue”

5. Examples in other fields • eLawyering • Widgets that generate legal forms, which may be reviewed by a licensed attorney… • microClinics • High tech office in a mall, staffed by two doctors, using online patient records and with hi-def video conferencing consultations with specialists at the hospital… • Health care • 68% of U.S. consumers seek medical advice via the internet or social media… but only 11% go to the pharmaceutical company’s website

6. and in market research “A surveywall may more palatable than a paywall, especially for younger users.” Frederic Filloux, The Guardian, September 10, 2012 “Google Consumer Surveys has severed a dependency between research client and research vendor… Google has disintermediated all of us.” Jason Anderson, www.greenbookblog.org

7. Information overload – then • Alvin Toffler, 1970Future Shock • Richard Saul Wurman, 1989Information Anxiety – information architecture • Reuters, 1996 Dying for Information – M25 effect • Peter Morville, 2005Ambient Findability – wayfinding

8. Information overload – now The average twittering brain has 126 followers …. If all these users stick to an average of 22 TPD (Tweets Per Day), reading the tweets will consume approximately 2.5 hours per day (not to mention responding to them). October 20 is Information Overload Awareness Day The average knowledge worker receives 93 e-mail messages per day, and many are unnecessary. If every knowledge worker in the U.S. were to send 10% fewer messages,the cost of information overload could be reduced by as much as $150 billion per year. Jonathan B. Spira, 2011 Overload!

9. The problem is that our brains didn’t evolve as much as the communication methods and information quantities have grown

10. So what? (i) • “… more and more students preferred the sound of MP3s, particularly for rock music. They’ve grown accustomed to the percussive sizzle – aka distortion – found in compressed music. To them, that’s what music is supposed to sound like.” • "Health educators may well face a significantly desensitized population, segments of which are immobilized by fear, indecision, and confusion."  • More people buy jam when there are six as opposed to twenty-four varieties

11. So what? (ii) • Most information manuals are filled with “important” safety tips against obvious stupidities burying the actual dangers in a huge mass of irrelevancy. This only makes them less safe, because people no longer take time to read the safety precautions. • “[In a student stock-market game] the group with less information earned twice as much as the well-informed group… Price signals and the invisible hand of the market proved more efficient than an overload of information.”

12. The business information client’s world RICH, PERSONAL • Group meetings . . . . . . . . . . . • Integrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • Direct contact . . . . . . . . . . . . • Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . • Special reports . . . . . . . . . . . • Formal info systems . . . . . • Rules & regulations . . . . . IMPERSONAL, SPARE • R. Daft & R. Lengel, Management Science, May 1986

13. In areas of high uncertainty, individuals prefer • Face-to-face conversations • Human sources over documentary • Personal sources over impersonal • Informal over formal • A 1994 study identified 2000 external sources of information for Quebec SMEs: consultants, banks, lawyers, accountants, ad agencies, trainers, educators, etc. etc. Yvon Gasse, J. Small Business & Entrepreneurship, Apr/Jun 1994 • “… users seldom penetrate a site to any depth, tend to visit a number of sites for any given information need, and seldom return to sites they once visited.” David Nicholas et al., Journal of Documentation, 2004 Re-appraising information-seeking behaviour in a digital environment: bouncers, checkers, returnees and the like.

14. Good Enough info – A threat? • “…Senior managers currently fail to see fact- and data-driven analysis as critical when making key business decisions and instead rely heavily on ‘gut feel’ and ‘soft’ factors such as consultation with others, intuition and experience.” [Accenture, Feb. 2010] • “Knowledge networks turn into echo chambers” [David Weinberger, “Too Big to Know”, 2012] • The health of the fact… is in serious decline these days, because the abuse of facts is so widespread.” [Doug Guthrie in Forbes, July 7, 2012]

15. Disintermediation • Information avoidance • Information withdrawal • Satisficing • David Bawden & Lyn Robinson • Journal of Information Science, 2008 • The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies

17. Satisficing (i) – in market research

18. Satisficing (ii) – in information services

19. Good Enough info – An opportunity? • Studies of content usability find that removing half of a website’s words will double the amount of information users actually get • “We need to be challenged… search results must include pages that make us go ‘WTF??’ .”David Weinberger, “Too Big to Know”, 2012 • “Lots of high-end market research can be great. Conversely, no market research is bad. And somewhere in the middle is more often than you think a very acceptable solution. Know the difference. And know when “good enough” is good for you.” Larry Fleischmann blog: When Is Market Research Good Enough?, 2010

20. Opportunity (i) – the first step • A small study might have a wider “error” than a more expensive, broader piece of research. But the uncertainty reduction from the smaller study might still be worth a lot, depending on the size and frequency of the decision(s) it is meant to support. • The more uncertainty you started out with, the more the initial observation will tell you. When starting from a position of extremely high uncertainty, even methods with a lot of inherent error can give you more information than you had before. Douglas W. Hubbard: How to Measure Anything, 2007

21. Opportunity (ii) – guided disintermediation www.alacrawiki.com

22. Opportunity (iii) – user segments • Fast Foodies: information as social capital [social media] • Supplementers: capsule-sized chunks [magazines] • Carnivores: meaty chunks [TV news, weekend newspapers] • Fussy eaters: Luddites • Balanced dieters: wide range of trusted sourcesStephen Yap, TNS UK www.research-live.com Data: How do you eat yours?April 4, 2012

23. My take on it . . .Businesses and people are short of money and time • They don’t share our expectations of • Accuracy • Completeness • Speed • They are easy to “wow” We’re still in the game – let’s adjust our play

24. Now, “Collect your thoughts, and the thoughts of others . . .”

25. Now you have your say…… • Talking points • Cover-your-ass • Context labelling • Pointing to quality sources as a first step