Michael Lissack division of labor, trust, and a reaffirmation of what we respect and what we question in each other. Organizations that attempt to substitute increased communication for increased collaboration will learn the hard way that there is a tremendous difference. Flooding someone with more information doesn’t necessarily make him a better thinker. “More information should presumably present more opportunities for broader vision and understanding. Yet the sheer volume of the data amassed makes almost inevitable the reduction of our focus to what is in the end a very narrow endeavor.... If we are to retain any kind of perspective on the role of humankind in the future, we must sometimes stand back and view the landscape, not merely a tree” wrote Erik Sandberg-Diment. Information is power, a world currency upon which fortunes are made and lost. And we are in a frenzy to acquire it, firm in the belief that more information means more power. But just the opposite is proving to be the case. The glut has begun to obscure the radical distinctions between data and information, between facts and knowledge. Our perception channels are short-circuiting. We have a limited capacity to transmit and process images, which means that our perception of the world is inevitably distorted in that it is selective; we cannot notice everything. And the more images with which we are confronted, the more distorted is our view of the world. Take the news as an example. Every day the media seek to deliver us larger amounts of news at a faster rate. We are besieged with accounts of the world in amounts that are impossible to process. And as we scramble to keep up with the news, we are more likely to make errors of perception. Anyone who has ever played the children’s game where you are given a few seconds to look at a tray of objects and then must recount all of the items on the tray knows that the less time you have and the more objects on the tray, the more likely you are to see objects that weren’t there and forget ones that were. The amount of news we are expected to ingest every day hampers our ability to perceive in much the same way. Not only are we more likely to make errors of perception, but the more time we spend with reports of separate events, the less time we have to understand the “whys and wherefores” behind them, to see the patterns and relationships between them, and to understand the
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