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Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the massive amounts of information available to you, and underwhelmed by what you’re able to do with it (or what is does to you)?
Are you sometimes frustrated by the seductive nature of social media, discovering that you just invested an hour of your life that you’ll never get back?
Join the club.
Most of us need help in navigating the fast-evolving world we live in. We need help with establishing—and honoring—priorities that keep us on track to accomplish the objectives we truly value.
Ross Dawson has some thoughtful advice on turning a surplus of information into expertise, insight, better decisions—and improved overall wellbeing. He’s author of THRIVING ON OVERLOAD: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information.
Dawson is founding chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies of companies, with clients including industry leaders like Citibank, Coco-Cola, Google, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, PwC, and Walmart. Drawing on the experiences of his world-class clients, he shows how to make information overload something to capitalize on rather than to flee.
Doing so, Dawson says, requires just five connected powers:
1. Purpose – understanding why you engage with information enables a healthier relationship that brings success and balance to your life;
2. Framing – creating frameworks that connect information into meaningful patterns builds deep knowledge, insight, and expertise;
3. Filtering – discerning what information serves us, using an intelligent portfolio of information sources, helps surface valuable signals amid the noise;
4. Attention – allocating your awareness with intent, including laser-like focus and serendipitous discovery, maximizes productivity;
5. Synthesis – expanding our unique capacity to integrate a universe of ideas yields powerful insight, better decisions, and the ability to see opportunities first.
Rodger Dean Duncan: Your book begins with the premise that our identities, our lives, and even our destinies are framed by our relationship with information. What does that mean?
Ross Dawson: Just as we have a relationship with money, food, and exercise, we have a relationship with information. Whether these relationships are positive or unhelpful to us is determined by our attitude and behaviors. We might let our relationship with information be shaped by disabling emotions such as anxiety, overwhelm, guilt, or boredom, leading to doomscrolling or compulsive checking of vapid social media updates. Or we can build an enabling relationship with information, driven by curiosity, the desire to learn and contribute, and a feeling of sufficiency. Treating information as a boon, something of value we should respect, results in an empowering relationship that supports your life’s objectives.
Duncan: The “information masters” you’ve studied exhibit what you call five powers or distinctive capabilities. To what extent are these powers interdependent and mutually reinforcing?
Dawson: Each of the individual powers are highly enabling, but where their true value lies is in being applied together as an integral set of capabilities. For example, the power of Purpose gives us insight on why and how information can support our objectives in life, while Filtering puts that into practice in refining our ability to discern what merits our attention. The power of Framing creates an architecture for our knowledge, which clarifies the relevance of new ideas. This in turn provides a foundation for our capacity for Synthesis, enabling us to make sense of complex domains and make better decisions. True information masters are those who have developed and integrated the five powers.
Duncan: What role does purpose play in people’s choices in the way they engage with and use information?
Dawson: Living in a world of unlimited information is necessarily overwhelming if we don’t know what is important to us. We need to know why we engage with information at all in the first place. Considering our purpose and how that shapes our specific objectives gives us a powerful guide to determine what information supports our life’s directions. Everything else is optional. Fundamental life decisions such as where we choose to develop our expertise or our goals for our ventures or career start by understanding our true aspirations.
Duncan: How do information consumption choices affect a person’s identify and self-image?
Ross Dawson
Dawson: We know that our minds make sense of the world on the basis of the information they receive. This means we need to be very careful in what we choose to take in, as it can shape not just our mood, but also how we see ourselves. While there has been massive positive value created by social media, one of its pointed downsides is in its distorted portrayals of people’s lives, feeding our natural human propensity to compare ourselves with what we see. Being aware of how our information environment shapes us is the first step to making choices that empower us.
Duncan: You say “letting go of trying to keep up transforms crippling overload into enabling abundance.” Please expand on that idea with an example of how such a transformation might look like in actual practice.
Dawson: Trying to drink from a firehose is not an effective way of quenching our thirst. We need to acknowledge emotionally as well as intellectually that it is impossible to keep up with exponentially growing information. Executives and entrepreneurs who clarify their objectives, define a diverse portfolio of information sources, and allocate defined periods to their information engagement will understand they are doing what they need, and can relax knowing they are almost certainly better informed than those struggling to absorb everything they can.
Duncan: How can a leader help team members develop their information skills to improve individual and organizational performance?
Dawson: The starting point is the simple recognition that for all knowledge workers, performance is driven by their skills in converting a universe of information to better decisions and actions. Explicit development of information capabilities should be intrinsic to corporate learning programs. Teamwork should be designed so members can collaborate in their filtering and sense-making, and individuals have time for dedicated attention to projects and developing deep knowledge.
Duncan: A lot of information has negative value because the cost and effort of consuming it is greater than what it provides. (Social media fixation comes to mind.) How can filtering help with this?
Dawson: Filtering is the process of efficiently determining the likely value of information so the gems can be readily spotted while the dross swiftly passes by. Designing a portfolio of pre-vetted information sources and formats makes this far easier. Understanding our purpose and developing knowledge frameworks gives us the tools we need to determine whether any new information could serve us or can be ignored.
Duncan: In what ways is attention related to mindfulness and filtering?
Dawson: What we pay attention to defines how we experience the world. Yet today’s economy is largely based on hijacking our attention, drawing us to things that serve others, not ourselves. Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware where our attention is going and directing it where we wish. We need to work to develop that capacity, it doesn’t come naturally, but the effort is amply repaid by giving us choice over what we allow into our minds.
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Duncan: The most successful inventors, entrepreneurs, and artists seem to have a special knack for synthesis—the ability to “connect the dots.” How does being open- minded give someone an advantage in developing this ability?
Dawson: The faster the pace of change, the greater the value of being open to new information and ideas. Being able to connect the dots, make sense of how things fit together, relies on a fundamental openness to possibilities, to seeing things that others can’t see. Leadership in a rapidly shifting world requires being receptive to faint signals and perceiving subtle emerging opportunities.
Duncan: What should leaders do to enhance their information productivity and effectiveness?
Dawson: The answer is different for everyone depending on many factors including their role, industry, objectives, and cognitive style. What we can all do is develop what I call a “personal information plan,” consciously considering our information habits across the five powers, and where we most need to improve. This plan distills the specific steps we should take to thrive in a world of overload.
