The Friday Thing #849

Hellloooooo Friday.

The Friday Thing 849 is about science this week, sort of.

Although I was never particularly good at either, I enjoyed chemistry and physics at school. Explosions, experiments and fire. There were both good fun, but biology never really got me hooked. However, one lesson from biology class that did stick was photosynthesis. It seemed like magic to a 12-year-old kid.

I was thinking about that lesson at Wirral Grammar School many years ago when thinking about another form of synthesis this week. Information synthesis. Or infosynthesis.

For communicators (and likely many other jobs) I think it’s a valuable skill and one I have attempted to master over many years. It’s very easy in our digital age to collect lots of information, read lots of things, listen to lots of things and watch gobs of stuff.

My digital diet is a sure sign of that as it’s constantly a collection of PDF’s on my desktop, podcast links, stories in journals and newspapers, PowerPoint decks, keynote videos, product reviews and so much more. I consume them throughout the week and then let them marinate in my noggin. Often when I am riding my bicycle or driving to work (podcast and music off) I make connections between these things – a sentence in a podcast and a slide I saw in a PowerPoint deck. An ad campaign from a skatewear company and PDF on marketing trends. Like photosynthesis, one thing comes in, gets remixed with others and then there is output.

Ideally, the output is a new idea or an answer to a question but sometimes it’s simply a reminder to join the dots and send something I read to someone else with a nugget of insight. I remember doing that in my first few years at Microsoft UK – occasionally sending random insights to the then General Manager. It served me well as I became his part time TA and it opened a ton of new doors.

It got me thinking: a plant’s leaves, with their vast networks of cells, are akin to the intricate information networks we navigate daily. They absorb light, carbon dioxide, and water — simple ingredients that, through a series of reactions, become the glucose that sustains growth. In our roles, we absorb data, opinions, and facts — often in overwhelming quantities. Yet, it’s our skill in synthesizing this information that creates the ‘glucose’ of our work: insights that sustain and grow our organizations.

In a world awash with data, a real differentiator is not merely access to information, but the ability to distill it into wisdom. It’s about finding patterns in chaos, signals in noise, and lessons in experiences. It’s about crafting stories that not only inform but also engage and motivate.

And, with AI, this practice has been given rocket fuel as I can now ask Copilot to help me synthesize a collection of assets and help me find links between them. I’m still honing this craft – but it’s fun to keep learning, growing and getting better at infosynthesis. Just as plants masterfully convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis, Comms professionals and anyone who desires to be “strategic” can develop this skill to transform raw information into valuable insights.

Take a leaf from nature’s book. Be a catalyst that converts the raw into the refined, the simple into the sophisticated, and the mundane into the meaningful.

That's it for this Friday. I am off to enjoy the sun and yes, to ride my bicycle.

Music this week is Ultramarine by Michael Brook.

Cheers and happy Friday.

-Steve