Stop the wildfire of information requests

Requests for information from central teams fan out across a department often creating large amounts of unplanned work. Ensure they are used effectively to maximise impact and avoid disruption.

The Chief of Stuff has spent the last two weeks away on their summer holiday. They are looking to develop a new initiative which they’ve been mulling through while they were away. Under pressure from the board they’re on a mission to implement the change fast, so they ask for information to help build a draft plan from all of the teams in the department by the end of the week. That will be ready for review at a specially convened meeting with departmental leads at the start of the next week.

The list of information points requested is relatively short, and the departmental leads and various middle managers from each area realise:

• There are some things they can answer quite easily.
• For some though they’re not quite sure what is being asked for, as the question is being asked in a novel way, and so they provide something which they think is close enough.
• The final questions they can’t answer, so they pass them to individual team leads in their department to deal with, who ,after a short delay, come back with the answers.

It’s all taken a bit longer than originally planned and it's now Friday lunchtime, so the Office of the Chief of Stuff ,who have been asked to pull things together, don’t have time to validate all of the responses. The plan they deliver has not been thoroughly reviewed with the departmental leads first either, and has multiple inconsistencies.

The next week, at the specially convened away day, disagreements and confusion erupt, and the Chief realises they cannot move forward with the plan.

The Chief of Stuff is no further forward than at the start of the previous week. That initiative that seemed to make sense on the beach has had unintended consequences.

Even worse the request has disrupted the flow of a large number of teams across the organisation, putting further pressure on their already tight schedules, and most of the departmental leads are now grumbling.

Information requests can fan out like wildfire

In a large organisation, what seem like simple information requests from the top fan out like a wildfire. All responses to questions are work to be done. If you add in time to clarify questions, correct errors, and check and gather the responses, and then multiply that by the number of teams, departments or management layers it can be a very large amount of work. This is particularly true if you factor in the disruption to other plans, or have to repeat a failed or partially effective request.

Although sometimes these kind of information requests can be a useful "temperature check" to understand the landscape of delivery, they may not provide an effective way forward. Some questions to consider:

• Are you aware of how much work the information request will create? Is it correct to prioritise this over existing plans?
• Can you narrow the target of an information request, and clarify it's intent, to reduce work?
• Has this kind of situation been created by a fundamental deficiency in management information, or strategic alignment? Is there something else that needs fixing first?
• Is there a more collaborative or decentralised approach to plan that initiative?

If you're the Chief of Stuff it's worth thinking twice before hitting send on that message.