The manager of a large Swedish retail chain called the client saying they were "drowning in email". To solve this, the client interviewed over 40 employees and discovered that information sharing worked best when connected to a specific person, rather than things like documents on shared drives. This reflects how early humans evolved to store and share knowledge by connecting it to individuals in their social networks. Viewing other people as repositories of knowledge was key to survival. Even today, we are more likely to remember and trust information when connected to a person rather than an anonymous source.

1. ”Help!
We’re drowning
in e-mail”
Back in 2004, we got a call from a client, one of the biggest retail chains in
Sweden.
They mananger said ”We’re drowning in e-mail!”
And we said ”Well, perhaps you need an intranet?”
He said ”We already have an intranet, but nobody is using it!”
So we said ”Maybe you should redesign it?”
He said ”We just did that. It didn’t help!”
So we decided on something else.

2. map the routes
of information
We said ”Let’s MAP the information.
What information is useful to people?
What works? What information DOESN’T work?
WHERE do they GET it from? How does it travel in the organisation today?
So we interviewed more than 40 people. From the HQ to the truckdrivers to the
store managers to the people sitting at the cash registers.
And of course , they gave us completly different answers.

3. Interviews with +40 people
What was important to the manager was one thing, to the truck driver
something completely differnet.
How to make sense of that?
But when I analyzed all the answers, I realized that every interview, every
person, had something in common.
It was in the answer ”Which information works well?”
Here you have ONE seconds to guess what.
Hint: it wasn’t the lunch menu.

4. [a name]
Everybody’s answer contained A NAME.
A different name, but everyone mentioned A SPECIFIC PERSON.
They said things like
”Information on projects works well because Maggie Smith has a newsletter with
updates, that she sends every thursday”.
Or ”Info on rebates works well, because Carlos Fuentes has an Excel file with all
numbers on his server, that we can access.

5. Maggie Smith
Carlos Fuentes
Kim Li
Or
”Info on allergies works well, because Kim Li came to us in November and told
us about her work, so if I need any updates about it, I will contact her.”
And this is when I had a revelation.
I realized that this is ancient.

6. Old knowledge
I realized that this is ancient.
This goes way back, hundreds of thousands of years, or even millions.
To our predecessors on the savannahs of Africa.
And the revelation also turned me, temporarily, into Sir David Attenborough.

7. This is a skull of Homo erectus, upright man, 1.9 million years ago in Africa.
Replaced the smaller, earlier Homo habilis.
It had some AMAZING new capabilities
Of which the most important was the very first intranet.

8. Language!
Language!
And language was not only communicartion.
With language came ANOTHER extrordinary ability.
What our predecessors discovered and learned to take advantage of was that ...

9. ... other people’s brains are very smart places to STORE KNOWLEDGE.
Evolution has optimized our brains for social use.
And that is what turned our predecessors into MORE than apes,
That TRANSFORMED them into people. Or in some cases, beetles.

10. – Remember
where the
water hole
was?)
– Under
that huge
grey
rock!
– BORK? – GRAWK!
When information could be SENT, SHARED, STORED and RETRIEVED, it opened
up an ENTIRELY new possiblity for survival.
You could query the database for vital information. Matters of life and death.
Query syntax has changed, obviously -

11. – Remember
where the
K-431 form
was?
– Under
the right-
hand
menu!
(Nothing

12. new)
but else, - the same thing applies today.
This means that information also carries, or is perhaps carried by, an enormous
amount of TRUST and CREDIBILITY.
Information and trust - tightly knit together by the IDENTITY of a person.

13. ?
Which server holds
the Beijing documents?
G-disc
H disc
I discK disc
L disc
It is extremly hard for us to guess, for example, ”On which server or which
portal might the Beijing documents be?” As humans, we’re very bad at that.
But we are, on the other hand ...
... extremly good at remembering ”Who knows anything about the Beijing
documents?”

14. Who knows about
the Beijing documents?
George
Harold
IngridKevin
Liza
Or even guessing ”Who MIGHT know anything about the Beijing documents?”
And that’s the reason, if I ask you about the Beijing docs, and you say
”Yeah, there filed at K-disc slash projects, slash, China slash 2012 slash
Finished slash background”
then I will say... ” Could you mail it to me?”

15. Bjornman/Flickr
And mail - before and nowadays - ties the knowledge to a name in a very clear
way.
The IT department and database nerds will call mail ”unstructured data”.
But it is structured in the very way that is important to humans: connecting
knowledge with people.

16. the human model
This is the human model for information sharing, for an organzation, and
indeed for society.
It is an extremely efficient model for an information ecology, and for an
organization. It’s resilient.
And over millions of years, it has left the competion in the dust. Because there
is an alternative.

17. The alternative model is this: the hierarchical one.
When information is governed by one source, controlled and distributed by one
master. It has been tried and tested in nature.
And the results are in: this is the species that still relies on this model:

18. the gorilla model
The gorilla model, where the flock is dominated and controlled by one great
silverback master.
Preferred by many organizations, it’s nevertheless far less efficient. It never
evolved to the agile, dynamic environment that characterizes human societies.

19. too much ”information”...
... not enough feedbackThere is much to say about this, many implications to be drawn. I’ll just add one
thing;
Today, we’re drowning in a sea of ”information”. Numbers, quantified goals,
measurements, the ”new public managment”. There is a cult of ”information”.
But a serious lack of feedback.

20. What was the problem?
”Nobody sees what I do”
Back at the retail company, we also discovered the roots of the email deluge.
The managers that complained about emails didn’t even sit in the same space
as their employees; but in a separate office several kilometers away.
To make themselves known as useful, they employees had to tell the world by
email.

21. Jonas Söderström • InUse Experience • Intranets2014, Sydney
slideshare.net/Jonas_inUse/
speakerdeck.com/jonas_blind_hen/
Although this was in 2004, long before Facebook and other social media, this
simple study made it clear to me, that SOCIAL will trump anything
This story actually continues with interesting connections to Joseph Stalin and
some other stuff, but I’ll have to share that with you during drinks.
The slides are available on Slideshare and Speakerdeck under my nicks - but
I’m sure, that you’ll ask me: ”Can you mail it to me?”
Thank you.