Attention, Synthesis and Communication

I had a "deja vu" the other day when I was having a chat with an old friend of mine, who manages the strategic consulting group of a big services firm. He was complaining that the cost of sales in his organization was too high and that they did not reuse enough other people's experiences. Wow, this sounds so 90's; but still it is so difficult to optimize.

My reaction was to treat it from the attention management perspective once again. Let me explain. Everyone complains that in the Intranets, Document Management Systems, Portals,..., they have way too much information and it's hard to find the relevant one. I said, why don't you force people to do 2 things when they capture the project experience:
1- Synthesize. It's much harder to make it short, because it forces you to get deep in the analysis of why things happened, why you won a deal, ...
2- Write thinking on people who will need it in the future, not for yourself. Force yourself to understand in which business circumstances the piece of content you are creating will be useful.

Of course, then use technology to leverage and broadcast it. They are doing a basic trial and we will see the results shortly.

What's the conclusion of this: one of the effective ways to navigate the information overload is for people to behave like journalists and think of ways in which their ideas can find their way to the appropriate minds that are interested on them.