Fake News of your organisation
Have you ever thought “that’s amazing I can’t believe it” but stored it as a fact anyway without double checking.
We find that we have the ability to search for any piece of information that we need, gone are the days of evenings arguing over a ‘factoid’ with friends and a glass of wine we just GTS (Google That S***). But even then can you trust what you find on the internet? Are your sources reliable and corroborated, can you be bothered to check? Probably not when the stakes are so low in an evening with friends unless of course you’re the one proven wrong. However in the workplace if we are looking to inform - provide information we need to make sure the information we are making available is accurate, up to date and factual.
In a recent article in Forbes magazine we were informed that there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated. Compare this to just 30 years ago when we had to refer back to books for our information. This created a society that generally trusted what was written down of course that’s not to say falsehoods weren’t written however the sources to find facts were more reliable in the form of encyclopaedia’s and other reference books.
Last week I found an interesting ‘fact’ that the human attention span is now less than a gold fish! I thought that is a great fact to include in a presentation when talking about communication, however on further investigation I found that although numerous reputable companies and news outlets have repeated this ‘fact’ as truth. In fact that very day I attended a workshop on body language and the presenter told us about this ‘fact’, since then I have seen it a number of times. Although the repetition of this information does no real harm, apart from making us believe we have an attention problem when in fact what we have is a multi-tasking problem (but that’s for another time), in other areas it can do especially if it is in your organisation.
As we are all aware if there is a gap in knowledge as humans we fill this gap with our imagination, this then gets shared and in the office becomes gossip and before you know it the truth. So when you have important information to share make sure it is available in a number of formats for a diverse group of people so everyone can search for and get the accurate, truthful information rather than rely on gossip.
If you have a communication problem in your workplace and would like help improving it then I can help through my consulting service or through workshops. Please don’t hesitate to give me a call to discuss on 0423 360507.
