level appropriate

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Table of Contents

Information

Especially nowadays all information is freely available; you only need to know three things; first, that it exists, second, where to find it, and third, how to get it.

But not every piece of information is intended for you or even of your own interest, and if it is, then it is often available in such a way and quantity that you can hardly understand or process it at all. Even the flood of information that is constantly pouring in on everyone is far too great to be able to filter out or even process only the most interesting things.

Each of us therefore develops our own filter in order to catch the information that is most relevant to us. And anyone who tries to sell information themselves quickly realizes how difficult it is. Just finding the right filter for your fellow human beings is a Herculean, if not a Sisyphus task.

And even if the sender and recipient want to access the same information and use the same filters, many fail because of the push or pull principle. And if they don't fail because of this, then surely because of the information that is distributed across the different levels — a very questionable development, especially in the age of e-mail; their forwarding function for many companies or organizations is the actual reason for their system failure.

organization structure

Does the flow of information work from "bottom up", "top down" or even completely free of hierarchies? The latter means that one cannot speak of levels and thus leaves out an essential organizational tool, which leads to its own peculiarities and is not to be discussed in this article.

The main direction of the flow of information must be determined depending on the structural form, whereby the centralized tend to use the “top down” approach and the federalistic tend to use the “bottom up” approach. In addition, the flow of information between the equivalent levels must also be regulated.

As soon as you know how the information flows, you can think further.

Push-pull principle

You can get by best if the push principle applies in the information direction and the pull principle is enabled for the following levels. If the number of levels (vertical as well as horizontal) is greater, it makes sense to determine the range of both principles, whether push or pull.

And that brings us to how layers work.

level appropriate

As previously mentioned, the death of any level of leadership is information piercing, level skipping, or, worst of all, one's own irrelevance at one or more levels. Each level has its function and responsibility, otherwise it is completely superfluous - this is where consulting firms used to like to step in and cut down entire hierarchies, and if they didn't understand the company structure, that was it for the entire company or Organization.

If information arrives at a level using the push principle, it must be evaluated and, if necessary, further information obtained using the pull principle. After the information has been checked for relevance for the next level, it goes there using the push principle. In the event that the information received is completely consistent with the information passed on, one should think about one's own existence in the organization at the latest.

The fact that the information has also arrived at the recipient is noticed at the latest when the recipient obtains additional information using the pull principle.

Need to know | Nice to know

In order not to make your own level superfluous without a necessary reason, you should always be careful not to forward any incoming e-mail beyond your own level; and even at your own level, you should make sure that you only proceed according to the need-to-know principle, otherwise you will unleash an avalanche of information digitally, which is often already paralyzing entire companies, organizations and authorities.

My favorite experience in this regard is when I was asked into a very lengthy meeting in 2012, in which an issue was hotly debated that had already been successfully concluded elsewhere weeks earlier.