Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan

Push vs. Pull. One reason we hesitate to adopt a more transparent approach to information is that we fear being overwhelmed. We’re already swimming in a sea of messages and news feeds. Researchers at UC San Diego found that the average person is confronted with thirty-four gigabytes of information every day. The idea that we should all share everything all the time seems crazy. But that’s only because we misunderstand how to share information—the difference between push and pull. Legacy information sharing is “push,” meaning that the information is delivered to us without our consent. When information is pushed, we have to wade through it and separate the signal (what we need) from the noise (what we don’t). But when information is abundant, a “pull”-based system where information is tagged, stored, and ready to search is far superior. Email is push. The internet is pull. A single-track conference is push. A multitrack conference is pull. In the early days of Percolate, a content-marketing platform used by some of the biggest brands in the world, it built a tool called Barista that allowed anyone in the company to ask a question and route it to people who might know the answer. Completed questions were tagged, saved, and searchable by everyone else. Instead of trying to drown a new employee in pushed information, Percolate let them find what they needed when they needed it. When information is optional, accessible, and searchable, everyone wins. Less push, more pull.