Optimal Information

Consultancy |  Plain language | Safety clutter | Information audits | Information design | FAQs

What is optimal information?

Optimal information is both effective (it achieves a purpose that has value) and cost-effective (the value of the achievement is greater than the total cost of the information).

Typically, this means the information is clear, concise, and compelling – to the audience.

In our experience, most knowledge workers do not fully appreciate the economics of writing, and lack many of the information design skills required for their work.

To help your organisation to produce optimal information we can:

Plain language transformations

With the enactment of the Plain Language Act 2022 in April 2023, writing in ‘plain language’ has become a legal requirement for more than 100,000 public servants here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

However, while the Act itself remains in the margins, its definition of plain language – information that is ‘clear, concise, and well organised’ for a precisely-defined audience – shines a helpful light on the issue of knowledge workers spending too long to write too much for purposes that are too vague.

What is your information culture?
It’s either exhaustive (and cost doesn’t matter) or concise and cost-effective.
It can’t be both.

If your staff write as if it doesn’t matter how long a document is, or how much it costs, then you probably have an out-of-date information culture and a suite of habits, processes, and templates that support overwriting.

Simon can work with you to design a simple transformation program to make cool (and possible!) to be concise.

Win-wins from addressing safety clutter

What is safety clutter?
A 2018 paper by academics from Brisbane’s Griffith University* defined safety clutter as ‘the accumulation of safety procedures, documents, roles, and activities that are performed in the name of safety, but do not contribute to the safety of operations.’

In other words, safety clutter is the well-intentioned over-creation of safety measures.

Safety clutter is also:

  • wastefully expensive
    because every word costs – not just to create, but to store, disseminate, and maintain
  • unsafe
    because all that confusing low-value information hides and desensitises us to essential information, and permits those responsible for safety to assume that everything has been taken care of (because all those policies, procedures, forms, inductions, etc, exist)
  • very common

Helpfully, the Griffith University paper didn’t just define the ‘previously unlabelled and under-theorised problem’, it highlighted a common cause: ‘the ease and the opportunity of adding or expanding safety activities, [compared to] the difficulty and lack of opportunity for reducing or removing safety activities.’

This is where Simon can provide extremely valuable assistance: first, in helping organisations to ‘see’ the clutter; second, in helping them to efficiently design it out; and, third, in helping them to create an information culture that values brevity, clarity, and usefulness, so the well-intentioned over-creation doesn’t recur.

And before ‘fixing’ safety documentation (that often houses redundancy, duplication, verbosity, inconsistency, ambiguity, and poor design), Simon is able to independently review the upstream systems, culture, and policies that accommodate the busyness.

Helping organisations to design optimal systems, culture, and less-but-better information is what Nakedize is all about.

Unlike most projects that improve a situation by predominantly adding value or reducing costs, a safety decluttering project achieves both, leaving organisations safer and more productive whilst also quickly reducing costs.

At one of New Zealand’s largest companies, Simon led a safety documentation upgrade project that began by retiring 80% of the existing materials. Simon was able to quickly show decision makers that most of the in-scope documentation was duplicated and unused, which led to significantly reduced costs (both project costs and ongoing dissemination and maintenance costs), while also increasing the effectiveness of the upgraded outputs.

While that example is from construction, similar opportunities abound (in particular) in transport, healthcare, engineering, agriculture, and manufacturing.

* A. J. Rae, D. J. Provan, D. E. Weber & S. W. A. Dekker (2018): Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of ‘safety’ work that does not contribute to operational safety, Policy and Practice in Health and Safety, DOI: 10.1080/14773996.2018.1491147

Information audit service

An information audit is an audit of your organisation’s entire information stock to determine which elements are helping you, and which are hindering you. (There is such a thing as too much information.)

The audit will provide your organisation with valuable business intelligence, including:

  • areas where money is being wasted on information
  • areas where money should be invested in information
  • information and medium duplications or redundancies
  • the data required to identify an optimal information architecture (see FAQs below)

Nakedize has developed its own information audit methodology, which produces optimal results when Simon is given access to all senior staff and strategic knowledge holders (for interviews and to complete questionnaires). Simon’s audit will provide you with a valuable report that reveals:

  • what information you have (instances, forms, mediums, duplications, inconsistencies, ambiguities, redundancies)
  • the true cost of your information (cost to create, disseminate, and store)
  • the effectiveness and value of your information (which information is a benefit, which is a burden)

Information design service

As a writer, editor, and plain language expert, Simon helps you and your team to design cost-effective documents that achieve their goals. Simon can provide:

  • advice on specific documents or information projects
  • document design
  • information architecture design (see FAQs below)

How do you book a service or get more information?

Please contact us to discuss or book an Optimal Information project.

Frequently asked questions

When is the ideal time to commission an information audit?
Given the current oversupply of information, ‘now’ is probably a fair answer. But we have found three circumstances that make an information audit particularly valuable:

  • When your organisation is new, because this gives you the precious opportunity to avoid common issues that will quickly consume resources needed for establishing your venture.
  • When your organisation is old, because you are almost certain to have built up a vast stock of expensive, redundant information and processes that now slow you down and hold you back.
  • Prior to a major information project, such as a new document management system, an intranet, or Microsoft SharePoint implementation. Remember, quality outputs require quality inputs.

What is an information architecture?
An information architecture is a blueprint of the simplest, most effective, most useful way of organising an entity’s information.

At the macro level, it should provide a single view (on a single page) of everything your organisation does.

At the micro level, it should provide a glossary of terms (divisions, groups, roles, products, services, etc) and a filing system so that information is logically grouped, ranked, and ordered, making it easy to understand, file, and find.

A high-quality information architecture is an essential component of any form of information storage (such as digital folders, a document management system, an intranet, or Microsoft SharePoint).