Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations

Topsight—the overall understanding of the big picture—is hard to achieve in organizations. There’s too much going on, too many moving pieces. But without topsight, we have a hard time figuring out how information circulates, where it gets stuck, and how we can get it unstuck.

Topsight is hard to get—but you can get it. I know: I’ve been achieving topsight into various organizations for the last 15 years. Along the way, I’ve developed an approach in which I gather clues, confirm details, model social interactions, and use all of these to systematically achieve topsight. Read this book and you’ll learn how to

• design a field study at your organization
• convince your organization and individuals to take part in the field study
• conduct the field study, collecting solid data
• navigate the data you collect
• analyze the data using several different models that can provide insights into systemic issues that haven’t yet been understood within the organization
• write a solid recommendation report that presents your findings and recommends ways to solve those systemic issues