There is an enemy in your company, and it’s invisible. You can’t see it because it literally is not there. Yet its impact is massive on every level of the enterprise, from boardroom to marketing to operations to the field staff. And the only way we have even the smallest chance of destroying it is by focusing on what it causes... its footprint.

Can you name it?

Yes, the enemy is information deficits: information that is either incomplete, imprecise, misleading, late/too late, wrong, or simply not there. This missing information is always vital to the task at hand, but its main attribute is its unavailability, whether by neglect or by oversight. Another way to say this is “missing answers.”

Missing answers are rampant in the workplace, whether factory, hospital, office, or government agency. Here I am not referring to information that we as customers might request from, for example, a government agency—the DMV, IRS, or Social Security; that is a different order of answer. The missing answers under discussion are the ones we need to do our own work.

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