Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Chapter 1.5 Informational Processes
It is the recipient who communicates.
The so-called communicator, the person who emits the communication,
does not communicate. He utters.
Unless there is someone who hears, there is no communication. There is only noise.
Peter Drucker (1974)
What is “information“?
In this difficult case even Wikipedia does not help us very much. It says: ‘Information as a concept
bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the
concept of information is closely related to notions of communication, constraint, control, data,
form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception and representation.’
(www.en.wikipedia.org). It means saying a lot to say nothing, doesn’t it?
Alas, badly defined basic concepts and notions, also different in different languages and cultures,
(unfortunately, using sometimes even the same spelling) often seem to be very familiar to
everyone, thus creating an illusion that they are clearly understood. This creates a problem for
global communication. If the terms did not sound so familiar, if we did not hear these words a
hundred times everyday, we would ask what they mean, discuss the answers and come to a more
or less similar understanding, making our communication much more effective.
Trainers’ and consultants’ communications must be effective. That is why they spend the
necessary time to get consensus on the meaning of words that intend to play an important role in
further explanations and discussions.
Information is very important term for any management related subject. Because managers most
of the time do nothing else, just communicating and processing information. Effective and efficient
processing of information creates a significant precondition for the effective and efficient work of a
manager. Like efficiency of processing fuel in engine conditions efficiency of using care.
Few managers would be able to say what ‘information’ means. Most often – they confuse it with
‘data’. A certain contribution to the misunderstanding was made by the common use of the term
“IT” for purely data processing technologies. Thus, we shall discuss the issue in more detail. For
this we shall start with the behaviour of organisms. Informational processes in nature make no
sense for non-living matter.
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