The Quality of Information Within A Hierarchy, by Paul Rosenberg

The people at the top sure as hell don’t know what’s going on below them. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

People very often expect authorities to possess superior information. After all, the assumptions of the 20^th century were that those at the top of large systems have information the rest of us don’t, and that they make better decisions because of it. This was the lesson of the factory, the military and government. In all cases, those at the top were believed to have the best information.

In actual practice, however, those at the top don’t get the best information. An FBI agent in Minneapolis, to use a famous example, knew all about the bizarre behavior of the 9/11 hijackers, but that information never reached those who were expected to use it.

There are many more examples, of course. The military is full of them; ask a 20-year corporal or sergeant some time. Pretty much every mid-level manager at a corporation can tell you the same types of stories. And by now we should all know how deeply “out of it” high level politicians are.

The problem is not the people involved, however; the problem is the structure. All of these are hierarchies, and all, necessarily, pass information up and down between levels of the structure. And that is a problem. The crucial fact is this:

As information is passed through the levels of a hierarchy, it is filtered.

This much is not seriously questionable. Corporate analysts have been talking about it for decades, trying to “flatten” the corporation. And again, this is caused by the structure itself, not by the quality of the individuals involved. A person with exceptionally high integrity will filter less, but since we’re talking about structures involving thousands of people, that’s not a significant factor. Hierarchies filter information because of their structure.

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