You say that success in one technical area impairs companies' use of new technologies outside that area. Mike Tushman at Harvard Business School has written about the Swiss watch industry. Switzerland owned the watch market for decades, and they had quartz technology long before anyone else had it. But their success with mechanical watches got in the way of their developing a replacement market. They essentially gave the quartz technology away, and the Japanese cleaned up as a result. Their success helped put on the blinders to using the information they had about an upcoming technological change that was going to occur with them or without them.

You note that members of a team often discuss only the information they're all aware of and don't share their unique information. Why? It seems crazy, because the whole reason we put together teams is to get information that only one or two of us may have. Our best guess is that when you say what everybody knows, you get positive reinforcement. When you bring up something that is unique information, people sit there or it's unclear what happens next. So people are reinforced more for saying things other people already know.

How can an IT manager make sure all these mistakes don't happen? The role of the devil's inquisitor can be of use here. Too often, we end up using the information available and agree to the same points and bring people into the decision path who have a lot in common. The devil's inquisitor is assigned to ask, "What information that we need isn't here? What information might we have that we're not using? What might we know that we're not sharing?"

I can imagine readers becoming paranoid about never having enough of the right information. How do you balance all this with the need to decide? We don't mean to create analysis paralysis, but too often we use the information we have rather than ask, "What information do we need?" People are always doing cost-benefit analyses about whether to look for more information or stop with what they have. But we're not even arguing for collecting more, but for collecting the right information. At NASA, they had an enormous amount of information, but not the right information.

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