By the late 1990s, the US military had a name for something businesses compete on but rarely name: information superiority. Introduced in Joint Vision 2010 in 1996, the idea was simple and ruthless. The side that can gather, analyze and execute on accurate information faster than its opponent tends to win. Clarity and speed of decision-making carry the day.
Business runs on the same logic. Your competitive advantage is the sum of your decisions, and your decisions depend on the information behind them. Which strategy, which markets, where to place capital: each judgment is only as good as the data reaching the person making the call. Information superiority, getting accurate information to decision-makers faster and cleaner than your rivals, is the advantage sitting beneath all others.
Initially, military leaders focused on achieving this through accessing and providing accurate data. Yet over two decades and several frustrating campaigns, they learned something hard: A superior information position does not, on its own, produce superior decisions. They had assumed that enough networks and sensors, engineered to operate quickly enough, would lead to better-informed decisions. But between the information arriving and the decision being taken sat a layer of human perception, interpretation and judgment. And there, the advantage repeatedly and routinely drained away.
Which raises an uncomfortable question. How good is the information actually reaching you?
Most senior leaders assume it’s good. They have dashboards, briefings and surveys, and many invest in building a culture that encourages people to speak up. Yet despite all this, information rarely travels upward in raw form. It gets compressed, tidied and interpreted at every level. As a result, what lands on your desk may look professional, succinct and aligned, but it may also have lost the parts that matter most.
5 ways information degrades
This silent erosion of information superiority is hard to spot because distortion rarely looks like distortion. It looks like conciseness, professionalism or consensus. You can’t notice the absence of something you’ve never seen, so leaders consistently overestimate how complete their information is. And the more senior you are, the wider that blind spot grows.
Information degrades on its way up in five ways.
1. Suppression
Bad news gets withheld, delayed or softened. The night before the 1986 Challenger launch, engineers warned that the booster seals could fail in the cold. Managers softened the message and told NASA the data was inconclusive. The shuttle broke apart seventy-three seconds after launch. The information existed. It just never traveled intact.
2. Inflation
Positivity becomes amplified. “The early results are mixed” becomes “the early signs are encouraging.” Forecasts become overly optimistic. And employees overly praise their bosses and their opinions. The research is blunt on this, too: CEOs who receive high levels of flattery and opinion conformity are more likely to damage performance and persist with failing strategies, hastening their exit.
3. Narrowing
The range of what gets discussed shrinks. From the mid-1990s, UK banks mis-sold payment protection insurance on an industrial scale, and the compensation bill eventually topped £38 billion. Staff on the ground knew the product was routinely unsuitable. Yet what traveled upward was sales data, so the complaints never made the same journey.
4. Simplifying
Disagreement is stripped out, so a recommendation sounds cleaner and more unanimous than the debate behind it. Kennedy’s advisers went into the Bay of Pigs with serious private doubts they never voiced as a group. So, he heard the consensus, not the argument.
5. Certifying
Uncertainty is converted into certainty. The analyst knows the forecast is give-or-take 30%. Their boss receives a single number. Confidence intervals and caveats are stripped out before the paper reaches the ExCo at every major company every week. And it’s considered efficient and professional, right up to the moment it goes wrong.
Being confidently wrong, faster
These distortions bite even harder than they first sound, too. The military’s initial idea was that speed wins. What they took for granted was that the picture acted on was true. But feed a fast decision cycle distorted information, and speed stops being a strength. It doesn’t make you sharper; it makes you confidently wrong faster than a slower competitor would. Every distortion above is a way an organization hands its own decision-makers a cleaner, calmer version of reality than the one they are in. The faster you run, the further off course you get.
Most organizations have one defense against all of this: psychological safety. It’s a real and necessary one. When people feel able to speak without fear, they suppress less. Fear, though, drives only one of the five distortions. A safe culture does almost nothing about inflation, narrowing, simplifying and certifying. It wins one battle in a longer campaign, and treating it as the whole war is how leaders can end up both confident and badly informed.
3 ways to build information superiority
Building real information superiority requires three things beyond a safe culture.
First, measure information flow. Most measures capture how people feel about speaking up. Almost none capture whether accurate information is actually moving. At least one distortion is always active; you need to know which one.
Second, engineer against the specific distortion you have. In my work with organizations, one or two are usually more active than the rest, so name yours first. Pre-mortems and reference-class forecasting can counter inflation. A dedicated route for weak signals, including skip-level contact, can counter narrowing. Requiring two competing analyses before a decision can counter simplifying. And expecting people to state confidence levels can counter certifying.
Third, ask sharper questions. Which concerns are discussed in the corridor but absent from the report? Where is confidence rising faster than evidence justifies? What did your team disagree about before they reached this tidy conclusion?
The militaries that coined the term understood that information superiority has to be built and defended deliberately, through process and structure, because the natural drift of any organization is to tell those at the top a cleaner story than the truth. The leaders who win aren’t the ones who feel best informed. They are the ones who have engineered their organization to carry reality upward intact, and who therefore see the field as it really is, while their competitors see the version that survived the climb.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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