Information Dysfunction (ID): The Hidden Disconnect Inside Today’s Organizations
The hidden tax you’re paying for all that information you didn’t need.
Most organizations suffer from an odd, unhelpful phenomenon:
People have more than enough information to make a decision —
and yet decisions still don’t get made.
Information scales effortlessly.
Authority does not. People are often waiting for one more piece of information to make the “best” decision.
So decisions stall.
Ownership blurs.
Teams hesitate because the organization hasn’t clarified who gets to act, who owns the tradeoff, or who has the mandate to move.
We mislabel this as misalignment or poor communication, but the real problem is simpler and far more structural:
ID — Information Dysfunction.
ID is what happens when the organization generates information faster than it can maintain a shared structure for turning that information into action.
Decision rights become ambiguous.
Accountability gets stuck in limbo.
Responsibility diffuses until no one knows whose judgment carries weight.
You can recognize ID instantly:
Work gets trapped in approval purgatories nobody designed.
Teams agree on goals but disagree on authority.
Priorities shift without the corresponding shift in ownership.
Plans circulate widely but lack a clear decision path.
The loudest opinions win because decision logic is unclear.
People “wait for clarity” that cannot arrive because the constraint is structural, not informational.
This isn’t a communication failure.
It’s a disconnect between information and authority.
And that disconnect follows a predictable pattern.
The Five D’s of Information Dysfunction
Once you see these five failure modes, you start noticing them everywhere.
1. Divergence — when the models no longer match reality.
Reality moves.
Roles, plans, and decision structures don’t.
People are making decisions using yesterday’s map.
2. Dilution — when meaning weakens as it spreads.
A clear intention becomes a softer directive becomes an optional suggestion.
By the time it reaches the edges, nobody knows what it authorizes.
3. Decoherence — when interpretations stop fitting together.
Same words.
Different implications.
Team A hears “must.”
Team B hears “maybe.”
Leadership hears “monitor.”
Each interpretation is internally logical but incompatible with the others.
4. Decay — when context evaporates.
Rationale disappears.
Ownership dissolves.
Tradeoffs get lost.
Decisions lose the logic required to sustain them.
The organization remembers what but forgets why.
5. Duplication — when meaning gets rebuilt instead of reused.
Three teams build three strategies for the same initiative because none of them knows which interpretation was actually authorized.
Artifacts multiply.
Shared understanding does not.
Together, these five D’s generate the visible outcome:
Dysfunction — the surface-level symptom of deep structural disconnect.
Not personal failure.
Not cultural weakness.
Simply this:
Information exists,
but there is no coherent structure that tells people what it enables.
Why ID keeps spreading
Two forces accelerate ID faster than organizations can adapt:
1. Digital tools scale information, not decision rights.
Everything gets documented.
Nothing gets resolved.
Tools store artifacts.
They do not store authority.
2. AI accelerates the downstream while the upstream remains undecided.
AI can summarize, classify, and generate —
but it cannot answer the fundamental question:
Who gets to decide what happens next?
AI speeds up the wrong layer of the system.
It amplifies ID by making ambiguous information appear more polished.
As a result:
People act without authorized direction
Or people wait for clarity the system cannot provide
Neither is a human failure.
Both are ID.
Why naming ID matters
When you misdiagnose a structural disconnect as a communication issue, you end up treating symptoms instead of causes.
You add tools.
You refine processes.
You run another alignment meeting.
You clarify goals again.
And the disconnect remains.
Naming it — Information Dysfunction — gives people a way to articulate what they already experience:
More than enough information.
Nowhere near enough structural coherence.
Authority without clarity.
Responsibility without alignment.
Work without a shared decision model.
ID isn’t rare.
It’s the default condition of information-rich organizations.
Now that it has a name, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.