HiFi Principle: Getting High-Fidelity Information

Getting Accurate Information from the Source

The HiFi Principle encourages you to get close to the source of information and examine what may have been lost in transmission.

THE HIFI PRINCIPLE: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information—information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.

Better information gives you a firmer basis for reasoning about a decision.

Many people treat all sources of information as if they’re equally valid. They’re not. While you might value getting everyone’s opinion, that doesn’t mean each opinion should be equally weighted or considered.

Much of the information we consume comes as highlights, summaries or distillations. They can be useful, but knowing a conclusion is different from understanding the evidence behind it.

A nutritionist may condense experience and research into a practical eating plan. That abstraction can be useful. Asking why the recommendations fit your circumstances helps you understand their purpose and when they might need to change.

It’s natural to think these abstractions will save us time and improve our decision-making, but in many cases they don’t. Reading a summary might be faster than reading a full document, but it misses a lot of details—details that weren’t relevant to the person summarizing the information, but that might be relevant to you. You end up saving time at the cost of missing important information. Skimming inadvertently creates blind spots.

Summaries help manage more information than we could examine firsthand. Each stage of selection or compression can also remove context, so check whether the summary retains the details your decision requires.

Decision-makers can become confident in a summary without understanding the problem it describes. When the consequences matter, trace important claims back to the observations or evidence supporting them.

Different information can help explain a disagreement. Ask what the other person has seen and how they interpret it before assuming their choice makes no sense.

How do we get better information?

Someone close to a problem may know details a distant analyst misses. A person working on the line at McDonald’s may understand a recurring local problem and have a practical fix. Broader data can help establish whether it occurs elsewhere and whether that fix would work across the organization. Local experience and broader analysis can inform each other.

My friend Tim Urban has a good metaphor to explain this concept. In the restaurant business, there are chefs and there are line cooks. Both can follow a recipe. When things go according to plan, there is no difference in the process or the result. But when things go wrong, the chef knows why. The line cook often does not. The chef has cultivated depth of understanding through years of experience, experimentation, and reflection, and as a result, the chef, rather than the line cook, can diagnose problems when they arise.

Direct observation and questions to knowledgeable people can reveal how a conclusion was reached.

Leonardo da Vinci is a great example. He kept journals throughout his life, and they contain notes about how he went about getting the right information. He wrote things like, “Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle,” and “Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner.”

As information travels up an organization, detail and nuance can be lost. Remember that children’s game, telephone: you whisper a sentence to the next person, and that person whispers it to the next, and after it passes through half the class, the message is nothing like the original sentence. No single person necessarily changes it much, but the more people it passes through, the more all those little changes accumulate. The same thing happens when information travels through an organization. It goes through multiple filters, including individual levels of understanding, political interpretation, and biases. Details are abstracted from the original, and the signal is lost. The various incentives people have when they communicate information end up complicating things even further.

The problem isn’t merely that people are unreliable transmitters of information; the problem is also that there are limitations on the information that abstractions can represent. Think of a road map. It’s an abstract representation of a real landscape. That landscape includes rocks, plants, animals, cities, wind, and weather, along with many other things. We don’t represent all of them when we map the landscape, only those things that interest us—for example, roads, rivers, and geographical boundaries. We pull these features away from the original and represent them in a way that makes them stand out. (That’s in fact what the word “abstract” means: “to pull away from.”)

Removing what doesn’t serve our interests is what makes a map useful. But somewhere in the process, someone has decided what’s useful and what isn’t based on what interests them. What if we’re interested in something else? What if we’re interested in population densities or geological strata? A road map isn’t designed to highlight these concepts, so it’s not going to be very useful to us.

What’s true of maps is true of any other abstractions: by nature, they’re designed to serve the interests of their designers. If their purpose differs from yours, check whether the abstraction contains what you need. The same applies to secondhand accounts: their selection of details may omit something relevant to your decision.

I learned the importance of accurate information while working for the CEO of a large company. Nothing crossed his desk without going through me first. Early one morning I saw an email from one of his direct reports flagging a technical problem that was affecting operations. After I told him what I’d heard about the problem, he asked a simple question: “Where did you get this information?” I replied that I’d heard it from the VP in charge of the division. The look on his face instantly turned to disappointment. Moments passed in silence.

Finally, he spoke softly, telling me that his decisions could only be as good as his information.

He wasn’t getting the raw HiFi information. He knew that people in the organization had an incentive to convey things in a way that covered up mistakes or made themselves look good. And he knew that those filters would obscure rather than clarify the situation.

When a report leaves an important question unanswered, look for direct observation, underlying records or a conversation with someone involved. Being close to the source can recover missing detail; it still leaves you responsible for checking accuracy and context.