Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations

Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations

Now available in print and Kindle editions!

Topsight—the overall understanding of the big picture—is hard to achieve in organizations. There’s too much going on, too many moving pieces. But without topsight, we have a hard time figuring out how information circulates, where it gets stuck, and how we can get it unstuck.

 

Topsight is hard to get—but you can get it. I know: I’ve been achieving topsight into various organizations for the last 15 years. Along the way, I’ve developed an approach in which I gather clues, confirm details, model social interactions, and use all of these to systematically achieve topsight. Read this book and you’ll learn how to

  • design a field study at your organization
  • convince your organization and individuals to take part in the field study
  • conduct the field study, collecting solid data
  • navigate the data you collect
  • analyze the data using several different models that can provide insights into systemic issues that haven’t yet been understood within the organization
  • write a solid recommendation report that presents your findings and recommends ways to solve those systemic issues

Advance praise for Topsight

Topsight is a proven, structured way to uncover and analyze the information flow in a process, department or organization. In contrast to many user-centered methods, it goes beyond the user and the screen to expose the work itself, identifying the parts that are broken and the connections between the users, their tools and their tasks. Topsight is ideal for large-scale, strategic design work and this book is required reading for anyone wanting to build a successful social platform, intranet or collaboration tools.

—Fredrik Matheson, Manager, Social Computing & Collaboration Group, Bekk Consulting AS

You may think you don’t need to know much about doing fieldwork to manage change in your organization, but Clay Spinuzzi shows you why it just might be in your interest to learn about it! If you use the methods in this book, you’ll learn where your communication strategy is working, where it could improve, and where you need additional information to make effective changes. In Topsight, Clay Spinuzzi presents a series of inquiry moves that anyone interested in organizational change can use. The methods are powerful, and they have been honed in over a decade of research experience and many peer-reviewed publications. But Spinuzzi presents them here for the first time as a straightforward and clear process for learning where your organization—and your people—can communicate more effectively. I believe those who think about communication practices in groups and organizations—as researchers or managers or practitioners—will find valuable insights and helpful tools in Topsight.

—William Hart-Davidson, Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Writing and Director of the Rhetoric & Writing Graduate Program, Michigan State University

Extras

In addition to instructions, Topsight offers examples and related materials. I’ll periodically add useful downloads and other extras here.

Discussions and press

How others are using Topsight

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