But, it is true that changing the ‘data stream’ can have a profound effect. In our organization, shortly after the economy crashed, we decided to put all projects on hold. Many of them had been funded and IT equipment had been purchased and brought online for the effort. In many cases, the annual cost to continue duplicate support far exceeded the cost to finish the projects. Executives were of the impression that support costs for older hardware; that being replaced; was insignificant. We took the time to gather the actual costs related to all of the older equipment to present to our executive team. Armed with that information, they were able to fund some of the dropped projects with the savings we would achieve from retiring our older infrastructure. Further, they created a term, “The Snowplow effect” to describe the cost of duplicate infrastructure. The the long term impact is that we’ve changed the corporate culture. Bottom line, we changed our executives data stream to influence our corporate bottom line.

certainly when we’re younger we’re forced to live in a well-edited data stream, but this quote represents an error i’ve seen vitalsmarts make before: they rarely distinguish an adult (who takes responsibility for that stream’s impact (i.e. for their perspective)) from a child (who does not.) we tailor our stream and those are choices made with intended consequences. if the senior managers are worth their salt, then they’ve considered the alternatives and have decided against them.

in this case mr. grenny is aware of the data that should have streamed (assuming previous crucial convos) and also addresses the change in perspective that can happen when you change your stream (to that of the senior managers). it’s just trust for senior management’s position that lets one off the hook, although in a perfect world one’s input would make a positive difference.