Topsight 2.0: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations

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 over 20 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
• characterize the data you collect
• analyze the data using several different models, providing insights into systemic issues that haven’t yet been understood within the organization
• present your findings and recommend ways to solve those systemic issues
• codesign workflow and tools with the individuals who will use them

Clay Spinuzzi is a professor of rhetoric and writing at The University of Texas at Austin. Spinuzzi's interests include research methods and methodology, workplace research, and computer-mediated activity. He has written four books: Tracing Genres through Organizations (MIT Press, 2003); Network (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Topsight (via Amazon CreateSpace, 2013; Topsight 2.0 (second edition), Urso Press, 2018); and All Edge (University of Chicago Press).