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).