Wikipedia – Information management uses the legal terms Holschuld (obligation to collect) and Bringschuld (obligation to deliver) for the information behavior of persons or personnel who have to collect information, messages or knowledge from the owner of the information in a timely and complete manner and in a suitable form or to forward it to another person.

According to the sender-receiver model, work instructions, service instructions or a manager must clarify in advance which information is required to be retrieved (pull) and for which information is required to be delivered (push) and who is responsible for the transmission of information. There is an obligation to deliver if the sender is the initiator of the information forwarding. In the case of an obligation to collect, the recipient is the initiator and must make an effort to obtain information from a source.

As a rule, information and messages are the responsibility of the person who received this information. He must decide to which addressees it is to be passed on. In hierarchical organizations, the reporting obligation (obligation to provide) is imposed on the respective lower level, which has to report to the higher level. Management must then inform the board accordingly. Since the supervisory board should obtain all relevant information in a better and more detailed manner, it has to actively demand the executive board’s obligation to provide it and to meet its obligation to collect it to a greater extent.

Holschuld from holen, to get and Schuld, obligation. You are obligated to get or ask for the information. Bringschuld from bringen, to bring, provide, give and Schuld, obligation. You are obligated to bring, provide, give the information.

“I didn’t know that!” – “But that’s on the intranet. You should have known that! After all, information is a debt to be collected!”

This or something similar is a dialogue that is heard again and again between project employees and project managers. Whereby instead of “Intranet” there can also be “Project drive”, “SharePoint” or another medium.

Is that really true? Is information in the project really the responsibility of the project staff?

I think the project manager (or the project office) makes things too easy here. I can’t throw all the information out at the employees’ door and then expect them to pick out the ones that are relevant to them. So that we understand each other correctly: the project manager can expect his employees to read meeting minutes or other periodicals regularly if they know where to find the latest issue.

But they won’t, and shouldn’t, bother to sift out “out of line” information that affects them from the jumble of information. That’s not their job. You should work on the project, any other approach would slow down the project.

Information hoarding, whether intentional or not, can be a costly problem. In fact, International Data Corp estimates that Fortune 500 companies lose at least $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge across teams and individuals. When employees don’t share their knowledge, teams miss opportunities to collaborate, individuals waste time trying to track down information, and organizations fail to preserve expertise and tacit knowledge when people leave the company.

At the end of your day, do you close out dozens of browser tabs that you intended to look at but never got to?

Do you have piles of downloaded movies, TV shows, and music that you’ve never watched?

Have you ever discovered unread PDFs, e-books, and blog articles collecting virtual dust in secret corners of your computer?

Congratulations, you might be an Information Hoarder!

That means you collect information but don’t use it. Like the cat ladies on an episode of “Hoarders,” Information Hoarders have way more stuff than they know what to do with.

This very modern problem stems from the wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, our desire to consume it all, and our inability to do it.

I’ve observed a growing problem in today’s workplace where employees hide, hoard or simply don’t provide information to others in their organization. It’s disruptive and contributes substantially to the lack of productivity. Although employers have tried multiple solutions to the problem — meetings, team building, knowledge management systems — the issue remains largely unresolved.

Human beings are a complicated bunch, and, as it turns out, there are multiple reasons that can cause this breakdown in the flow of information from person to person, level to level or team to team. The fix depends largely on determining which specific issues are driving the behavior in each particular instance.

Knowledge hoarding is an indirect business killer, and there are often signs of knowledge hoarding in the workplace if you know what to look for. The good news is that once you recognize the signs, you can start addressing them.

We’re going to take a deeper dive into the definition of knowledge hoarding, why employees may keep knowledge to themselves, and what you can do to promote a culture of knowledge sharing within your organization.