The rise and expansion of non-nutritive information.
It is difficult to select for less.
First, do not worry.
This is not going to be a lengthy post about all the do-don’t-can-can’t diets out there, but instead, is referencing the great Clark Griswold of National Lampoons fame in order to talk about bloated content.
It starts with a bowl of cereal, and what our good pal Clark has done to improve our experience.
“Oh, the crunch enhancer? Yeah, it’s a non-nutritive cereal varnish. It’s semi-permeable. It’s not osmotic. What it does is it coats and seals the flake and prevents the milk from penetrating it,” Clark tells his co-worker at the food preservative company he is employed at, making him problematic by today’s MAHA standards, both for creating food preservatives and enabling people to eat cereal.
It’s a fun phrase to say, non-nutritive. I’ve taken to using it frequently when confronted with unnecessary things. The non-nutritive argument. The non-nutritive end credits. The non-nutritive information. The non-nutritive tipping culture that wants to ask us one quick question before we tap our card.
If something is non-nutritive, it has no inherent value. It’s there, it does something up front, but it provides nothing nutritious. You can’t grow from it.
Author Erik Larson, in his excellent book about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, perfectly describes non-nutritive problems in the communications between the skilled meteorologists in Cuba and the bureaucrats in the fledgling beginnings of our modern national weather services.
Stockman was a ponderous bureaucrat, given to writing immense reports about tiny things. When he filed his second annual report on July 31, 1900, even the professors and clerks at the Central Office rebelled, and these were men accustomed to levels of tedium that would have driven ordinary men to suicide.
[…]
“Nevertheless, I am constrained to say that if the Official in Charge at Havana could curb a tendency toward verbosity and avoid iterations and reiterations in successive communications of matter that is irrelevant and immaterial to the subject heads, a great deal of time and labor would be saved…”1
Business and professional communication is the realm of some of the worst non-nutritive word collections for many reasons, most often narrowed down to two: people who pack caveats and backdoors into everything in case it hits the fan and they need wiggle room to spread the blame, or people whose thinking process is frightfully completed by talking and writing out their thoughts so that they, forty-some paragraphs later, might come to a semblance of a conclusion. It appears that a well-structured and concise three-sentence reply in which all necessary information is conveyed is not enough in these cases, and instead, a dissertation-level extinction event is all that will suffice. There is no tedium, to borrow Larson’s excellent word choice, that cannot be provided with such verbal steroids to train coworkers to avoid communication with such a person at all possible costs.
Excess is generally non-nutritive. It’s an anchor, a brake, a distraction.
Captain D. Michael Abrashoff, at age 36, was selected to become Commander of USS Benfold. Not only was he the most junior commanding officer in the Pacific Fleet at the time, but it was a rather crappy ship, if we’re speaking kindly, in terms of crew morale. High turnover, seriously lackluster performance evaluations, and no indication that it would ever change greeted him on day one. But in one year, USS Benfold was ranked top in performance with the same crew he had when he took over. Dude was a legitimate leader, to be sure.
A friend attended a leadership conference in which Abrashoff told his story and gave out his book, It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy, and that is where this non-nutritive principle can be found.
In the book, Abrashoff recounts his career and the early experiences that led to his becoming the leader necessary to achieve a USS Benfold-like success. While serving as the military assistant to Secretary of Defense William Perry, he was given the task of going through a four-foot-high stack of papers and clippings every day with the sole purpose of determining which news and information items were of importance for Perry to see.
Every morning at 5:30 a.m. Abrashoff arrived, and he’d stay until 8:30 p.m. reading and sorting through the papers. He’d then send his summaries to the two-star Army general who was the senior military assistant, and who would make the final cut of what Perry would ultimately see.
Abrashoff thought he had a good understanding of what was important. And he certainly did whittle down that huge stack of information to a much smaller pile. But for the first two months, his entire day’s effort would mostly end up in the garbage. The two-star general threw out 90 percent of what Abrashoff had selected, passing on only 10 percent to Perry.
At first, it was angering and disheartening. But Abrashoff respected the general and decided to learn what was—if you’ll pardon my intrusion on his story—non-nutritive about the information he was selecting. He began studying the papers that were thrown out to learn how that decision was made. What was the pattern? What made the cut? Why was this information unimportant? He became more efficient and effective by streamlining the information he sent forward. Within three months, about 80 percent of what he selected was passed on to Perry.2
It’s hard work to rid ourselves of the extra.
We love non-nutritive. We can barely identify it, and therefore, are shocked when two-star generals or anyone else toss something in the garbage or show disinterest when we wander into every situation with a crunch enhancer.
We take 300 vacation or family event photos because they’re digital and we can, forgetting what it was like when we were winding and shooting film and had to make the right decisions on what handful of photos would tell the story years from now. We live in an era of “hauls” in which buying massive quantities of a particular thing—clothes haul, book haul, food haul—has become stock content on social media and video platforms. Stuff is cheap, digital is easy, and so we no longer curate.
Before AI and social algorithms, curation was the big buzzword on the internet. RSS readers were finely honed, bringing information to people based strictly on sources they wanted.
But now we just automate the curation and don’t notice the bloat. Less is more, but it’s hard to define what is essential. If we just scoop it all up, surely we’ll be safe because somewhere in that massive pile is the thing we wanted, though we’ve just committed either more time than we have to sort it, or added a burden of failure to our psyche because we fixate on our failure to tidy things up in life.
Share only a handful of photos instead of 25 or 500.
Write shorter emails because more words aren’t better communication; they only train your coworkers not to trust opening your emails without their eyes bleeding.
Share a poignant, singular piece of content on social media instead of a deluge.
I don’t know. Apply this as needs must. There are friendships and hobbies and things that slip into non-nutritive. They might be crunch enhancers, and that can be nice for a while, but it’s just an additive when it’s all said and done.
I don’t know what else you’ve read today, but I’m pretty sure you haven’t seen anyone try to draw a line and connect Clark Griswold, the Galveston hurricane, and the Navy, and perhaps this kind of thing ought only happen once.
You’re welcome. This may have been non-nutritive.
Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 104-105.
Michael Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2002), 31-32.
As someone who has a 22+ year “career” as a blogger based solely on my ability to deliver non-nutritive content (or, to be more accurate, my inability to provide nutritive content), I cannot let these base accusations go unchallenged and therefore I must needs be respond in the most, uh…well…I forget where I was going with this. Please pass the Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds and a Walt Kelly cartoon book.