Is your organisation suffering from "infobesity"?

This week I’ve been in Toronto, one of the FIFA World Cup host cities, but I have seen no football. Instead, I’ve been at the IABC World Conference. It’s one of my favourite events, bringing together hundreds of communications, public relations, and marketing professionals from around the globe – to network, learn best practices, and discuss industry trends.

As part of the event, on Sunday morning, I hosted a global Heads of Comms session on trust and clarity in a complex world. Sharon O’Dea gave a brilliant keynote exploring information overload through the analogy of GLP-1 drugs, the weight loss injections that reduce appetite. This framing gave us one of the most memorable terms of the session: “infobesity”.

Attention is now one of the scarcest resources 

Sharon drew a deliberate parallel between our information environment and our food environment, arguing that both have become “obesogenic”: designed to encourage overconsumption, while telling individuals the answer is more self-control.

Research by Microsoft shows knowledge workers are interrupted by a meeting, email or notification roughly every two minutes during the working day. Teams, email newsletters, town halls and leadership videos are layered on top of each other. The result is not always a better-informed workforce. Too often, it is an exhausted one.

If infobesity is the disease, the comms equivalent of GLP-1 is not telling people to manage their inboxes better.

It is helping organisations reduce their appetite for sending more: through clearer governance and better prioritisation. Her point was that overload is too often treated as a personal failing. We tell people to manage their inboxes better, turn off notifications or be more disciplined about what they read. But that, she argues, is the comms equivalent of telling someone to eat less in an environment built to make overeating the easy option. It must be structural: changing how organisations produce information, not just nudging how people consume it.

Decrease, diagnose and discuss

Sharon’s solution was refreshingly practical: decrease, diagnose and discuss.

Decrease means being more intentional about volume, including asking whether a message needs to be sent at all. Diagnose means looking at where overload comes from including duplicated channels, and leaders adding noise without realising it. Discuss means having an honest conversation with leaders about priorities, trade-offs and what genuinely deserves people’s attention.

Trust does not survive in a system where everything is broadcast at the same volume.

When every message is urgent, important or “must read”, people stop believing that any of them really are. They tune out, including from the messages that genuinely matter.

So what does tackling infobesity systemically look like? 

Here are five practical actions for internal comms teams:

1. Audit what people receive. Ask colleagues to log communications over a defined period, whether they come from internal comms, leadership, HR, IT, finance or elsewhere. The point is to see the whole experience, not just the part comms owns.
2. Govern who gets to broadcast. Not every team needs a channel, newsletter or all-staff email. Clear governance protects attention and makes important messages more credible when they do need to land.
3. Consolidate channels rather than adding new ones. Every new platform is another tax on attention. Before creating something new, ask what can be stopped.
4. Reserve “urgent” for things that actually are. If everything is marked urgent, nothing is...
5. Model the behaviour at the top. Leaders who cannot resist “just one more update” undercut every governance rule comms puts in place. If people are to trust the system, senior teams need to use it responsibly too.

None of this is about persuading people to want less information. It is about organisations taking responsibility for how much they put into the system in the first place. For internal communicators, that is both the challenge and the opportunity: to move from producing more content to creating the conditions for trust, clarity and attention to survive.