I have a friend who is an American, visiting the U.K. for the first time. He has been staying with me in Nottingham for 10 days, travelling around using a hire car, or trains.  His flight leaves from Birmingham tomorrow, Monday, and he will drive the hire car to the airport and leave it there.  He asks me,

“How far is it to Birmingham airport?”.

Now the straightforward answer is “About 50 miles”.  But, bearing in mind the first principal of information, in order to ensure this information is relevant, I need to know the decision which my friend wishes to make.  I add “Why do you want to know?”.

He answers, “My plane takes off at 11:00 a.m., which means I have to be at the airport at 9:00 a.m.  I need to decide when to leave.  I reckon, since the roads are dual carriageway or motorway, the journey should only take me an hour and I can leave at 8:00.”

I reply, “How lovely it must be to leave in a part of the U.S. with no traffic jams.  Unfortunately, the roads between here and Birmingham consist of several long traffic jams at that time on a Monday morning and you need to leave at least two hours in advance, especially as you have to park the hire car and leave the keys.  So I would leave at 7:00”.

This example illustrates the importance of understanding the link between information and decisions.  My friend failed to tell me the decision he had to make, when to leave, and the facts surrounding the decision, he had to be at Birmingham Airport at 9:00 on a Monday morning.  If I had only answered, “About 50 miles”, he could have missed his plane, or at least have had a worrying journey.

So I answered “…at least two hours” because that was as accurate as I could be.  There would have been no point in answering one hour, fifty-five minutes and twenty seconds because I couldn’t predict the journey time that accurately and it would give a false impression of how certain I was of the timing. 

When did my friend want the information?  Well, he had to know when to leave, so he would know when to get out of bed – so there would be no point in telling him the following morning.  However, there would be time tonight to check on the road news to see if there were any road works which would make the journey even longer!  For this reason there would also have been no point in him asking the question two weeks before he arrived in the UK.

What we didn’t do was spend a long time discussing whether it would take 1¾ or 2 hours to reach the airport.  We started at the information known accurately, the time the plane was to leave and worked back.  The best solution?  Leave at around 6:30 to beat the traffic and have a leisurely breakfast at the airport.

The next illustration concerns accuracy and timeliness...