Fourie to Present 2nd Annual ASIS&T President’s Lecture

Contemporary societies are marked by turmoil and rapid developments at technological, regulatory, social and demographic levels. This includes Artificial Intelligence (AI), expectations for autonomy in elderly living conditions, and wider generational gaps over increased life expectancies. This necessitates attention to sense-making, coping, thriving and meeting expectations for people to be successful in the workplace, everyday life and relationships – and ultimately, to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives. While change management frameworks address organisational transformation, far less attention is given to the individual-level processes of navigating change, sense-making and emotional adaptation. At the individual level, there is a need for genuine change-enablement. Numerous examples illustrate the need for agility in adapting to changed circumstances, repositioning, and keeping track of requirements for changes. This applies to the workplace and perhaps less obviously, to everyday life. A central question is how emotional dimensions of information behaviour can inform more responsive strategies. A deeper understanding of information monitoring practices, creative use of information and the use of collaborative discourse spaces will assist in change-enablement and fostering proactive agility.  These are guided by an understanding of how we recognise and articulate information needs. Enhancing our ability to clarify needs, questions, and the information that underpins agility in coping with and anticipating change (i.e., acting as change-enabled) is essential.

Information behaviour – including the recognition and articulation of information needs, and activities such as seeking, sharing, non-sharing, transfer, encountering and avoidance – offers a powerful research lens for understanding the challenges of change and the practices that support change enablement, transition and flow. We require both a robust theoretical foundation for agility-oriented information behaviour and pragmatic practices that can be implemented in real contexts.

I will argue for a heightened awareness of information behaviour at the individual level, and for the intentional alignment of information behaviour and practices to foster agility. From the many pathways that can be followed, I will, amongst others, focus on the following:

• Challenges of the time: AI, competitiveness, relevance, ageing, autonomy, transitions, emotional well-being, agility, etc.
• Acknowledging the realities of lagging behind: contextualised lived experiences in the workplace and everyday life
• Bridging organisational and everyday life contexts – change enablement (more than traditional change management) – aiming for flow as a psychological/experiential state in the spirit of Csikszentmihalyi
• Cultivating self-awareness, the power of collectives and enriching discourses
• Recognising limitations in habits, priorities and mechanisms for monitoring change
• Integrating personality, cognitive strengths, thinking styles, emotion, and rapid creativity with systematic/analytic thinking
• Mindfulness of pitfalls, misinterpretations and misjudgements
• Respecting human dignity and the complexity of life

The lecture will position information behaviour as a transformative, future-oriented lens that expands the change and agility discourse. The intention is to encourage researchers and individuals in their own right to understand how people live through change, not just how organisations manage it. Ultimately, agility and change-enablement must honour human dignity, emotional well-being, and the rich complexity of how people live, learn and adapt. I invite Information Science researchers to position information behaviour not only as an explanatory framework, but as an active driver of human adaptability and innovation.