p.5 The premise of this paper is that organizational success is based on the organization's ability to process information of appropriate richness to reduce uncertainty and clarify ambiguity.

p.13 Managers will turn to rich media when they deal with the difficult, changing, unpredictable human dimensions of organizations. Rich media enable them to communicate about and make sense of these processes.

p.16 The majority of manager information is processed through rich media because organizations are often fast changing, and many of the manager's responsibilities pertain to the social, emotional and poorly understood aspects of organization.

p.16-17 A study by Holland, Stead, and Leibrock (1976)... proposed that individuals working under high uncertainty would use richer media to transfer information than would individuals dealing with relative certainty... Holland, et al concluded that managers experiencing uncertainty should be encouraged to use rich sources of information... High rich media enabled participants to learn about complex topics in a short time.

p.22 Organizations must cope with equivocal cues in a way that reduces equivocality to an acceptable level so that the organization can take action and get things done. The equivocal stimulus triggers information processing within the organization that leads to greater certainty and clarity for participants.

p.29 The majority of stimuli contain ambiguity. The external environment is alive with sounds, observed behavior, music, language, and symbols of all types. Most of these phenomena have multiple interpretations. Knowledge on any single topic is incomplete. People act on scraps of information and form these scraps into coherent wholes (Weick and Daft, 1982). The ability to process and interpret equivocal stimuli from the environment is what distinguishes human beings from lower level systems.

p.35 As Weick argued, uncertainty triggers the act of organizing. People cluster around the equivocal event and pool ideas and perceptions. This information should be processed through media of high richness until equivocality is reduced to an acceptable level so that less rich media can be used to communicate specific goals and tasks.

p.42 Scanning pertains to the organization's intelligence gathering mechanisms. Most environmental scanning takes place at the upper levels of the organization (Aiken and Hage, 1972). The few studies which have actually observed scanning behavior indicated that most scanning utilizes rich media.

p.47 Interdependence is... related to media richness. Thompson (1967) argued that when interdependence increased from pooled to sequential to reciprocal, techniques of coordination should change from rules to standardization to mutual adjustment. These coordination techniques are changes in media. Rules do not convey rich information, but mutual adjustment (face-to-face) is very rich.

p.49 Organizational design should enable the appropriate amount of information to be processed, and should provide managers with appropriate media richness depending on task uncertainty and interdependence.

p.50 When the environment is uncertain and equivocal, rich media are called for.

p.52 rich media are used more extensively in organic organizations where the environment is changing and complex.

p.57 Organizations must be able to translate uncertainty to certainty in order to achieve internal efficiency and stability (Skivington, 1982).

p.59 Thorngate's (1976) postulate of commensurate complexity. Thorngate states that a theory of social behavior cannot be simultaneously general, accurate, and simple. Two of the three are possible, but only at a loss to the third.

p.59-60 The major conclusion from the paper is the need for organizations to manage information richness. Richness has to reflect the organization's need to interpret an uncertain environment and to achieve coordination within.

p.60 Rich information will have to be processed because environments will never be certain and internal conditions will never be characterized by complete agreement and understanding. Without some level of rich information, organizations would become rigid and brittle. They could not adapt to the environment or resolve internal disagreements in a satisfactory way.