Peter Jones: 14 May 2007

Please see an interesting follow-up link by our dear friend, Dr Peter Jones, on the subject "From Data to Wisdom" initiated at CIMI website a few months back

A few words to describe Dr. Peter Jones

Dr. Peter Jones is managing partner of Dialogic Design International, LLC, a partnership dedicated to advancing structured dialogue for sociotechnical problems, social change situations, and complex systems. He is also a board member of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, a non-profit dedicated to dialogic design in the civic/public sector.

Dr. Jones is managing principal of Redesign Research, a consulting practice for information product design, independent research and innovation strategy, located in Dayton and Toronto. He has designed complete products, websites, & information services for large firms and start-ups. Dr. Jones authored Team Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to Collaborative Innovation, revised in 2002. His research interests are reflected in publications on information ecology, cognitive work in professional practices, user experience, and organizational strategy.

However constructed, the DIKW model presents a kind of Maslovian-type hierarchy of knowledge, where the higher levels are assumed to be “better” locations that are reached by mastering the lower levels composing the pyramid. Except in Laszlo’s model, the pyramidal shape is rightly downsided-up, to better envision the dynamics of the syntonic (dual-circuit) model. Laszlo shows the bottom levels (data and information) as constituting more objectified representations of human knowledge. The higher levels increase the degrees of freedom exponentially, toward an unlimited horizon of (subjective) possibility, creativity, and transcendence. The pyramid is bisected just above Knowledge, a line indicating that teaching applies only to the more objectified, concrete representations and that individually-motivated learning is required to attain comprehension through enlightenment.

In the development of KM, one of the persistent forces driving the field was the possibility of moving organizational awareness from a data-perspective toward a knowledge-based perspective. A non-trivial difference was imagined, whereby we might enhance productivity, reduce error and the reinvention of wheels, and accelerate innovation by leveraging the various levels of information entities: data, information, and the ever-elusive knowledge. Consider an organizational model of this pyramid based on one of the main drivers of KM, innovation management. Some of the questions that drive interaction at these levels may include:

• Data: What resources do we have?
• Information: What do we know about?
• Knowledge: What do we know how to do with what we know?
• Comprehension: Where do we have mastery? (Is it worth doing?)
• Understanding: How well do we understand our context, opportunities and possibilities?
• Wisdom: Knowing this, what should we do? (What’s the best decision?)
• Transcendence: What does this mean? (What’s the best contribution we can make?)

I would also like to clarify that we must define these levels of meaning as states of consciousness, from Data to Transcendence. Data is not data apart from our awareness and perception of it as such. Information is not transformed from data except in cognition – there is no object in the world identified as “information.” Bits, yes – information, no. And of course, these are the tangible levels of meaning – the intersubjective agreement becomes more diffuse as we navigate through Knowledge and toward Wisdom. Working knowledge is inherently tacit – all the more so Understanding and Wisdom. While I am not ready to regard these states of awareness as continua, the states have characteristics we might collectively agree upon and recognize, even across cultures. And traversing up the pyramid, we experience different gradations of possibility vs. utility, tacitness vs. concreteness, self-awareness vs. object-awareness, and duration.

(So how should we explore the temporal relationships to knowledge, understanding, and insight? I will reserve the continuation of this discussion for another time.)