The Content Philosopher

The Anatomy of Knowledge

It is not uncommon for discussions of content management (CM) to drift over into discussions of knowledge management (KM). And no, these are not only discussions in which I happen to be participating. In fact, it is interesting to note when these discussions typically do happen - whether I am present or not. Rather oddly, they tend to happen when discussing the goals and benefits of content management with senior business executives. Many of the usual garlands that we hang around the neck of CM, often bespeckled with promises of dollars saved here and staff positions reduced there, don't seem to excite the kind of response we are looking for. Rather than feverish uptake, our arguments frequently are met with skepticism and waning interest. It is at this dark moment we venture a word that we know cannot be linked to any of these sorts of hard calculations. That word is "knowledge".

How, we ask, does your organization manage what it knows? Where does the most valuable knowledge reside? If, as we suspect, it lives amid the communications and collaborations of your best people, then how can you manage this fleeting asset? How will your organization deal with the fact that many of your best people are about to retire? How then do you, and we wince a little knowing that we are trotting out a contentious buzzword, manage knowledge? Having crossed the line already, we decide to go all the way and ask "what is your knowledge management strategy?" And suddenly, rather than being shown the door we have the executive's undivided attention.

Having traversed this rather odd path many times, including very recently, I am regularly compelled to return to some of my earlier inquiries into KM so as to reaffirm for myself that there is indeed a way to talk about KM as a practice that has some defensible foundation and that has some reason for being other than attracting the often fickle attention of management.

A few years ago, I prepared a whitepaper on this subject - precisely because I needed to confirm for myself that there was a sensible way to talk about knowledge management and that there was indeed a concrete way to connect knowledge management to my ongoing work in content management. The result was a whitepaper called "The Anatomy of Knowledge" (See my Whitepapers Old & New or flip through it below).

This paper sets out what, I would still argue, are well-grounded (philosophically speaking) definitions for several key concepts including knowledge, information and data. It also establishes the ways in which knowledge management can be understood to be a viable practice and how that practice relates to other organizational activities. One of these organizational relationships is with technology and specifically with the cluster of technologies that we typically see deployed to manage information, content and collaboration.

Picking up on the subject of my last post (Perspectives on Data, Information and Knowledge), this paper puts forward a variation on the data - information - knowledge pyramid that I call the Knowledge Dynamic. This model stresses the differences between the artifacts of communication (data, information and knowledge) and the domain of decisions, actions and experience. It also provides what I believe is a productive framework for studying the interaction between knowledge and performance - an interaction that seems to deserve more disciplined treatment than is usually seen.

In various posts I have returned to this topic from different angles. Specifically, I have been exploring how this understanding of knowledge, information and data can inform and enlighten our understanding of content and what it means to manage content. There seems to be heightened urgency around these explorations as the concept of intelligent content gains increasing traction and more and more institutions are applying open content standards to the materials on which, in a very real sense, their business turn. The post entitled The Truth about Content can serve as a gateway onto some of these discussions.

I encourage people who are immersed in the business of content, and in the technology field of managing and processing content, to peruse some of these materials and to provide feedback - whether supportive or contradictory. For those of us who, by design or accident, discover ourselves to be content practitioners, these discussions can help us all to be more clear about what it is we do and why it is important that we do it.

The Anatomy of Knowledge

View more documents from Joe Gollner.

Perspectives on Data, Information and Knowledge

There are some structures that seem impossible to escape. The Data – Information – Knowledge hierarchy seems to be one of them. This representational structure is one that depicts information standing above data and knowledge standing on top of both. Sometimes it is finished with wisdom as a mystical cherry-on-top but I generally prefer to avoid such heart-warming embellishments.

Encounters with this Data – Information - Knowledge pyramid, as I sometimes term it, generally fall into one of two categories. It is often invoked as a given – something that is self-evidently true and of obvious utility. Just as often, especially of late, it is invoked as an object of ridicule – something to be derided and chased from the consulting stage.  One of the interesting aspects of this phenomenon is that no matter hope frequently it is attacked, the Data – Information – Knowledge pyramid continues to show remarkable resilience. Some refuse to give it up while others would miss having it as a foil for their arguments. To my mind, if the data-information-knowledge pyramid is going to be around then it’s probably best to think about how it can be understood so that it can also be useful.

And now for a confession. I have been using the Data – Information – Knowledge pyramid for many years. Twenty years in fact. My first company, Euclid Consulting Group (aside from terrifying prospective customers with memories of High School geometry) explicitly invoked the relationship between data, information and knowledge with the implied message that we could help customers shuffle resources from one level, data, to the highest level, knowledge. The logo for this consulting group layered triangles so that data, information, knowledge transmuted into a form capable of flight. I cannot, therefore, be considered an unbiased spectator in the debates about the merits or shortcomings of the data, information and knowledge pyramid.

So the question that surfaces, at least for me, is why have some people, me included, found the Data – Information – Knowledge pyramid to be a worthwhile tool for organizing lessons from projects and for integrating disparate insights. Some might be quick to say that this is because I could be classified, without undue violence, as a technologist. There is a side to my recurrent use of the pyramids that can rightfully be seen as trying to understand data, information and knowledge in a way that technology can have a useful role to play and in a way that allows us to couple any of these terms with the word “management”. On this, I am guilty as charged.

When I review the positions taken on the subject by others I note that by far the most thoughtful tend to be criticisms of the data – information – knowledge hierarchy. See David Weinberger on The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy and Patrick Lambe on From Data, with Love. For a brief history of the hierarchy see Nikhil Sharma on The Origin of the “Data Information Knowledge Wisdom” Hierarchy. One of the recurrent themes that appears is that the hierarchy was constructed by the advocates of a nascent computer industry as it sought to make its case to management stakeholders. Computers, the argument went, could be deployed to sift information from data and knowledge from information. I distinctly recall hearing this story spun on more than one occasion in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I worked among computer scientists who often wore lab coats to highlight their role as scientists exploring the frontiers of knowledge. But even as a technologist, I have to say that I was never able bend my mind in a way that allowed me to imagine what this “sifting” might be. In fact, I have difficulty mounting an attack on the filtering model because I cannot form a sufficiently firm conception of it to allow the criticism to begin. The analogy that seems to apply likens the process that connects data to information and information to knowledge as something analogous to panhandling for gold in a stream filled with sand and rocks. Or perhaps a better analogy would be taken from medieval alchemy with its incantations, toxic brews and burnt fingers being deployed so as to transmute lead into gold. None of these seem to help.

If this sifting model does not seem to work, it does not then follow, to my mind, that the hierarchy of data, information and knowledge should itself be jettisoned. Preferring to re-conceptualize what already exists and does not seem to want to die, I have tended to posit a different connective process as the underpinning of the data – information – knowledge pyramid. Rather than a sifting of one level from another, I see the process as closer to “construction”, wherein building blocks are fashioned so as to be useful within a social context (data), then used within communication transactions (information), and then from out of the latter activity emerges a shared understanding (knowledge) that undergoes continuous “validation” (or at least application providing feedback on utility). All of these I prefer to see as artifacts of communication – as existing between people instead of being a cognitive process occurring inside a given agent. (I understand that there is a mathematical attractiveness to generalizing agents so as to cover everything between cells and civilizations but I find that such universalizing tends to stumble across some rather important categorical differences.) I further posit that these artifacts of communication tend to figure very prominently as formative influences on what others sometimes see as the province of inner and private cognitive processes. Under this model, you can see the pyramid of data, information and knowledge not so much as a value hierarchy as a depiction of how the three are inter-related and co-dependent. An ounce of knowledge will be accompanied by a pound of information and a ton of data. In practice, you cannot have one without the others. Volumetrically, there is a sense that knowledge is the most overwhelming of the artifacts precisely because it will be manifest amid such vast quantities of data and information.

We can see the contending camps in the debate over the data – information – knowledge hierarchy exposed when we look at the differing conceptualizations of what we mean by the term “knowledge”.

The camp that tends to attack the pyramid will often position knowledge as a psychological state upon which an agent is ready to act. This can be pursued to the point where anything that provides a precursor to a decision by an agent can be taken to be knowledge. This then leads to a definition of knowledge as the set of influences drawn upon in decision making – learned behaviors, intuitions, experience, feelings and so on become integral to what knowledge is. I sometimes observe that the only thing missing from some of these definitions is “mint jelly” - so guttural are the components being assembled as a definition of knowledge. This approach also tends to make knowledge into something that is profoundly personal. This explains why some people can react with horror to any suggestion that knowledge, effectively their inner private universes, might be something that can be subjected to management. As you can see, I am not much of a fan of this approach to defining knowledge. My main objection is that is not very useful when we consider the full range of domains where it is worthwhile to have a practical working definition for “knowledge”.

On the other side, we find some who apply the most rigid conception of knowledge as a logical assertion. This definition is most commonly found within the computing community and more specifically those working in the field of artificial intelligence and its various offspring. I have encountered practitioners from this community who have even gone so far as defining knowledge explicitly as what can be reduced into a logical form amenable to processing by computers. This is clearly the polar opposite of the camp we considered above. There can be no rapprochement between these two camps. By the way, I am not a fan of this camp either, finding their definition of “knowledge” as indistinguishable from what I would define as “data”, or the meaningful representation of experience.

Clearly, we are circling a large topic here and it is not possible to lay the debates to rest at this time. I have approached this topic on a number of occasions and I have found myself to have been remarkably consistent despite having encountered a wide range of alternatives. (I am hoping that this is more indicative of the merit of my re-conception of the pyramid than of any intransigence on my part.) Of these alternatives, by far the most cogent and worthy of consideration is the position sketched out by Max H. Boisot in Information Space and elaborated on in two successive books (Knowledge Assets and Explorations in Information Space). His work in some ways leverages aspects of both of the above camps and, most delightfully, progresses towards an expansion of considerations from the microcosms of decision-making agents to the larger planes of economic markets and historical change. I am inclined, still, to make further distinctions between phenomena (more rooted in the perceptions of individual cognitive agents) and data (emerging as socially constructed representation schemes), and between knowledge (a socially constructed and continuously evolving understanding) and the basis of decisions (occurring again at the level of cognitive agents and based on a wide range of influencing factors), than are evidenced in Mr. Boisot’s gloriously detailed framework. Perhaps with time, I will find that these distinctions are unnecessary but that is a work in progress.

Returning to the subject at hand, whether there is any merit in continuing to use the pyramidal hierarchy of data, information and knowledge, I am suggesting that there is merit provided that we adopt and refine definitions for the constituent terms that allow us to use the model in useful ways. As the example of Mr. Boisot’s work underscores, if we make sure that we are weighing our options within a broad enough context then the limitations of some interpretations of the data, information and knowledge hierarchy will be illuminated and, with that, some of the more fierce attachments exhibited by the different camps can be left behind.

The Truth about Content

Well now that I have thrown down the gauntlet in my previous post about the Trials and Tribulations of Content Management, I feel that I should take the next step and posit some core definitions for terms such as content, information, data, publishing and even knowledge. Hopefully, others will contribute superior alternatives or hack these contributions to pieces so as to expose something better.

And why not start with the term content. There is an entire industry dedicated to its management so we would hope that it is a term for which we have a ready definition. In reality this does not seem to be the case. So let’s toss one out.

Content is potential information.

Content is the raw material from which information is fashioned. It encompasses all of the constituent pieces that, when assembled together, constitute a specific information transaction. So it is that when we undertake a content analysis we are in effect rewinding the communication process that produces the information product. Working backwards from the envisioned audience and the intended outcome, we itemize the many pieces that will need to come together to forge an effective information event. Many of these pieces are recognizable to practitioners in the content management and publishing field – text components, media assets, assembly maps, governing models, processing rules, audience profiles, personalization filters, formatting stylesheets, metadata structures, relationship links, security controls and probably others. All must come together to form an information output which, in being delivered, becomes an information transaction.

This leads us to a point where a second definition is needed – one for information. In many environments, the terms content and information are used almost interchangeably but not here because to do so would be to conceal an all-important difference.

Information is the meaningful organization of data, communicated in a specific context and with the purpose of informing others and thereby influencing their actions.

In other words, information is transactional. It is an action. A given information product will therefore have specific goals, take on a specific physical form, occur in a specific context, and be exchanged between specific participants. Information is also authoritative, meaning that someone is responsible for it just as someone is responsible for an action. This fact explains why information management has been receiving so much attention in this time of heightened accountability. Information, it is important to note, is formatted and physical – it has been fashioned into a form that is fit for its purpose whether that be as a book, a text message, a voice prompt or a web page. The transactional unit of information, the artifact that is ultimately encountered, is known as a document.

Once enacted, information, as we well know, persists and accumulates - in some ways taking on a life of its own quite separate from the context in which it originally occurred. Past information transactions, as an illustration of this process, become inputs to, and reference points for, content creators and information actors. As information events are actions they will give rise to consequences and this experience can become part of what is known about each information transaction (its outcome or results). In this way, past information events become a source of content that can inform, and potentially improve the effectiveness of, future information transactions.

So how does content become information? How does it change from being merely the potential for action to being a real event? By what mechanism do all the constituent pieces assemble together to form an information transaction that will suit a specific circumstance? This is the role of publishing.

Publishing is the process of transforming content into information, of converting the latent assets into concrete actions that will inform people, impact performance and influence outcomes.

As a sweeping generalization, I would be inclined to say that publishing technology stands as the most challenging aspect of the entire content management domain. The variety and sophistication of transformations, necessary to support the increasingly wide range of information transactions that organizations seem to need today, represents a very demanding requirement and especially when everyone seems to want access to relevant information at the touch of a button.

In our posited definition for information, we see another term deserving of attention – data.

Data is the meaningful representation of experience.

More specifically, data is the method of encoding that we use to represent the basic building blocks of communication, with these providing the substance for what we call content. It would be a distraction to dig too deeply into the subject of data now but suffice it to say that the various components that make up content will each be associated with a form of representation for which rules have been specified. One such component would be a formatting stylesheet which will, in addition to a basic character encoding, possess a specific syntax that governs how formatting instructions are to be framed as well as how they are to be applied and to what. So not only are the details arrayed in a table in a final document considered data, so should the formatting stylesheet that governs its rendition.

It is at this point that it is worth pausing to consider the subject of openness and portability. These considerations are effectively determined at the level of data representation and it is here that the adoption of, and adherence to, open standards will establish whether content components will themselves be open and portable or not. It is also here that the degree of intelligence that can be exhibited in the content components will be decided. How effectively and efficiently information transactions can traverse boundaries associated with different media and different devices is, in turn, governed by the openness, portability and intelligence of the content that stands behind it.

Most recently, I have come to think of content as a transformation layer that separates data representations from information transactions – the layer in which we, as the content owners and information actors, plan the many different ways in which we may want to engage audiences and to lay out our resources and processes accordingly.

Finally, the relationships between these concepts are important because they illuminate the mechanisms whereby organizations and societies express, share and evolve their knowledge. So as a final step, I offer a somewhat controversial definition of knowledge itself, with it being controversial because it emphasizes the physicality of knowledge (in emerging from the meaningful interplay and organization of information transactions) and its standing as an evolving understanding that is publicly communicated and therefore subject to testing, refutation and even validation. This definition explicitly links knowledge to our definition of information, and thereby to our definitions of data, content and publishing.

Knowledge is the meaningful organization of information, expressing an evolving understanding of a subject and establishing a justified basis for judgment and the potential for effective action.

 

As we might expect, content is what is contained in an information transaction, within a document. When we look at the lifecycle that leads up to the formation of information actions, we see that it is content, in its rich physicality, that is being fashioned, evaluated, assembled, endorsed and eventually incorporated into the transactions. We also see that the content of past transactions can be referenced, reused or revised in the framing of new information events. Data resources, of varying types, can be seen in evidence in each and every content component and, likewise, the imprint of background knowledge, whether acknowledged or not, can be seen in the representational data schemes and in the structural patterns underlying each information product. And knowledge itself achieves a degree of persistence and portability when it is instantiated in networks of inter-related information transactions that trace out, over time, the emergence and evolution of a shared understanding of a subject. 

This overall system, or content ecology, becomes, in no time, almost unfathomably complex and this is one of the reasons why content management and publishing solutions have, historically, struggled to put it politely. When we really think about it, it should come as no surprise that the management of content, together with its publication and cyclical evolution, is phenomenally difficult and the one mistake that must be avoided is assuming, as all too many technology implementations have, that content and its associated processes are simple.

This is an awful lot to pack into a relatively short declaration but I believe we have managed to float definitions for content, information, documents, publishing, data and knowledge. And without sound working definitions for these concepts, content management, as an industry and as a technology domain, cannot hope to be successful. As this is something that we, as a community of content management practitioners, have a stake in, I am hopeful that others will weigh in to challenge, correct, change or confirm these definitions.

If this is a topic that the reader finds interesting, then the following references might be worthwhile:

Blog Posts:

• Content Integration
• Fear of Content
• The Road to Intelligent Content
• Intelligent Content in the Green Desert
• The Business of Intelligent Content
• Architecting Information and Engineering Content
• Seven Steps to Intelligent Content
• The Challenge of Managing Intelligent Content
• The Emergence of Intelligent Content
• Content in the Wild
• Connecting with Content
• Structured Information Systems
• Managing Information
• On the Management of Content
• The Trials and Tribulations of Content Management
• The KM Uncertainty Principle 
• The Great KM Divide 

Whitepapers:

• The Emergence of Intelligent Content
• The Anatomy of Knowledge

Now to make the context for this specific post, this information transaction, explicit, I will say that the notes for it were prepared in the above pictured quadrangle at Pembroke College, Oxford. It so happened that at the time organ music was pouring out from the small chapel that would be off to the right of the above photo. The blog entry was finalized and posted from my well-appointed room and desk as shown below. It is noteworthy that perhaps Pembroke's most famous alumnus is none other than Samuel Johnson, who among many other things produced a highly influencial dictionary of the English language. Perhaps it is his spirit that spurred me into a fit of definitions and inclined me to sweeping generalizations and serpentine sentences. To what extent this context might colour the meaning of this post will be left open to debate. Of course, it might also have been the wine.

KM Uncertainty Principle

During a Knowledge Management (KM) working group meeting at the Federal Government of Canada, I could not help but notice the length to which KM initiatives must go to justify their existence. KM initiatives will typically seek to make an improvement in how knowledge is acquired, shared and evolved within the organization. It is true that all organizational investments, or one would hope, have to follow some manner of formal process to declare their objectives and how they will know they have arrived at success. These processes usually travel, in larger institutions, under the name of an ‘accountability framework’. In smaller organizations where the tolerance for missteps is necessarily smaller, we would call it the ‘fitting your head into the noose’ framework.

So we will take it as a given that there is a cultural and, at times, an operational need to position initiatives within the accepted ‘accountability framework’ of the organization expected to make the investments. That just seems fair. But in some circumstances, this essential step may in fact eliminate the conditions for success. In these cases, it becomes a form of Catch-22. Upon hearing about a KM initiative studying the relative merits of, and selecting from amongst, various accountability frameworks, it occurred to me that KM may be such an instance.

The premise here is that if steps are taken to formalize a KM initiative specifically to sustain an accountability obligation, its formalization and the resulting investments of energy to implementing that formality, will in fact work against its potential for success.

For those who must live in this type of organizational world, or those that, in general, embrace the ‘formalization’ of business monitoring (results-based management), this premise will seem at best odd, and at worst ill-considered.

But if, as I have argued in my paper on the anatomy of knowledge, there is no deterministic causal link between knowledge and the domain of judgment and action (and therefore results), then any results-based accountability model will be, essentially, missing the point (or to be more precise, creating a fictitious one). If there are no causal links, again in a directly deterministic way, then managing initiatives by causal outcomes will be impossible. If such a management regime is forcefully adopted, then, all energies directed to its implementation will be energies away from the focus, presumably, of KM – being the creation and advancement of shared knowledge. The attempts to align with an accountability framework would, in this light, become tangible impediments to success.

So to summarize, if a KM initiative is squarely focused upon cultivating improved knowledge within a community, then it will not be possible, directly, to measure outcomes in terms of business performance changes. It would be with reference to such changes that a business justification, in the form of a Return-on-Investment (ROI) calculation, would be made. If a KM initiative is soundly structured and can be monitored with reference to these types of measurable outcomes, then it is – by definition – not directed towards knowledge but rather towards some other operational goal. It would thus cease to be a KM initiative or at least insofar as it accommodates this redirection. So in echoing the argument demonstrated by Heisenberg for sub-atomic particles, we have the “KM Uncertainty Principle”.
 
Mercifully, and again by recourse to scientific models, we can stress the complex relationship between knowledge and the emergent operational phenomena that can be measured in the domain of judgment and action where causality is at least somewhat less fundamentally problematic. If changes in knowledge still represent a change in potentiality then the indirect consequences of KM interventions will eventually become observable. But there are many other factors also influencing those observable outcomes so categorically tracing any consequence, whether good or ill, back to KM is still not possible, strictly speaking. Ideally, this should simply remind us that the prudent method for advancing a KM initiative is to position it as a longer term, strategic investment that, like hiring and developing good people, will bear fruit over time.

Image Credit: UT Health Sciences Center (Library)

Renegade Learning

During a recent stay in Oxford, I found myself thinking about Roger Bacon (1214-1294). At least some of my strolls were loosely designed to retrace some of the pathways he may have followed. One reason he comes to mind is that I find his example to be particularly relevant these days. What this example might be can be a little challenging to delineate simply because he has become a figure enshrouded with legends. Since the time of this Doctor Mirabilis (wonderful teacher), he has become many things ranging, in order of increasing defensibility, across magician, Faustian alchemist, and forbearer of modern science. 

The fact is that enough time intercedes between the present and his time that we cannot be absolutely sure of many things. We do not, for example, actually know when he was born. And each generation of historians, declaring in turn a renewed attention to the truth, have painted him differently. More recently, this effort has been coloured by the current academic fixation with the rather tenuous notion of "originality". The claims of previous historians that in Bacon they found early expositions of the modern scientific method are being challenged as people find other traces in other, yet earlier, sources. The pursuit of origins in ideas reminds me of the little old lady who interrupted a scientific conference with her theory that the world teetered on the back of a turtle. When queried by a doubtlessly self-satisfied authority on what this turtle might itself be standing on, our intervener returned "It's turtles all the way down". There is always an antecedent.

And I will be no different than previous interpreters of history in seeing Roger Bacon as an exemplar of renegade learning to which I feel a particularly strong affinity. One thing we do know about Bacon is that he was passionate about his learning and, due to the financial strength of his family at least during the early part of his life, he was able to pursue this passion in all possible directions. One dimension of this passion was a determination to delve into various languages so that he could access knowledge from various sources without the dilution that comes with translation. It was his reputation at the time that he was the most learned man in Europe and there have not been many convincing arguments to undermine this reputation. His driving passion, it seems, was to achieve a more perfect and more complete access to knowledge and with this to realize a new level of freedom and independence.

 

Another thing we know is that he was exceeding practical in his pursuits and he recorded numerous experiments, such as in optics. His arguments championing experimentation are striking in their modernity and they are very much early articulations of the scientific method. On practical matters, he took up the cause of correcting the calendar which was eventually done. His major work, Opus Majus, although it was itself a sprawling compendium of scientific knowledge, was actually written as an "abstract", that he wrote for the Pope, outlining an even greater project to assemble all of the world's knowledge.

We also know that he joined the Franciscan order and, like many scientists after him like Isaac Newton, the particular character of his faith seems to have influenced many of his specific areas of scientific inquiry. It may have been the nature, or intensity, of some of these beliefs, more so than his reputation for experimentation and his espousing the philosophy of Aristotle, that got him into trouble. Again, we are not exactly sure how he found himself in trouble with some powerful elements in the church and nor are we sure what exactly the consequences of the trouble were. The stories of his punishment that have been passed down have probably survived, and been embellished, because they are so difficult to contemplate as befalling someone who was so obviously passionate about learning and teaching. It is said, for example, that his masters within the Franciscan order forbade him from studying and set him to long days of manual labour. Nearer the end of his life one line of the story has Roger Bacon dispatched to a prison cell where he was forbidden to speak to anyone. One of the romantic twists on the story, emerging as an expression of hope in the face of despair, sees the wonderful teacher sharing his knowledge with passersby and local children through a hole in the wall of his imperfect cell.

I would argue that it is in being an exemplar of renegade learning, the type that observes no boundaries and that energetically seeks opportunities for experiment and application, that Roger Bacon is the most noteworthy. The constellation of myths and stories about him can be jettisoned or leveraged as necessary as their presence takes nothing away from this role. The presence and persistence of these myths and stories might, however, indicate that the power of this example is genuinely compelling and has been for centuries. When compared to many of the practices seen within academia today, often coloured by a strange mixture of timidity and territoriality, Roger Bacon's example, even what little of it we can really see, serves as a ringing reminder that what is learned must be brought out into the daylight, tested and then deployed into practical service.

Knowing and Doing

For some strange reason, I have been thinking about, of all people, Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574). In particular, I have been thinking about a specific portrait by Giorgio Vasari entitled "Duke Cosimo I and his Artists" (located in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence).

To my mind, what makes this portrait interesting is its depiction of the interaction between an executive (the Duke), responsible ultimately for doing, and the artists, responsible for knowing and creating.

What I especially like about the portrait is that it depicts, quite intentionally to his favour, Cosimo's interest in the arts. He is depicted holding a compass and a ruler, so he is trying his hand. But best of all is the fact that he is shown as interrupting the discussion and stirring into action. Something important is happening and the time for action has arrived. There is a tenderness in how Cosimo is interrupting the exchange while there is an evident awareness amongst the artists that they need to step aside so that the Duke can take care of business. Now all this is squarely set in the long tradition of portraiture but nonetheless the treatment of the dynamic between knowing and doing is memorable.

On regular occasions in my experience, and specifically on those occasions where academics are drawn into business environments, I have seen where this same dynamic emerges. What is sometimes missing in these events is an awareness on the part of the academics that the understanding conveyed in knowledge is only one input to the process of decision making. On the other side, the business executives often miss the value of putting aside the demands of the minute so as to seek an understanding of what they have been taking for granted and that may need modification.

Even within the last few weeks, I have found myself hankering for ways to reintroduce a more constructive interaction between the two domains. Specifically, I was participating in a workshop where on one side the academics continuously quoted obscure research while the business people were looking for overly expedient answers whose shelf-life would be measured in days at best.

There is a fundamental difference between the domains of knowledge and those of action and facilitating a pragmatic and productive interaction between the two is central to being successful, with success here being defined as broadly as possible.

As I am sometimes heard saying "To focus on knowledge is to focus on potentials. Business, let us not forget, is about actuals." This does not denigrate knowledge because what can actually be achieved is bounded by what is possible. The range and quality of the knowledge available and readied for application determines the range of possible actions. 

Giving Aristotle his Due

To my surprise, in two books that I have read recently, the authors went out of their way to denigrate Aristotle and to do so with almost puerile glee. In both cases, Aristotle was "the Man" to be overthrown and the teacher at whom we can thumb our noses while we run from the classroom. It strikes me as odd because Aristotle, we must remind ourselves, has been dead for 2330 years.

The impulse to denigrate Aristotle of course has a long pedigree. With the rediscovery of many of Aristotle's works in Spain in the 12th century, thanks to the care and commentary of Islamic scholars, he came to be known simply as "the Philosopher". Aristotle's surviving works can rightly be said to have revolutionized western thinking and laid the foundations for, among other things, what we now call science. And in this way did Aristotle very much become "the Man".

Among the things that really distinguishes Aristotle is the fact that he very much was a practicing "scientist" given to compiling endless details on observed phenomena. So unlike many in the field of philosophy, then and now, he was engaged in the practical business of building knowledge. Seeing how long ago his work was carried out, and the state of art that existed at the time, it is less surprising that his scientific works exhibit errors than the fact that in many regards they started the ball rolling in the first place.

To encounter authors in the 21st century who delight in pointing out mistakes in Aristotle's work and celebrating their superiority therewith strikes me as mean-spirited and ungrateful. In at least one case, quite entertainingly, the celebrations were premature because upon closer inspection the Philosopher remained firmly on top.

Once again I am reminded of the Third Voyage in Gulliver's Travels, where Swift summons up the ghost of Aristotle to face his inquisitors:

I then desired the governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi, with whom I prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle.  This great philosopher freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally to be exploded.  He predicted the same fate to attraction, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters.  He said, "that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; and even those, who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles, would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined."

Jonathan Swift was solid in his knowledge of Aristotle and, I would argue, the words he gives to the Philosopher sound completely appropriate for a seasoned practitioner in the business of applying and refining knowledge.

So we consider the case of the 21st century author who declares triumphantly that Aristotle has, once again, been proven wrong and this time in an area where he had otherwise been universally respected. Aristotle, we learn, argued that knowledge was a categorization system ultimately resting on definitional assertions. Reality, and our psychological perspections thereof, are intrinsically messy and undermine all attempts at definition. Aristotle, a study of pattern recognition amongst children proves, is wrong in advancing categorization schemes, definitions, logical reasoning and so on as the basis of knowledge. Knowledge it turns out is more slippery than that. And there is a manifest joy exhibited by this author in now being free from the artificial constraint of definitions, from the interference of "experts" and specifically from "the Man".

This is patent nonsense and, ironically but with some justice, the problem is one of definitions. If, as Aristotle would, we define knowledge explicitly as what we formalize and then endeavour to test and refine, the argument that reality itself does not body forth definitions is met with patient agreement. The response that one could imagine Aristotle making, were we to summon him up again, would be "And this is news to you?" And Aristotle would probably continue with something like "Just try to build one of those flying machines without definitions."

If we define knowledge in terms drawn from, and with recourse to our evolving understanding of, the psychology of perception then it would be caught in the ebb and flow of our daily discoveries and debates. On the other hand, if we define knowledge as a more general, and therefore more abstract, artifact, then the usefulness of the term, and discussions around it, will persist in parallel with our other endeavours. The latter seems the more prudent, and less frustrating, path.

Some discussions of "knowledge", which are a popular adjunct to studies of organizational design and knowledge management, prefer to define knowledge in a way that makes it as prone to turbulence as possible. This way every new paper published can carry a stirring title such as "the new knowledge". But they are like the weather reporter who choses to define "weather" as a particular type of precipitation. When a sunny day is forecast, this reporter must soberly inform the audience that everything we knew about weather is about to change.

As an example of someone who, perhaps more successfully than anyone before or since, straddled the domains of both knowledge and judgment, Aristotle remains unparalleled. Declarations of his overthrow are very much premature.

Fear of Language

Following a thread of references from an article on Knowledge Management (KM), I happened upon a blog entry that took as its focus the definition of what we mean by "knowledge". This is quite a common occurrence. Any article on KM will, as a rule, be only one click away from some epistemological statement of position.

This particular entry repeated the familiar history of KM wherein the earlier dark ages where dominated by an exclusive focus on technology and on an understanding of knowledge that seemed to limit it to what can be managed using computing technology. This dark age is then contrasted with the more recent movement towards a fuller, more human appreciation for the intrinsic messiness and slipperiness of knowledge. The dark age of KM is usually associated with the late 1980s and early 1990s and the process of renaissance and enlightment with regards to appreciating knowledge more fully emerged beginning in the mid-1990s.

As might be discernable in my choice of wording, I do not subscribe to this framing of history. I distinctly recall encountering many fierce advocates in the early 1990s who explicitly defined knowledge as that which cannot be managed and specifically that which cannot be enhanced by the introduction of technology of any form. It seems to me that this framing of history may be a rhetorical trope that casts technology, and explicitly tangible and manageable knowledge, in the role of villians. Against this foil, warmly shared human experience can be set up as a romantic antithesis and organizations can be called to the heroic recognition that knowledge workers deserve increased lattitude to innovate organically and without artificial constraint. All this sounds strangely familiar to me when I recall the tensions that arose between the Enlightment, the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic reaction. This is a line of inquiry that deserves more attention.

What was particularly interesting about the post on "knowledge" that I came upon was the fact that the rhetorical position that leaped out was such an extreme example of a "romantic reaction". Specifically, this extended post opens with an interesting rejection of language as "a clumsy and artificial abstraction". This is a peculiar position to take as the question that must immediately arise is - compared to what? The rhetorical position implies the presence of something more genuine that stands as an alternative to the artifice of words. As usual, this substratum of the "genuine" is not defined, free as it is from such constraints.

I have encountered this same position on many occasions and I tend to classify (constrain) it as a form of "escape" from discussion. For one reason or another people want, or need, to protect a cherished notion from criticism or perhaps simply from the burden of articulation. Those who share the same underlying affinities will immediately agree on this exemption from discourse while those that do not share these affinities can be politely ignored as being trapped in some form of darkened state of insensitivity.

This type of discursive escapism is found in many forms, most of which are not as extreme as seen in this case. It usually surfaces as a blanket rejection of "labels" which again turns up when one party in a discussion wants to exit from a potentially uncomfortable predicament.

That language is an artifice is obvious as is the fact that no language is, or can be, "perfect". This is not to say that languages cannot be improved over time through refinement, extension and experimentation. But declaring that language itself, in all its forms, is something that can be miraculously side-stepped in order to gain direct access to the "truth", or that this would be desireable, or that this is even an intelligible statement at all, is utterly ridiculous. As the position itself is ludicrous, it is the psychology underlying the attraction to such a position, and the ferocity with which it is usually defended, that is most interesting.

On some occasions when I am confronted with this position, I quote from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels where Swift seems to have these very people squarely in his satiric sights:

The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity.  For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lunge by corrosion, and, consequently, contributes to the shortening of our lives.  An expedient was therefore offered, 'that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on.'  And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people.  However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things; which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him.  I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave. (Gulliver's Travels Book III Chapter V)

Knowledge Preservation

It was about a year ago that I participated in a panel discussion around the subject of knowledge preservation. It was convened at the Government Technology Week in Ottawa Canada in October 2006. The exchanges amongst the panelists started well in advance of the event and they churned up a lot of things to consider. As usual, I played the role of the provocateur.

In the preparations for the panel discussion, which consequently went very well and sparked a fruitful exchange with a fair-sized audience, I floated an illustration. We collectively decided that its complexity disqualified it from being used in that particular forum. I realize now that this means that the illustration and its associated ideas have never seen the light of day.

The illustration was entitled The Knowledge Preservation Challenge. The specific shapes used to construct the illustration carry with them potentially unintended meanings but in general the curves reflect the pattern of employment within the subject organization - in this case the Canadian Federal Government. Here, there had been a ballooning pattern of growth in the public sector for years until downsizing and retirement started to take its toll in the later 1990s. After several years of hiring freezes, the government has now embarked on a recruiting drive on such a scale that the city of Ottawa, the seat of Government, is bursting at the seams. These patterns create specific challenges and, as the illustration endeavours to show, opportunities.

The matrix that I found myself toying with was that along with the departure of the legacy workforce the government needed to recognize that there were a set of legacy problems to be addressed that were more often than not associated with legacy solutions. The retiring workforce was critically important to addressing this class of problem or at least in orienting the emerging workforce. There were also emerging problems associated specifically with the rise of new phenomena for which the emerging, younger workforce were best equipped. In both of these circumstances, the conclusion was that working on these problems in ways that require the legacy and emerging workforces to work together as the most pragmatic approach to preserving the knowledge.

Of course, being in provocateur mode, I threw in some more jaundice remarks. I questioned, for example, how much of what the legacy workforce knew could genuinely be defined as knowledge or whether it represented a nest of self-sustaining declarations that were best buried behind the barn. As at least some of my fellow panelists were senior public servants, you can imagine how popular these remarks made me. Partially to save my own skin and partially in recognition of the truth, I did acknowledge that I had myself benefitted from the mentoring of senior government bureaucrats in the Department of National Defence. But these people, I hastened to point out, were the last of the "war generation" who had learned a great deal by virtue of having achieved so much. To maintain my provocateur stance, I concluded that this respect would not be automatically transferred to the generation that succeeded them. 

The Great KM Divide

Continuing with some reflections on, or occasioned by, "Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages" (see my earlier post), I found that the conclusion of the book introduced a new perspective on a topic that has bothered me (interested me) for quite some time.

Within the subject that travels under the banner of "knowledge management", there appears to be a rather resilient division of opinion. On one side there are those who associate KM with best practices (troublesome though the term is), documents, and what we might call explicit knowledge - artifacts where "management" can be used with some meaning and where technology can defensibly be said to play a useful role. On the other side are those who associate "knowledge", or its most interesting and valuable manifestations, with the tacit, the inarticulatable, the personal, and the dynamically social. These two camps don't generally see eye-to-eye on anything and indeed rarely have anything good to say about each other. Hence the title - the Great KM Divide.

I have found this divide to be a distraction and the animosity expressed by one or the other camp to be utterly counter-productive. I have ventured into the debate with a paper albeit it has not been widely circulated and therefore has not provoked much in the way of responses. The paper, entitled "The Anatomy of Knowledge" does come down largely on the side of emphasizing "explicit knowledge" as being a key area of interest for KM although it does endeavour to establish a framework wherein it is productive to talk about the dynamic between the public artifacts we call "knowledge" and the world of decisions, actions and tacit contributors. Interestingly, readers who are inclined to foreground explicit knowledge artifacts have strongly endorsed the paper while those hailing from the opposing school declare indifference and refer to its definition of knowledge as constraining, insensitive and inadequate. The divide reveals itself, somewhat as expected.

In the concluding pages of "Glut", Alex Wright draws the distinction between two domains - one associated with orality and the other with the written text. The closing of the book accords the pride of place to the former, the domain of the oral tradition and the dynamic flow of communication amongst people. This domain is associated with the "heart" and not surprisingly it is elevated above the domain of the "head", linked as that is with the somewhat colder written text. This hierarchical preference of speech over text is not too surprising given the general leaning of current opinion in favour of the more tacit side of knowledge. (I actually suspect that this leaning of opinion is in reality a form of compensation against the gnawing recognition that the world of explicit and manageable knowledge is in fact gaining so much ground in the modern world, in terms of its causal importance, as to be approaching hegemony.)

Jacques Derrida had, along with others, drawn up the argument that the written text is not properly seen as merely "frozen speech", an inert remnant of what was once a much more vital utterance. While the reality of it may in fact argue the opposite, it has been a long-standing rhetorical position, and frequently an ardently held belief, to claim that real-time speech, especially when exchanged face-to-face (F2F), is the purest and most complete form of communication and that everything else is a pale reflection. This is in fact a topic from which none of us will escape unless we move on.

The epiphany that occurred to me in reading the closing pages of "Glut" was that this duality between orality and textuality aligns very, very neatly with the framework I was playing with in my paper on the Anatomy of Knowledge.

What I was most interested in doing in this paper was formalizing the great divide and establishing separate domains of inquiry for both knowledge (articulated so as to become a public artifact open to criticism and therefore capable of evolution) and judgment and action (the realm in which people make decisions, collectively and individually, take action and experience consequences). The former is inescapably more abstract and persistent while the latter is inescapably the world of "lived experience", of immediate reality.

I found that in reading "Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages" I was introduced to a new way of looking at my own artifact, the framework I call "the knowledge dynamic". Now the tension between the domains of the oral and the written is not entirely new to me, reading this book brought some of these considerations back into focus. And now that I look at the great divide and the chasm that separates the warring factions within the KM community I see that the two camps hail from different sides of my own framework. The oral domain accords with the hierarchy of judgment, action and experience, while that of the written articulation is associated with the pyramid of data, information and knowledge.

Although I don't think too much of this is evidenced in the book "Glut" itself, some aspects of the topic certainly are. More importantly, the book provided useful inputs to my thought process and for this I am thankful. Not all books do this. But when a book helps to provoke constructive thinking then it can be said to have really done its job. It is a concrete demonstration that, while the written text plays a different role than that of the spoken word, both can have their effects.