Wisdom workers have been around forever. Tribal elders. Religious leaders. Politicians. Captains of industry. Pillars of the community. Their job is to make the best possible use of our knowledge, to help us survive as a species, to live a better life, to live more lightly on the planet.
The knowledge and wisdom industry combined is huge. Each year about 1.4-1.5 million peer reviewed scholarly articles are published in 24,000 academic journals. Some 2-3 per cent of people have a doctor in front of their names. Two percent of people work as teachers, lecturers or trainers. Wisdom workers in the form of leaders of all kinds comprise another 2-3 percent of all workers.
Yet despite this huge massive effort we still have many unsolved wicked problems that never seem to go away. Poverty. Famine. Disease. Environmental degradation. Crime. Chronic unemployment. Species loss. Just to name a few.
Maybe it's time for all of us to play a role. One possibility is to think about wisdom in the same way that a computer programmer does and become our own determiners of what is wise. Wisdom is at the pinnacle of the data hierarchy. Activity. Data. Information. Knowledge. Wisdom.
At the base of the wisdom-data hierarchy is Activity. Activity is simply events. Physical events such as the earth revolving around the sun, water freezing as ice or an apple falling off a tree and striking the ground. Chemical events such as a fire burning or steel rusting. Geological events such as earthquakes and volcanos. Biological events such as the flowering of plants, sex or consuming other species. Social events such as a conversation, party, meeting or war.
The process of collecting data requires some kind of measuring device. Observation by our senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Or a ruler. Measuring tape. Microscope, Telescope. Beaker. Balance beam. Spectrometer. Or gamma ray detector.
Here's how it works. Consider this image. Some parts are colored black, some deep blue, other parts are white and some are brown. That's all data is. Pixels, symbols, numbers, letters or words wthout any meaning.
It's only when we analyze what we see, usually through a theoretical lens, that we can decide what the data means. This generates a kind of smarter data we call information....perhaps the white fluffy swirls in the picture are clouds, the red patches are deserts, and the circular rim is the boundary between the earth and the rest of the universe. Or if we suspect it's a picture of a beach ball, the patches of color are just the designer's imagination run wild, and the circular boundary is the limit to the ball.
Next, we use the information we have collected to create knowledge. We make judgments about whether the data represents a picture of a ball, a planet or some other other object. Knowledge is merely our collective best guess. Its' often represented as a diagram, a model, an equation, a graph, a list, a process, or a statement about relationships between the subject of our study and its component parts.
We can process our best guesses even further, and choose how to apply the knowledge with wisdom. For example, we could use the knowledge acquired by analyzing the magnificent image of earth photographed from space, combined with other kinds of knowledge about our planet, to work out how we might more wisely live on space-ship earth or be more compassionate about our fellow travelers.
Here is a workshop so anyone can learn how to convert data into information, information into knowledge and begin to apply it wisely:
1. Activity – What is our field of our study? What kind of events/objects are we observing? What observation method/tool are we using?
2. Data – What can we see/observe or measure? e.g. color, shapes
3. Information – What could be the meaning of what we observe/measure? e.g. brown parts might be earth/deserts
4. Knowledge – What are the patterns, if any, in our interpretation of the information? What is our hypothesis or best guess about what we observe?
5. Wisdom - How could we learn from this? How could we apply our knowledge wisely to benefit not just ourselves but all others?
No comments:
Post a Comment