The general theme of this series has focused on the nature of information, or more accurately, the processing of being informed. In the OED, the various definitions of information include the imparting of knowledge and, more specifically, the shaping of the mind and character, communication of facts, intelligence, a mathematical quantity “divorced from any concept of news or meaning” (attributed to Shannon), communication of news and in a rare use the provision of form. In a world dominated by algorithms and text processing, I argue that we are increasingly divorced from meaning and agency and need a richer understanding.
I’ve made the point here and elsewhere that the domination of Shannon’s concept of information, while brilliant in conception and context, is limiting if generalised. In 1948, in a paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication, published in the Bell Labs journal, he focused on information that can be stored and transmitted to reduce uncertainty and linked to entropy. Critically, he separated this from its semantic content. It is the statistical structure of information which interests him. There are strong links between that and Ackoff’s 1989 formulation of the DIKW pyramid, frequently referenced to Eliot’s 1934 poem The Rock and the much-quoted two lines: ”Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Now, given that the poem is about the conflict between the spiritual and material, I suspect Eliot would be turning in his grave at the highly structured and linear approaches that have arisen. I took the title of this post from that poem, which goes on to state that said endless cycle, together with “Endless invention, endless experiment”, brings: “knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
Shannon talks about the conversion of signals into information and, in my view, sees knowledge as emerging from the use of information; I am less sure that he would see it as a hierarchy. Seeing Wisdom as the ability to make sound judgements doesn’t require it to be a higher level of information either. The danger is that the metaphor of data/signals being translated into information carries over into DIKW. There are also some other relevant statements from Ackoff that we should consider. He states that to observe is to sense and see data as the object of observation. Now, I have long rejected the DIKW pyramid as I think it is misleading. However, Ackoff’s observations on misassumptions in computer-based management information systems deserve attention.
They are:
Now, I have always loved Ackoff’s cynical pragmatism and the twinkle in his eye when he talks. I am pretty sure that I agree with all five points he makes, both from a theoretical and a practical/experiential perspective. For Ackoff, knowledge is know–how and is either transmitted or acquired, increasing potential but not necessarily attainment. Interestingly (given the Eliot link), he talks about ethics, conscience, the common good and the need to keep options open for future generations. That links to aesthetics, and then we get to Wisdom. While information, knowledge and understanding are about efficiency, Wisdom for Ackoff requires judgment to create value. Efficiency can be programmed, measured and spoken of independently of the actor, but that is not the case with judgment. Ackoff argues that wisdom generation cannot be assigned to automata and distinguishes (wo)man from machine.
Shannon is involved in the early Macy Conferences (of which more before this series ends), but his stance is different from Bateson’s, and while I think Ackoff is within that field (as is most systems thinking) there is a more extraordinary richness to what Ackoff is talking about it, and if I bring the various disciplines I mentioned in the opening post to play, we can augment and expand that fundamental (sic) wisdom without resorted to linear hierarchies.
I’m going to do this as a set of bullet points or markers:
I’ll get stuck into those tomorrow, but for the moment, remember that the Rock in Elliot’s poem stands for stability and him, that was the Church. I’m not going to get evangelical on you, but stability, or better understood, scaffolding, is key in human sense-making and judgement.
The banner picture is cropped from an original by Rowan Smith, and the opening picture is by Ave Calvary, both used under the terms of an Unsplash+ licence
I want to continue with my marketing to Yale Graduates theme from yesterday. One of the characteristics of activists is that, with a few exceptions, they tend to view that, given the right opportunities, everyone wants to be like them. I reference my Mrs E M C Davies story here, a formative experience at eleven and a set of lessons I have never forgotten. People don’t vote for an abstraction; they vote for empathy, or if all else fails, they go for a strong leader. Few people including the activists, if we are honest) look at data objectively. We use people or institutions we trust to filter the more significant issues for us. In the post-WWII consensus for many years, scientists and mainstream media were trusted, but that hasn’t worked out for everyone, so maybe demagogues are being given a chance instead. When I vote for members of the Wikipedia governing board, I tend to take the recommendations of a senior editor or two I have grown to trust over the years. I’m old enough not to pay attention to manifestos, and I don’t have the time to check the candidates’ edit history. In the same way, Political Parties used to have a form of tribal loyalty, but that has broken down all over North America and Europe in recent years.
A lot of our information processing, particularly as it relates to exercising judgment where there are significant consequences, we, in part, delegate to trusted individuals, institutions or networks. Now, that isn’t an explicit process, which is something people designing some digital democracy platforms don’t understand. It’s not a subject-by-subject delegation; it’s more the engagement in a movement, a feeling or rightness (which may, of course, be wrong). It is a strength of technology designers that they know how to make things explicit, but it’s also a weakness. We don’t want to be constantly making decisions. Peter Cook famously satirised this idea in a short film in which people get so fed up with his fully participative democracy that they vote to make him a dictator.
This also relates to the way that ideas can be challenged. There is a substantial difference between talking with strangers in the flesh and via social media, email and the like. When we move into text-based exchanges, AI-mediated exchanges cause antagonism and misunderstanding to arise more efficiently and with few immediate consequences. The audiences for the exchange are also important – saving face is not just a gender-based phenomenon, and allowing it is a key aspect in some cultures. The British habit of not being direct and phrases like ‘Well, you could do that’, which means please don’t ever think it, have evolved to avoid confrontation and allow people to save face. Other cultures are more direct. I still remember sitting in a meeting with an American partner in Singapore who, for the best part of an hour, was verbally beaten up and told that if things didn’t change, his contract was going to be cancelled. But he came out thinking that everyone was happy. Chinese and British culture fuse well in saying things indirectly, but if you don’t understand what You were courageous means in British Political Circles, you are going to get into a mess pretty damn fast.
This is a point I have made before in my managing knowledge heuristic: we always know more than we can tell, and we will always tell more than we can write down. Now, that was initially formulated to indicate that just making something explicit didn’t mean that you had captured the full depth of meaning that would be available in a conversation if someone asked me a question; it’s not difficult to understand the context of that question and the level of knowledge the other person has. If not, a short exchange will reveal it. If I have to write down everything I could know in the context of my knowing, then that is a Sisyphean task. This is an obvious limit on AI’s text and token basis. But I want to extend it here to issues of trust in so far as it pertains to my processing information and, as significantly, my efficient processing of the same. We know scent plays a part in human decision-making, to take just one example. Also, visual and cultural clues (a catch in the voice, a tear in the eye) tell us things that would not be visible in a virtual environment. When you get those clues, it is much easier to pull back (or push forward) in a conversation. Everyone (unless they are a full-blown narcissist)has the experience of realising that something matters to someone, and you have to tread gently. Equally, more pressure must be applied as the person is just listening.
I remember a conversation with an academic in Sydney we were working with on an indigenous SenseMaker® project. He planned to have his students conduct interviews, transcribe the results, and present conclusions. He wasn’t happy that we were involved and even less happy that it was at the insistence of the indigenous group who wanted the right to interpret their own stories. But he had to meet, so we did, and it didn’t go well at first. I explained what we were trying to achieve and its relationship to longitudinal research. Each response he gave was a mini-lecture, and I realised he wasn’t listening to me. I did not come from his academic background or have publications in the journals he respected, so he treated me as a rather bumptious undergraduate whose parents are University donors and, therefore, can’t be ignored. However, there is no need to take him/her seriously. So, I needed to find a way for him to pay attention as a first step. You come up with ideas in the context of need, so I said, OK, let’s do both – we can gather the stories. The Indigenous subjects can index (using a familiar word there, although, in SenseMaker®, we signify). We will transcribe the material, strip out the subject indexing, and give the material to your research group for interpretation, and I’ll pay the additional cost. There was no extra cost, but I knew that would gain attention. He was silent a bit, and then the dialogue went as follows:
Academic: once we’ve done that, you might compare how we interpreted the story with the way the Indigenous group indexed it
Me, with heavy irony: I might
Academic: then you might write a paper to say that you have proved our cultural bias
Me, ironically again, I might
Academic: and then call into question all our previous work in the field
Me (with a smile on my face): Yep
Academic: OK, I get it now
And after that, we had a good conversation and an interesting (yes, I am being British again) project. The above is a form of Socratic conversation but could not have occurred in a virtual environment. The judgement about what could work was a part of the complex exchange. I was proposing an approach that, to use a Scottish expression, was Beyond his Ken, so I had to find a way for him to articulate my points in his language and political context. Humour was also present on both sides of the exchange. I had to clear the logs before the train could run …
I was not a part of his community, but that is an additional aspect. I lived for several years in a Christian Socialist Community located in Wick Court, a Jacobean Mansion near Bristol. It is not as elaborate as Llanthony Abbey in the opening picture but mostly has better plumbing. Within that community, orthodoxies relating to religion and politics acted as boundary objects. If you associated action with the Sermon on the Mount, or more effectively, the writing of Paulo Friere (we had our modern-day heroes), it meant people would accept and move on rather than a contest. There was a shared value system that provided a substrate of decision efficacy. Challenging it unexpectedly could also shake things up so people pay attention; using shock against the substrate is a key skill in rhetoric; it creates anomalies, and we pay attention to anomalies.
As we get to know people, things change, and virtual communication is adequate; the knowledge between data and information must be built and built socially to be practical. The social context is key, and it has implications for organisational design as much as it does for data processing by technology. I’ll return to that tomorrow.
Again, I took both the photographs used today. The banner picture shows fallen trees blocking the Welsh Highland Railway just above Beddgelert, and the opening picture is of Llanthony Abbey in the Black Mountains, both taken this month.
One of the common phrases in modern political commentary, and I find it depressing, is that we are no longer working with principles; everything is now transactional. To a degree, I am exhibiting a degree of hiraeth here, a nostalgia to return to a past that probably never existed in the way I remember it anyway. Corruption and self-interest are hardly without precedent, nor is the manipulation of information to control people’s perception of reality. But things have changed and can be characterised (incompletely) in three ’S’ words: shame, speed, and scale. In some ways, the most significant of these is the first. While corruption, self-interest and a willingness to lie and double down on the lies no longer trigger either shame or rejection. Indeed, it can be celebrated. One of my weirdest pre-Christmas experiences was in the final session of Map Camp, where there was a clear difference between the US and UK participants. Simon and I believed that freedom of speech does not include the freedom to lie, particularly when those lies can hurt people. These days that provides for anything from mild reputation damage to make you a target for physical abuse or make you a target for assassination. This wasn’t an acceptable constraint for the US participants or at least one of them. Truth as an objective and an objective standard has increasingly had less and less to do with what people believe. When someone is proven a liar, their defence is to say that everyone lies anyway, and people accept that.
Now, when I was in the US in November, post the election, one leading Democrat said to me that the problem had been that they were treating the electorate as if they wrecked all Yale graduates engaged in fact-based ‘rational’ decision-making; they ignored sentiment. For the past two decades, in various political forums, I have argued that street stories matter, not the response to pollsters or focus groups. The day-to-day micro-concerns matter; the least bad arguments don’t work when people want things to change. When they are increasingly desperate for some change, any change will do, even if you characterised it as turkeys voting for Christmas. Doling, that will make things worse, it’s patronising at best. Proximate threats matter more than distant threats, so doing things now to avoid triggering more irreversible climate changes is not a priority when the basics of life are in danger – we are not naturally inclined as a species to sacrifice, but we are capable of it. Worst still, uncertainty is interpreted as a reason not to take action. The reality of climate change cannot be denied if you have a basic education, some ability to sort the wheat from the chaff in the information you receive, logical reasoning capability and the time, willingness and opportunity to use all three. But uncertainty about events, catastrophic predictions that fail within the time horizon of people’s attention span, or the span of things that are brought to their attention, lead to a denial that one-day such events, or similar, may happen. An old friend, Tom, who worked in intelligence for the Canadian Government (at the time of writing, competing to be the 51st US State with Greenland said it well: It used to be that every village had an idiot, and it didn’t matter because everyone knew who the idiot was, but now the idiots have banded together on the internet to legitimise idiocy to which I would add and do a few other things besides.
Getting a group of people together from a specific culture, possibly with token neo-colonial participants, to talk about how other people should not behave like this and should instead adopt our mindset is pure lotus-eating. It has the opposite effect than intended—it plays into perversion. We need to think and act differently, and to that end, we need to pay attention to our species’ social evolution and work to change the substrate – more on that tomorrow. For the moment, let’s go back to the village.
The village was a legitimising substrate for the validation of information. The source of any information was as important as the information itself. It constitutes a deme and will be a part of a network that makes up a macrodeme. Those words are important, and I got them from Caporael’s work, which I summarised in 2021 as fundamental to understanding how human systems are scaffolded. A deme or band handles migration and collaborative behaviour between hunting and foraging groups and provides for a shared construction of reality. A macrodeme goes up to 300 and is used for seasonal gathering genetic variety, stabilising language and more collective identities. This work primarily focuses on hunter-gatherer communities, but I have long argued that in a virtual world, we can start substituting the idea of identities for individuals. The downside of a village is that it can become very narrow-minded: the demes without the periodic assembly of macrodemes lack genetic variety and diversity of perspective. Social media works similarly as it clusters like with like to the point where individual differences disappear, and groups with millions of participants behave like an isolated village taken over by a cult. In a macrodeme, a common purpose (never articulated) means empathy can overcome differences. Indeed, Graeber and Wengrow X suggest that the demes may have been at war with each other until they engaged in monument building; no differences that can make any difference. In effect, the speed of interaction allows the rapid and unpredictable scaling of perverted forms of information, and consequent action or inaction, and shame is a weapon to attack the other rather than a moral inhibitor.
I took both of the pictures I used today. The banner picture at dusk in West Kennett just before Christmas; the river Kennett has spilt over its boundaries. The opening picture is of the cairn, a signpost for Wayfarers, at the highest point of Y Grib, known as the Dragon’s Back in the Black Mountains, looking on to Mynydd Bychan. The Symbolism is hopefully self-evident.
I almost became an involuntary actor in the wrong sort of story today. I took a brief break in Porthmadog (see yesterday’s banner picture) to get in three, possibly four, walks in Eryri. I watched Cardiff beat the Dragons for the twentieth time on Boxing Day. Then, after dropping my son off at his inlaws, I drove up through mid-Wales to arrive just before midnight. Hence, in the morning, I was tired, and with a lousy mountain, I decided on a circular walk around the coast from Aberdaron, which would pass the point where we had scattered my parents’ ashes two decades ago. That would also allow me to stock up at the local bakers, itself a strong childhood memory. But the weather was foul when I arrived, and the bakers closed for winter. SoI ended up spending the 27th on a sentimental journey to the Llangwynadl, the location for a decade or more of family holidays walking and sailing between the small harbour of Porth Colman and the beach at Traeth Penllech; harbour and beach are superfluous words there by the way if you know some basic welsh. Yesterday was better, but with low clouds, so I parked at Rhyd Ddu and went over the old slates mines at the Col between the South Ridge of Yr Wyddfa and Yr Aran and thence down the Watkin Path to the road, then a lakeside walk on the Cambrian Way to Beddgelert for a pint in the Prince Llywellyn before getting the bus back to my starting point. So today, with the forecast indicating clear summits with sunshine in the morning, I plotted a route up Moel Hebog and then down what looked like a clear path to Pont Aberglaslyn for the river walk back to my start.
Parking in Beddgelert all looked good ahead, with the summit clear. Setting off, I was walking well with no breathlessness or weariness in my limbs. Many a younger party overtook me; I am 70 and reconciled to that. The ascent of Hebog is pretty brutal, not a formal scramble, but with wet rocks, you need to know what you are doing, and I passed two of the younger parties at that point. But the cloud came in with driving rain, so my stay at the summit was brief. On my way up, I thought of heading north from the top, along a route I knew, rather than south, where I depended on the map’s depiction of a correct path. But with a strong wind from the north, I kept to my original plan and followed a good route. The Sat Nav pinged to tell me I was off route at one point. Still, there was no obvious route where it indicated some significant cliffs, so I decided to keep to the more gentle gradient to descend to Cwm Ystradllyn, which I had half thought about doing at the planning stage. It’s a fascinating area with the remnants of neolithic huts and the miner’s barracks. It would mean a longer walk, but I reasoned that the clear path in front of me indicated that others had been that way before. All that was true until I reached a massive dry stone wall with no style or gate. I had to climb that; it’s not easy as the stones shift under your feet. From that wall to the old Miner’s cottages, I had to navigate slowly over slippery rocks and through the bog, marsh, and streams swollen by the rain. Not to mention one more wall. I relaxed then but was now concerned about the time, so I ate quickly and moved on. The track from there (you can see it in the banner picture) looked good, and it was until I got to the col leading to Cwm Oerddwr. Thereafter, the nightmare started again, compounded by fallen trees necessitating diversions. The final mile was down a very steep path between two stone walls full of fallen leaves concealing uneven and slippy rocks, and twice, I had to climb the walls again to navigate around more fallen trees. I got to the start of the tourist path up the Aberglaslyn at sunset, but the light was good enough to make it back, if carefully before complete darkness set in.
Now, you may ask what the relevance of that story is to the overall theme of information ecology and the differences that make a difference. Well, in part, I was experienced enough to cope but was also experienced enough to have taken the safer, known option from the summit. I’ve been softened by the Lake District, where if there is a path on the map, there is nearly always a good path on the ground and multiple exit routes. That is not the case in Eryri, and even less so in Scotland, but I didn’t use my knowledge. I had been habituated in the Lake District to a pattern in the landscape that was not present here. Ironically, I advised two groups who were thinking of coming down the same way not to do so but to follow the wall down to clearer and easier forest tracks. But I didn’t follow my advice; the information on the ground gave me confidence, my history and experience should have made me warier, and knowledge of my age, that it was winter and the weather deteriorating, I should have played safe. But it was a complex decision and partly informed by realising I really should have completed the planned route yesterday rather than taking the bus; as I was scrambling up the wet rock, I was rehearsing multiple stories about what I would do at the summit. I was matching reality against imagination and history to explore possible patterns. Then, at the summit, I reached a bifurcation point where one set of possibilities would close off and another would open up. Descending Cwm Oerddwr, I was rehearsing options. Reaching Oerddwr-uchaf, a deserted farmhouse, I could take a farm track down to the main road, adding an hour to the trip while playing completely safe or carry on and hope the track became clearer – which it did bar the leaves and the stones. Seeing woodsmoke rising from the woods above Aberglaslyn Hall was the deciding factor – for that to be the case, there must be a clear track up.
There was a lot of post hoc rationalisation, but many factors and options were involved. My experience, memories, and stories of other walkers tested how appropriate a prior experience, always remembered as a story, was to the current situation. Like all human decision-making, it’s messy and emergent and, as far as possible, you want to avoid premature convergence on a particular option. Over the years, I’ve developed a calming technique: to imagine getting back to the car, sitting down, taking off the boots and then driving back for food and rest. In a sense, I am telling a story about a future state to make sure I don’t panic. It is also a very familiar story as it is where I end up. I’ve descended challenging tracks in the dark without a torch, come down Glyder Fach with a broken rib, and Tryfan after a fall which needed eight stitches. My stories tell me it will work out if I stay calm, but I am also rehearsing stopping, getting into survival sacks, and using the emergency beacon while I still have the energy to do it.
Experience and storytelling are profoundly entangled and are one of the primary mechanisms for sense-making; as I said earlier in this series, borrowing from Andy Clark, we are not intelligent cameras. I couldn’t explain all the sensory data I was using when walking or, in an earlier life, dinghy sailing. Larry Prusak famously said that intuition is a compressed experience; out of the many wise things, he said it is one of the wisest. Narrative is key to sharing that experience and building the capacity to make rapid, intuitive decisions. It’s never a mental model or a mindset; it is a complex mélange of stories, imagination and sensory data at the time. It’s a tangled web with some coherence, which is the theme of the opening picture.
One interesting question is when narrative acts as a collage or when it is a mosaic. In the former case, all the elements have meaning and potential beauty in their own right. In the latter, it is only when everything comes together that the pattern makes sense. Both can assemble and reassemble, neither is linear, and both create coherence to make new meaning. However, I think narrative has its highest use as a collage, not a mosaic; it contrasts the messy patterns of assemblages with the completed and presented story that you see in too much communication.
My 2020 Twelvetide series had two key blogs (also with some walking references) on narrative. I also wrote up my work with Boisot to show how narrative acts as an abductive link between tacit and explicit knowledge; all three blogs are incorporated into this one. Narrative can be anecdotal, memory or complete stories told or written, but they all have a profound effect. I can trace my claustrophobia to listening to David Davies read the Wierdstone of Brisingamen (the subject of the first of last year’s Twelvetide posts) on Children’s Hour when I was young. The escape through the Earldelving in The Wierdstone of Brisingamen, where each, in turn, has to crawl through a water-filled sump, not knowing if there will be air on the other side, terrifies me to this day. And when the storm clouds rise on the horizon, I think of Nastrond sending Fenrir in the final scene or the summoning of the Fimbulwinter by the Morrigan. Then, there was the sacrifice of Durathror and the wisdom of Cadelin to act as role models. Stories create their path dependencies over time and are part and parcel of the substrate by which we are informed and through which we inform. You will understand Good Omens better if you read the Just William stories and Harry Potter if you grew up with Jennings and Derbyshire. But they also have value without that context. They are fractal, many-layered and complex; they scale by decomposition and recombination over time.
I took the banner picture with the new frameless Sony A IV (so much lighter) on the descent into Cwn Ystradllyn; it shows the remnants of the old miner’s cottages looking onto the mine they worked. The opening picture is used under the terms of an Unsplash + Licence.
As is customary in the Christmas series, I want to set some personal context for this – learning and reflecting on my own experience. An eclectic career and education can naturally orient you to complexity and uncertainty. University was Philosophy and Physics, but also through being Leader of the House of Debates and Legal officer for a significant occupation of University House. I was then a sabbatical officer in the student union in the turbulent seventies and learnt a lot about negotiation and building relationships with your enemies. I got on well with a very right-wing Pro-Vice-Chancellor as we were both pragmatists, not ideologues, and over dinner in the Inn at Whitwell (if you ever get a chance to stay and dine, it is as good now as it was then), we could find ways to compromise outside of the public view, and we trusted each other to deliver on promises. That was one of my first lessons in using empathy to overcome political conflict, but at a micro, not a macro, level. My period in the SCM and WSCF was formative. It took me to the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe in an intensive three-year period in which I had responsibilities very young, possibly too young. Keeping my mouth shut when being questioned by the Stasi on what ended up as my last trip to East Berlin was formative, and while I had been briefed that it would happen and how to respond, the reality was very different. I knew, in theory, that the Four Powers Agreement meant I would be OK, but I still remember the pricking in my back as I did the solitary walk back over the border to West Berlin. Witnessing the murder of social activists and the indifference of the police on two continents shocked me out of middle-class complacency and is a part of my lifetime opposition to well-meaning but neocolonial attempts to talk about how things should be rather than engaging with the reality of the here and now. Those experiences also make you a realist and a materialist; the indulgences of constructivism are, in the main, lotus-eating. If you haven’t read Metaphysical Animals, then do so; it’s the story of the response to the horrors emerging from WWII by four women philosophers who had to find a way to make philosophy relevant again.
In yesterday’s post, I raised questions about the obsession with being data-driven and some of the consequences. A reference to the ancient mariner parched near to death but surrounded by salt water was designed to drive that point home. Data in itself is just data; distillation is required to be consumable. The question I raised is how and who should carry out the distillation, and I promised to talk about the role of experience in today’s post and narrative tomorrow. I sometimes play with a matrix between intensity and time in understanding the role of experience, and I also want to distinguish between understanding and ability in both dimensions. Understanding also involves a degree of empathy, and it isn’t easy to research something involving human knowledge in practice without some degree of empathy. That requires engagement, the degree of which has to be balanced with objectivity.
That diversity continued as I entered the world of Industry in the early days of computing. My international experience and youth (so not expensive) got me a job (after a scary nine months without a job) in HR and Training for Hunting Surveys and Consulting, but, as a result of telling a new Finance Director he was mistreating his staff (I was young and naïve), I was moved into the Finance Function – he wanted someone who would say to him what he needed to know without undue respect for his position. That gave me several years of experience as a development accountant responsible for treasury and the complete computerisation of manual systems. I was also the de facto head of Business Computing for the whole company, which is to say the CEO trusted my recommendations. Reconciling the UK and Irish VAT accounts for the movement of gas cylinders on and off North Sea survey vessels with irregular patterns of port visits over the North and Irish Seas with only a slide rule and an Add-lister (the one with a till roll) developed both manual and problem-solving skills and a sense of proportion; writing off rounding errors is a key accounting skill and knowing what you can get away with in the minutia of detail that is much of an accountant’s life. When you are half the age of those you manage (with one exception) and your direct colleagues, that also creates learning, respect and patience. Getting that VAT stuff sorted took me a long, sleepless weekend, but it earned me a lot of respect, and when the returns were signed off, trust from colleagues and the VAT authorities. It had been a simmering mess of potential prosecution and fines, and everyone was trying to make it someone else’s responsibility. Moving on again to Datasolve and being part of the management buyout, which gave rise to Data Sciences, I moved from programmer to team leader and then to an odd sort of consultant. I was building decision support systems for people without any idea what the technology could do, and they would not have believed me if I had told them. By then, I had realised that it was a lot better to find out what people did, by engagement, storytelling, credibility building, and so on, than design and build the system they would have asked for if they had known what was possible. The whole linear process of requirements capture, specification, testing, and such would not work. I had to pull a lot of all-nighters and long weekends in an office in Smithfield to do that, as their internal IT department was more traditional. So I had two parallel processes, one building the system and the other talking about a system I was confident wouldn’t be built. I did that successfully with three major clients, which got me promoted to team leader but left a few enemies in the IT departments; this was before anyone even thought about Agile. After that, I moved to business manager, general manager, and finally, the senior strategy role I held up to the IBM takeover.
So, I didn’t get back into the academic side (besides a lot of reading and a thesis on decision support for my MBA) until I hit my early forties. IBM, post-acquisition, moved me into a research, strategy and business development role. Throughout this, working in diverse roles and cultures has been very important. It provides the context of diverse practice, which you don’t get with a single career track, to inform and be informed by the theory. It also means you learn to converse with academics, Executives, Engineers and many others, not in the abstract but through working together. You share and can use stories that resonate with them; more on that tomorrow. Those stories also represented a diverse body of experience. But I was still doing consultancy; you must be engaged in research and practice in Services.
Now, I was lucky to be born when those sorts of opportunities and experiences were available if you rode your luck, and I rode that hard at times. For several decades now, my concern has been creating methods and tools to build on and use that type of experience and the associated practice but at scale and with respect for the natural process and path dependencies critical for human decision-making. That, by definition, means multiple perspectives. Narrative is key there, but that is for tomorrow.
One of the most enjoyable projects I ran at IBM was setting up a situation where partners in a major accounting firm had to complete their timesheets and expense reports rather than delegate the task to a junior. Mayhem ensued, and the process was radically simplified. Getting people to engage in the task is more effective than getting them to observe it. One of my first ventures into ethnography was not to study people but to take on the apprentice role for a week or more, understanding by doing. Sweeping metal swarf off the floors of a Glasgow factory in the early morning hours or wading almost up to your neck in sewage teach you more than observation or interviewing. Still, it requires some humility and a sense of humour.: never say to a water engineer, “Give me a dirty job, I don’t mind, I’m here to help.” Interestingly, exposing senior management to reality is something we share with the Vanguard Method. Still, the difference which makes a difference is engagement, and with SenseMaker® Genba, continuous real-time capture of experience in a form that enables vector measurement and rapid feedback. You can also cross-fertilise; I took C Level Bankers and made them shelf stackers in a supermarket for a week while the Supermarket Directors were trained as cashiers. The swap ensured no one knew who they were. The information you gain through these methods differs significantly from the data you would gather in a more traditional approach.
When I put that process together, which I will call participative ethnography, my motivation was partly driven by having lived through half a dozen strategy initiatives as a General Manager. Each was similar; you were a workshop, told about the latest miracle cure, driven through a few exercises, and then expected to align your business with the result. Occasionally, if you were fortunate, you might be interviewed, and if miracles were taking place, those who worked for you might be engaged before the strategy was finalised. But most of the time, it was a top-down-driven recipe. You had to learn a new language, and in the main, you carried on what you had been doing anyway but described it differently. That was when I realised that Management’s primary function is to protect employees from such initiatives so they can get on with the work. Moving to IBM, I built a reputation for doing things differently, which meant major account managers would seek my group out when all else was lost, hoping we might turn things around. We did, in part because the general response from customers to engagement was: “We can’t believe these people work for IBM “. Salespeople then were driven by orders more than politics, so we got called in more and more and started to formalise the process. We were doing some precarious things, but the customer was happy as IBM was perceived as safe. I don’t think I would have got away with them other than a Blue Chip Company, and for that, I remain grateful to IBM. Another illustration of my point in this series is that the proper context can reduce the cost of being informed. No one would get fired for taking a risk on IBM as a supplier. In contrast, in a smaller company, more evidence would have had to be gathered and provided, and there would have been more safety measures, which would have inhibited radical change.
I’m not sure if the matrix to the right helps or not, but I hope it makes the point. It contrasts time spent with the level of engagement. The blue items represent traditional consultancy or management models, and the green items are the new ones we introduced at IBM and later in the Cynefin Co. Dark red is one of the key new areas we are working on. If you observe what people are doing (common in design thinking) or interview people, even in situ, you have a brief engagement and are dipping into the space. That contrasts with the top right, where you work on a day-to-day basis and have some years of experience to the point where you can claim a degree of mastery in the field. The apprentice is immersed in the acts of doing but also takes time out for education and mentoring, intending to move to mastery. At the bottom left, seeking information from the top right will always be limited. Hence, our new work on role-based distributed decision-making, a topic I started to introduce in a post a year ago and further developed in a book chapter. Work continues, but I am being more cautious than I was with Estuarine Mapping, given a minority tendency to take good ideas, simplify them and prematurely launch them on the market! The essence of the approach is to enable people to, in effect, be their own consultants by the way they make decisions and how those get fed back at scale to senior management. Expressions of interest are welcome. The participative ethnography I developed while in IBM is still there in the open source methods, and I encourage people to take it up – even a few days are better than nothing. Still, you have to be prepared to take on the role of the naïve trainee and do the work, not study other people.
The Genba walk, developed initially by Taiichi Ohno in Toyota, is a keen lean technique that focuses on observation in situ, and there have been multiple variations since then. Thanks to a suggestion from Nigel Thurlow (himself ex-Toyota), we named the journaling version of SenseMaker® after this. Regular reporting is replaced by continuous capture of experience and associated narrative here. Still, emphasising high abstraction metadata, we want the person recounting their experience to interpret their experience however expressed. For example, in one project, a nurse could capture an oral story from a patient, take a picture and add written notes with both parties interpreting the data. High abstraction metadata is another key way to improve information transmission using the abductive capabilities that are uniquely human, but I will pick up on that tomorrow. For the moment, the point is that continuous capture is better than staccato.
Now all of these techniques are part of creating an informative eco-system. That also uses the ability of humans to sense and manage patterns. I’m currently reading Damien Collins’s Rivals in the Storm, the story of how Lloyd George seized power, won the war and lost his government. In it, he references J T Davies, one of Lloyd George’s personal secretaries who went on to join the Board of the Ford Motor Company. He was asked to compare the working styles of Lloyd George with those of Henry Ford. He recalled that ‘they both work a great deal from instinct. Ford is a man of genius, and he has no plan, no rigid system. He works by a series of inspirations and has never blundered. L.G. is very much the same. Over and over again during the war, we thought he was doing the wrong thing. But he was always right.’ I don’t think that would have survived a consultancy exercise. My concern is how to make decisions that way, but at scale and without needing a magician. Lloyd George, probably one of Britain’s most remarkable, if not the greatest, Prime Minister, was known as the Welsh Wizard.
I took the banner picture in Porthmadog harbour on a brief trip to get some walking in Eryri post-Christmas. The opening photo of a heron by a sewer outfall is by insung yoon on Unsplash.
One of the most common assumptions in many a management field is the assumption that if you could get the right information to the right people at the right time, and if those people had the right training, the right mindset and the right authority, then magically all would be well with the world. Associated with this are the long lists of biases, which are, of course, there to be overcome. The underlying assumption is that if properly informed, human actors have a Spock-like ability to make the right decisions if we can only meet all those conditions. The focus has been on training, mapping competence and becoming data-driven. Also, a belief that everything has to be measured explicitly to be effectively managed. Yesterday’s post argued against that somewhat naïve Enlightenment and North Atlantic (in cultural terms) decision-making model with some examples of how an evolved (that word is key) social context reduced the cost of decision-making by pre-processing data in a social context of trust. I’m building on that theme over this and the following two posts.
Now, to a degree, that is not a flawed assumption. Still, over the last few decades, there has been confusion of data with information, to the point where some AI advocates are advocating a position in which correlation is causation. The focus is also on the individual decision-maker or combinations in teams, which is not the same thing as the distributed or what I am starting to think of as affordance or scaffolded decision-making; I will return to that in a future post. I would also add that many, particularly the Agile community, have a minimal and restrictive understanding of ‘roles’, another reason for looking for a new language.
The drive to be data-driven is interesting as it confuses a means with an end. Data acquisition becomes the tail that wags the dog. To take a typical example, you start with a legitimate desire to acquire data about the activity. Still, it becomes a compulsive desire on the part of the analysts who use the data (generally not the decision-makers) to get more and more data. As a result, you get constant incremental requests from client-facing staff for numerical reports to the point where form completion is more important than client acquisition or retention. I should admit here that when I was a Development Accountant in one of the Hunting Group Companies, I shamelessly used my access to and control of data as a point of influence. Data acquisition becomes an addiction, and the ability to interpret it is a power source for the analyst or middle manager. In Belbin terms, they become monitor-evaluators who can analyse data to enable or paralyse. As a note, I’ve used Bebin for many years, but I think it completely lost its way when it went from seven to nine roles (adding Specialist and Innovator). I’ve previously written about why I used the old Belbin and issues with psychometric tests in general. Belbin used to define people in relation to context and time rather than implying some individual innate and underpinning capability which you see in pseudo-sciences such as MBTI.
I asked Chat GPT to take the famous line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “water, water everywhere” and adapt it to data, and it did pretty well, albeit with a bit of help.
Data, data everywhere,
In streams that swirl and sink
But insights rare as desert rain
Nor any thread to think!
Now, I partly blame the DIKW pyramid for this, one of two models that helped launch a thousand failed knowledge initiatives, the other being SECI. In the 2020 Twelvetide series, I went back to the CBI Handbook on Knowledge Management, which I edited; I said we should see knowledge as the shared context that creates information from data, not some higher level order of information, and God help us when people start to talk about I talked about Wisdom Management. That post and the two that follow are incorporated into this one. My essential point is that without a shared context, all you have is data, no information.
When we look back, the domination of the engineering metaphor that displaced the more adaptive military metaphor of ‘Taylorism’ created the conditions by which we are now giving AI far too much credibility. We dumbed human sense-making down through excessive structure, best practice, consultancy-led fad cycles and so on to the point where it can often produce as ‘good as’ results.
The emphasis on data, mainly text and tokens, is a part of this issue. Complex systems have high path dependency, and we now live in this world that has emerged from a false metaphor that isn’t easy to correct. If, and I suggest it does, effective sense-making is dependent on shared context, then text analytics and context-free data gathering and scaping (highly appropriate use of the English language) are not enough. Here, the ASHEN framework comes into play: artefacts, skills, habits, experience and natural talent. We can partially capture the artefacts and skills with technology and use language in part for the rest, but it is not complete.
The rapid growth of technology and associated organisational change methods enabled by the sudden supply of data happened too quickly for humans to adjust, and we now face a very real issue in that few managers are aware that there is another way or rather ways. Judgement has become a real issue, and the OED has many definitions, but three are relevant here:
The ability to make considered decisions or to arrive at reasonable conclusions or opinions on the basis of the available information; the critical faculty; discernment, discrimination.
The fact of possessing this ability to a high degree or in a sophisticated form; discretion, good sense, wisdom.
The formation of an opinion or conclusion concerning something, esp. following careful consideration or deliberation. Also: the opinion or conclusion thus formed; an assessment, a view, an estimate.
This requires something more than being data-driven, and it should not include the assumption that automation of interpretation of data, or worse, the correlation is causation argument, is the way to handle things. Managing the context is key. Also, the danger of being data-driven is the assumption that the answer is already out there; we may need to create new data.
So, in my next two posts in this series, I want to explore experience and narrative as ways to create shared context.
The Banner picture is cropped from an original by dan carlson obtained from Unsplash, and the opening picture is by William Strang and is the frontispiece to Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Essex House 1903) which is in the Public Domain.
Many of you will know the origins of the body of methods, tools, and theory that is Cynefin has its formal origins in my work at IBM on Knowledge Management (KM), which started in 1996. I can trace the roots through my roles in strategy, general management (working in decision support systems), SCM/WSCF, and student politics (with some study between meetings, occupations and protest marches) at university, not to mention school, childhood, and the broader cultural context, which enabled and constrained all that followed. “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together”, to quote the Bard in ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ ( Act IV, Scene 3) and, in the context of this series, we can add, from ‘Troilus and Cressida’, One touch of nature makes the whole world kin” (Act III, Scene 3). Throughout that period, I was engaged with the work, not just managing it. I remember being offered a promotion at IBM to leave KM as a field and direct another business area, but I refused. I couldn’t imagine managing something in which I was not involved. The interaction of theory and practice was key to innovation. The practice triggered anomalies; you then reflected on the theory and tried again, repeating the cycle as frequently as possible and, critically, because I was managing the business, I didn’t have to justify what I thought was the next right thing I could go and do it. I never understand why some academics see teaching as a burden; for me, the need to communicate to an audience live is when phrases, ideas and such all come together. All the frameworks I have created started their life as a rapid sketch on a flipchart or whiteboard in response to an audience.
Now, over the years, I have had the great benefit of working for people who could direct things they didn’t understand per se; the best ones in IBM also knew how to communicate what I was doing (or not doing) to the powers above them to give me the space. They were good at enabling innovation by people like me, which meant trusting me with a degree of autonomy and providing top cover, which is rare in risk-averse modern organisations. A complex ecosystem with very different but connected role-based capabilities had evolved and worked. However, as centralised budgetary control became easier (one of the downsides of technology), their freedom to operate was damaged by excessive transparency. They no longer had the freedom to give people like me the freedom to work in the messy present; everything had to be predicted in advance and promised had to conform with what was generally fashion-driven strategy (IBM used McKinsey a lot). I should say that a key skill here was the ability to translate something innovative and different into a language that those in power would understand or, better still, not notice. Expectation and pattern repetition are essential here. I remember sitting at a meeting in Armonk (IBM’s HQ) once, and a main board member turned to me and said, “I get it, you’re one of Philip’s Pets; let’s move on”, and the questioning stopped, and I had the de facto authority to proceed. The pattern of past success, in the main, of Philip’s Pets gave license without the need for understanding the initiative itself – that is very efficient. But carries its dangers, given it is based on an individual. Philip, I would always trust Joel, never. However, within the conventional hierarchy of IBM, Joel delivered what they expected to see in the immediate context of his targets, but mainly at the cost of the future. For Joel, that was someone else’s problem; Philip cared about the organisation and its people.
So, in effect, the information here is in the sense of being informed. When developing software and methods, I am informed by theory and practice and generally could move into mostly risk-free action to test, evaluate, develop and refine. Anomalies made me pay attention, and I was sensitised to those anomalies because I was creating the conditions under which they would emerge. The leadership of IBM was informed by an implicit understanding that some freedom to make ‘pets’ in general was beneficial and any loss bearable. The environment, the social context, and shared knowledge reduced the need for data and increased the ability to inform and be informed. It was never a matter of creating information flows to humans acting as intelligent cameras (lovely concept there from Andy Clark). Most of the process was not explicit, but it was generally understood, creating information efficiency. Humans have always had to do that. One of the downsides of the growth of information technology is that the costs of processing large volumes of data went down, and the tyranny of the explicit replaced the efficiency of the implicit at a considerable cost to humanity. In addition homogenisation started to reduce differences, something to which I will return tomorrow
The banned picture is cropped from an original, as is the opening picture, both used under the terms of an Unsplash+ license.
In recent years, I have been in the habit of writing a dozen, sometimes a baker’s dozen, blog posts around a theme to coincide with the twelve days of Christmas. I failed to complete 2016 on the theme of Welsh poems, and at some point, I plan to retrofit the missing blog posts: the lack of completeness irritates me every year. Last year, I took science fiction/fantasy authors and themes as my subject, starting with Alan Garner and ending with Terry Pratchett, emphasising his Tiffany Series. The 13th post, to make up the Baker’s dozen, picked up on all the authors I could write about, so there is another series in there if I ever run out of ideas. The first post of the 2022 series links you back to the entire history of this series, which started in 2009, continued in 2012 and then, since 2014, has been an annual tradition.
At the end of last year, I noted that this year, I might pick up on the television programmes we watched as a family – in the days of one box, three channels or possibly adult books I read as a child/teenager. An overall theme would have been the liminal work you live in, from around puberty to leaving home, and I may return to that. I did think about the theme of the physical world and how we invest meaning in it, which is linked to our 21st Anniversary Year Retreat theme (please read Anna’s latest blog post on this), but that didn’t gel as a twelve/thirteen-part series. I briefly flirted with a series on narrative methods and theory to help get ready for the next Field Book, but that would be a duplicate effort. So earlier today, much later than usual, while I was stuffing a goose with rum-soaked apples, I realised that the theme of being different and making a difference would be more appropriate to set the scene for the year to come. Further, that would allow a discussion of how we are informed and creating a healthy information substrate. I confess that I was partly stimulated by attempts to gaslight critics into a pliant and platitudinous passivity in response to my and others’ criticism of the Inner Development Goals.
The phrase the differences which make a difference is attributed to Gregory Bateson in his book Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, published in 1972, the year I went up to University. It is usually seen as a definition of information (or possibly bits of information) that create a significant distinction and/or impact. I will return to Bateson at the end of this series as I am entertaining the thesis that understanding information is better linked to complexity science than of Shannon, Ashby, et al., who mainly informs what is now known as Cybernetics within the Systems Thinking tradition. The Macy Conferences were in the early days of understanding systems and Cybernetics, and they then had a wider use. If you read Bateson, one crucial thing is that abstraction and abduction were key to making meaningful distinctions. He also anticipates much of modern physics in talking about the criticality of energy. For the moment, I want to note some key links in different bodies of work which may have tight synergy:
I deliberately have not linked back to my written posts on all these, but searching on the blog will get you material. But I am also interested in how people read around these subjects without my directing the conversation – so comments are very welcome. For me, the links between all of those start to open up pathways to see the world in very different ways,
So energy and information are key here, as is difference-making, a phrase where I am making purposeful use of the ambiguity of the English language. This subject will allow me to explore a range of subjects: the illegitimate distinction between inner and outer, which is far too pervasive, whether an is ever be an ought, identity diversity (rather than gender/race, etc.), description as opposed to evaluation or judgement and a few others where an anthro-complexity perspective is different from convention. I’ll also pick up on some historical work on knowledge management and methods such as anthro-simulation (including metaphor landscapes). The dangers of attempting to see things holistically will also be there – not seeing the forest for the trees is cool, but if you think the forest is made of trees and you can see the whole, you are in for a rude awakening. The substrate matters, and there are elements of time (Chronos and Kairos) when different types of knowledge are possible or relevant. At this stage, I am unsure of the sequence or the entire content so that it will be an exploration; I will be writing aloud, so comments and questions are welcome and will influence how the series develops.
.
The banner picture is cropped from an original by Lukasz Szmigiel and the opening photo is by Lukasz Szmigiel, both on Unsplash. For this series, the banner picture will generally show boundary conditions, some sharp, some liminal and the opening picture will contrast fast with slow., mechanical with natural, etc.
At the end of each episode of In Our Time, there is an additional few minutes for podcast listeners which always starts with Melvyn Bragg asking his guests what aspects of the topic they would have liked to cover but were missed. So I thought I would do the same at the end of this series. I’ve also had thoughts about a couple of options for next year so I’ve added that to remind me nearer the time. While I am here thanks for all the comments by email and on social media as I have worked through and to all the Doctor Who fans who told me where I was wrong!
Firstly to the major ommissions, the ones I originally planned to use but then it didn’t pan out. While I mentioned Niel Gaimen in yesterday’s post for Good Omens he deserved an article in his own right for American Gods and its sister novel Anansi Boys along with the Sandman series (brilliantly televised unlike American Gods) and The Ocean at the End of the Road, now translated into a West End play. He also deserves mention for a cameo performance on Big Bang Theory without which we would not have had the character of Denise. Lauren Lapkus stole several episodes with that part. Adrian Tchaikovsky was second up on my original list for this Children of Time series which explores the consequence of intelligence emerging in spiders. octopodes and other creatures. He has a background in zoology and psychology which comes through in this work. I am currently working through his Final Architecture series. He is a prolific writer but without any loss in imagination or quality of writing. I think one of the reasons I didn’t include him was that I couldn’t think of how to talk about the spiders without ruining the book for people who hadn’t read it. Another other major omission was Philip Pullman for the His Dark Materials series which has finally gotten the treatment it deserved in the BBC and HBO series, although I did like the first film but never developed thanks to the religious right lobby. There is an old saying that the only two religions that have jokes about their faith are the Catholics and the Jews; because they know they are right. Losing a sense of humour about your faith is the first sign of a descent into superstition. The sequels to the original three books maintain the quality of the first. It is overall one of the best explorations of Religion but it almost deserves a series in its own right. I did mention him in an earlier post.
We then come to a pair of Comic Writers Robert Rankin and Tom Holt. It turns out Rankin was a guest at my Mother-in-Law’s 90th birthday but no one told me and I am still frustrated at that missed opportunity. Once you have read Rankin you can never drive through Brentwood in west London again without at least thinking if you will meet Jim Pooley and John Omally in the Flying Swan. Brentford turns out to be in a mysterious triangle in which we variously get satanic takeover attempts (barcoding the entire population, and projects to clone Jesus from the Turin Shroud. The serpent which tempted Eve is buried under the local football ground. The titles are to die for, notably The Sprouts of Wrath, East of Ealing, The Brentford Chain Store Massacre and Lord of the Ringroads. Tom Holt is also adept at twisting the familiar for comic purposes. I remember irritating the whole family when his first book Expecting Someone Taller was published, It is a retelling of the Ring Cycle in modern Britain. It is one of those novels that is so clever that you just can’t stop laughing. He went on to give the same treatment to the Flying Dutchman, Beowolf and the Grail Legends. The Management Style of the Supreme Beings should be a part of any leadership course and the JW Wells & Co series has now had its first novel The Portable Door televised and one hopes they will continue with the other five. He also wrote two novels as a sequel to E F Benson’s Lucia series, and he writes very much in that style. He also writes as K J Parker in which capacity he has won two World Fantasy Awards.
Then we get to the also-rans. They were on my list, some for the quality of their writing, some just because they were important to me as I got into the genre. I list them here in alphabetical order:
Then, just for fun, I asked ChatGPT to give me all the categories for science fiction and fantasy. Fiction was split into Hard Science Fiction, Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Dystopian Fiction, Time Travel and Alternate History. Fantasy into High, Low, Urban, Historical and Dark plus Sword and Sorcery. I think I have covered them all.
Thinking about next year I came up with two possible themes namely (i) adult books I read as a child and (ii) television programmes we watched together as a family when I was growing up. The former would include the John Master’s series about India, Private Angelo, and some serious political work. Interesting to note which were my fathers, which were my mothers and which they both liked. The latter is also interesting as in those days everything had to be negotiated. So to get Star Trek and Monty Python I had to make other concessions. That period was interesting for all British Families however as in the main the whole family watched the same programmes and that had implications for language and much else.
But that is next year, I will probably take tomorrow off and then next week I have serious posts, linked to new work, that I need to focus on.
If you have been, thank you for reading
POSTSCRIPT
As an afterthought, I asked ChatGPT the same question again and got a more interesting list, one that I think is a better summary:
The banner picture is cropped from an original by Iván Díaz obtained from Unsplash. The opening picture ‘UFO arrivals at Sea’ is an imaginative work used under an Unsplash+ License
Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.
© COPYRIGHT 2025
