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October 12, 2005

Meaning-based Management

In the classic bottom-up hierarchy of understanding, made up of Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom, we have four distinct sources of "decision-support". Given that automation is very intense at the bottom and very sparse at the top, the trick to picking the right source for your current decision might seem trivial: fast, accountable decision-making would evidently be most supported at the bottom.

Despite that reasoning, lots of corporate and organizational experience shows that the more explicit we make the complexity of decisions, the more difficult they actually become to make -- frustrating both speed and accountability. Whether the complexity problem is a seeming impossibility of integrating multiple massive data stores, or whether it is simply the often unwieldy dynamics of a large committee, final decisions are really most often the result of a "best effort" to navigate uncertainties while not losing sight of a goal. The harder the navigation, the more obscure the location of the finish line becomes.

If we also want to believe that the decision is always intended to be the "best available choice" then it makes sense to examine how we expose the alternative choices along the way. For example, what role does each layer in the hierarchy of understanding play in indicating alternatives?

Data - provides descriptions of the elements and components of situations

Information - provides evidence of associations between data and assumptions (thus proposing and representing states)

Knowledge - provides models of interactions and interdependencies amongst states

Wisdom - provides assessment of the relevance of knowledge to requirements (and thus guidance of the application of knowledge to requirements)

From those influences we usually look for four things: facts, evidence, truth and meaning. Big mistakes lurk for us when we confuse these things with each other and with the four levels of understanding.

For example, counter to our intuition, data and facts are not the same thing; what makes data into fact? Testing. Likewise:

- Information is not evidence; what makes information into evidence? Context.
- Knowledge and truth are not the same thing; what makes knowledge into truth? Agreement.
- Wisdom and meaning are not the same thing; what makes wisdom into meaning? Relevance.

We need to also preserve the distinction between fact, evidence, truth and meaning -- despite the influence of politics, anxiety and habits:

- Facts provide a set of values (like properties and attributes) that correlate highly with the appearance of a designated phenomenon and thus become useful as definitions of the phenomenon.

- Evidence is facts that distinguish the probability of the defined phenomenon's presence.

Truth and meaning are yet something else. (To be continued...)

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at October 12, 2005 8:45 AM

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