Big Data, Little Wisdom
We can mine more megabytes than ever before - but does it make sense..?
“The righter you do the wrong things, the wronger you become.” — Russ Ackoff 1
Russ Ackoff was a pioneer of applying systems thinking to complex, systemic challenges in organisations.
Throughout a long career, including consulting to more than 400 organisations and 75 government agencies in 17 different countries, he concluded that:
A pound of data is worth an ounce of information
A pound of information is worth an ounce of knowledge
A pound of knowledge is worth an ounce of understanding
A pound of understanding is worth an ounce of wisdom
In other words, wisdom is worth 65,536 times its weight in data.2
With all the big talk about the promise of big data, that’s a ratio worth remembering
DIKUW
Ackoff frequently referred to the above five types of content of the human mind, as follows:
Data
At the most basic level, data consists of symbolic representations of properties of objects, events, and environments captured through observations. Ackoff likened data to iron ore — not much use until it’s processed into a usable, relevant form — i.e. the second type in his taxonomy: information.
Information
Since most data gets processed into information by computers, it’s wise to bear in mind an old computing acronym: GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out. In other words, if the data fails to adequately capture important aspects of what it’s supposed to represent, no amount of data mining, manipulating, or massaging will magically morph it into valid, worthwhile, genuinely useful information.
Knowledge
This is the third type of mental content in Ackoff’s taxonomy. When I was a digital systems engineer back in the 1980’s, there was a lot of interest in knowledge management (KM) systems. Large organisations had lots of experienced people approaching retirement. The basic thinking behind KM was: “How can we capture people’s institutional knowledge (store it in computer systems) before they retire, so it remains available for the organisation’s future use”?
IBM – then the world’s leading computer systems and software vendor – invested heavily in trying to find out. But it became apparent that much of the value in people’s knowledge of how to do things of real-world value is not just contained in explicit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is the kind of thing that can be articulated, written down, codified, stored, and retrieved by computers. But the practical knowhow that actually creates value in the real world always and inevitably involves a significant amount of tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is embodied — possessed by the knower in the form of skill, produced in action, and which the knower can rarely articulate explicitly. 3
So, whereas explicit knowledge is readily acquired through study, tacit knowledge — in the form of skills — is only acquired through practice. Common examples of tacit knowing are driving a car, riding a bicycle, playing a musical instrument, or even recognising someone we know. We see a familiar face and immediately recognise who it is. But we cannot say what data we use to recognise them.
We know it’s them but we don’t know how we know it’s them.
It’s vitally important to recognise that this transition from information to knowledge is inherently, unavoidably human. In other words, we can’t fully capture knowledge (useful knowhow that can be used to create value in the world) in a computerised form. That’s why the KM revolution never happened but was replaced by a growing interest in organisational learning — a capacity that’s inherently embodied in human beings and which can often be supported, but never replaced, by IT. 4
Understanding
The fourth type of mental content in Ackoff’s hierarchy — understanding — is based on knowledge, so it too is inherently human-centric. 5
One important conclusion we can draw from the above is that no matter how shiny the apps, systems, and digital dashboards various IT vendors keep dangling in front of us, the metrics they present can never provide adequate understanding for effective organisational sense making, decision making, and action taking. 6
Wisdom
The fifth type of mental content — wisdom — is qualitatively different from the other four. In explaining this, Ackoff cites his close friend and long-time associate Peter Drucker: “There’s a big difference between doing things right, and doing the right thing”. In progressing from data, through information, via knowledge to understanding, we use intelligence to increase the efficiency of the means we use in pursuing our ends.
But without wisdom, the ends we pursue will be ineffective in creating genuine value in the world and will often create the opposite.
Many of the crises we face as a human world population are ones we’ve created for ourselves by becoming much more efficient at doing unwise things.
As Ackoff said, in his inimitable style:
“We are largely devoted to doing the wrong thing right. That’s very unfortunate because the righter you do the wrong things, the wronger you become.”
“By contrast, doing the right thing wrong allows you to error correct and improve”.
“The distinction is absolutely critical. And we as a society are simply drowning in the pursuit of efficiency concerned with the pursuit of the wrong ends.” 7
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Dr Russell Ackoff (1919–2009) was an American organizational theorist, consultant, and university professor. The quote comes at 09:30 in a speech he gave in the 1990’s — direct link to that section here.
In the US Customary System of Weights and Measures, one pound (1lb) = 16 ounces (16oz)
Michael Polanyi coined the term tacit knowledge in his 1958 book Personal Knowledge, pointing out that “We believe more than we can prove” and “We know more than we can tell”.
It’s helpfully named information technology as opposed to knowledge technology.
To understand literally means to stand on, by, near, over, or amongst our knowledge. The theory of understanding — epistemology — derives from the Greek epistasthai — from epi “over, near” + histasthai “to stand”.
For more on this see Killing Performance Inadvertently and The Dark Side of Measurement.
Ibid Ackoff speech from the 1990’s
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