Data, information, knowledge, judgment, and wisdom

The dullest, and probably the most important chapter in The Cognitive Enterprise (Bob Lewis and Scott Lee, 2016) addresses a central topic when it comes to cognition: What does it mean for an organization to “know” something?

We started with the tired old “knowledge pyramid” — you know, the one that starts with Data and progresses through Information and Knowledge until arriving at Wisdom (DIKW).

The old pyramid gets just about everything wrong, at least as it’s usually explained. And the flaws matter: For an enterprise to act as if it thinks, getting this right is essential.

Here’s an overview. To get the whole story you’ll need to buy the book. It pains me to say this, and I plan to continue in my agony until you … that’s right, you, the person reading these words right now … until you get yourself a copy and write an honest review on Amazon.

Where was I. That’s right — the old DIKW pyramid and what to do about it.

Start with Data. Most of DIKW’s proponents would have you think that every byte stored on your company’s hard drives, NASes and SANs is data. When you read an awe-inducing statistic about the data explosion, it’s probably based on the every-byte-stored definition. You’d think the GIGO principle (Garbage In/Garbage Out) was still waiting to be formulated.

Data (plural of datum if anyone still cares about such things) is actually a collection of individually verifiable facts. Your eye color is a datum. So are your driver’s license number, your annual income, and how many miles you walk every week.

Data aren’t always verified, but they must be verifiable.

Information next. No, it isn’t data that have been processed to provide something useful. Definitions like this entirely ignore the well-developed branch of mathematics upon which the entire data process industry is founded: Information theory.

Information is the stuff that reduces uncertainty. It comes in bits, one of which is the quantity of information that cuts your uncertainty about something in half. The classic example is a coin toss. You know it either landed heads or tails. One bit of information will resolve your uncertainty about the result.

For the most part, though, information doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. It reduces it — a very different matter. Even in the case of the coin toss, if someone tells you it landed heads you still aren’t absolutely sure. Your informant might, for example, be an untrustworthy source.

Information is, by the way, what a good system of metrics provides.

Which gets us to knowledge – a word that’s been hard to pin down since Plato first wrote about it a few millennia back, not that he got anywhere with his ponderings.

I’m not criticizing, mind you. Epistemology is an eyeball-crossing domain.

Scientists generally rely on Karl Popper’s approach to things: You start with a proposition and do everything you can to disprove it. A proposition that’s survived all the tests human ingenuity can subject it to — nobody can think of any more tests that might disprove it — is considered by scientists to be something they “know,” in quotes because they know that everything they “know” is just one additional test away from being something they used to know, only now they know better.

Business managers (and, for that matter, consultants) don’t have the luxury of subjecting their knowledge to testing that’s as thorough as what scientists are able to manage. We have to make do.

Scott and I are practical guys, not epistemologists. We figure you know something if you’ve looked into it extensively and have concluded there’s just no point in worrying about it anymore. You still might be wrong, but you’re more than certain enough to act.

Then we added a new layer: Judgment. It sits between knowledge and wisdom in the pyramid. Judgment is about tempering your knowledge about something with related insights that come from experience. It’s your safety net when making difficult decisions.

At the top of the pyramid there’s wisdom — broad principles about important subjects, which you don’t find very often, and when you do it’s rarely in the domain of commerce.

Now, finally, we’re ready to talk about what it means for an enterprise to be cognitive. It means the enterprise does a fair imitation of knowing things, as distinct from the people in it knowing things.

In a cognitive enterprise, when it comes to the most important subjects, most people share similar views, with similar levels of certainty, and so can be trusted to make similar decisions when it’s their turn to do so.

A different way of saying it: In a cognitive enterprise, knowledge becomes culture, and culture becomes the centerpiece of governance.