| Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 21:27:20 -0700 | 04 00067 61 01091401 |
Unfinished Revolution
unrev-II@egroups.com
OHS DKR Project
SRI International
333 Ravenswood Avenue
Menlo Park, CA 94025
| Subject: | Intelligence Integrates Pictures, Text, Time |
Dear John,
Responding to your letter today presenting evidence showing the invaluable role of pictures in human life, and objecting to Eric's analysis in a letter earlier today explaining limitations of pictures and graphs for Knowledge Management, a useful distinction between pictures and language can be grasped from Eric's earlier comment on March 12, 2001 that a picture takes a thousand words to explain.
Pictures are useful and often critical to daily affairs. The human mind interprets pictures by making associations with other pictures and drawing inferences of correlations, implications and nuance that apply, adjust and expand paradigms, rules, belief, past experience and a huge body of knowledge far beyond the confines of a particular picture.
Language is a more powerful, flexible window into the mind's interpretation than can be achieved by drawing a lot of pictures. For example, it is very difficult to draw a picture of a concept, or to draw a picture that conveys the meaning of this paragraph, yet people readily draw useful meaning from the text. This gives rise to a notion of an alphabetic mind, reviewed on November 8, 1999.
Since speech is a powerful way to communicate at a much lower, i.e., refined, level of detail than is possible from reliance on pictures, an issue arises about how to manage what people say and do, since speech and action soon fade from memory. Henry van Eykan points out that people rely on remembering only the gist of things, about 5% of the actual record.
We see some of this in our own work on the OHS/DKR, where people say things like,
The OHS/DKR project has not yet begun in earnest, so it is not critical that people do more than remember the gist of things. Like Jack Park explained on September 8, 2001, when there is no evident value at risk, no evident harm, laziness encourages taking action that is fast and easy, like making spontaneous Reply for email based on remembering the gist of things. People don't care about being productive and useful, when seemingly insulated from both harm of poor performance, and benefits of good performance. Since relying on the gist of things is fast and easy, there is no evident incentive to improve on remembering more than the gist of things, when people feel insulated from consequences of error.
We have seen in recent months that too many people having too many problems from too many errors relying on the gist of things, causes productivity, earnings and stock prices to suffer. As with the OHS/DKR, so long as no one gets hurt, nobody cares if people use fast and easy methods that are not effective.
However, we have now witnessed in recent days beginning on September 11, 2001 that the intelligence community has a lot of data and information, but cannot remember more than the gist of things. Unlike the OHS/DKR, and the faltering economy, people care about accurate memory when "the chips are on the line," i.e., accurate understanding of the actual record showing patterns of cause and effect impacts important values for guiding timely action. This suggests there is demand for intelligence, which Eric proposed could be augmented, in a letter to the team on April 23, 2000.
How then might this be accomplished?
A textual explanation of what people say and do and hear and see, including any pictures, provides organizational memory. Adding analysis to organizational memory creates history of cause and effect organized by context, that enables people to be prepared to take effective action. Pictures are not conducive to this role, but still have a powerful role to preserve impressions and certain relationships, as in the design of a building or computer chip, etc.
In sum, pictures and text alone are not enough. We need to follow Eric's lead and develop useful intelligence, defined in POIMS. Jack, Eric, Eugene, Lee and others seem to be working along these lines. Yesterday, on September 13, 2001 Eric reported that Eugene will have an announcement soon. The rest of us need to be developing the culture and work practices for deployment, as Eugene suggested on November 26, 2001. Doug has been writing about a new way of working for years for years, so there is no time like the present to get started producing useful intelligence.
THE WELCH COMPANY
Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net