'Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?'

Silicon and circuitry are not wholesale replacements for flesh and blood.

I had a Conversation with my friend and colleague, Dr Olaf Hermans. On LinkedIn Olaf describes himself as being concerned with ‘Scaling co-Ownership Attribution for Guaranteed Forward Movement of Collectives’.

What the … ?

We talked for just over an hour. We talk regularly and sometimes the Conversations go on for several hours. And we have conversed, in person and online, for eight or more years.

What the … ?

And every time, the Conversation is fresh and invigorating. Every time, I frantically scribble notes. Every time I learn something. Every time we refine some aspect of the thinking around … Conversation. And I wonder …

What the hell is the rest of the world doing, generally ignoring this topic?

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There is a problem with Conversation: like the air we breathe it is all around us, and like the air we breathe we generally pay no attention to it; in fact, we don’t even think about, let alone realize, the immense value it provides.

Which is to say, it just is until it isn’t. And the way the vast majority of digitally-governed conversation (lower case ‘c’ for this context) is transacted, it explicitly requires analysis and adjustment because the quality of it sure has per-lummeted.

Statement of the obvious: changes wrought by the digital world have happened and are ongoing. Statement of the not-so-obvious: the problem is, save for some work focused on the social and health impacts on young people, we seem just to have allowed the tech corporations to herd us all into the Age of Surveillance Capitalism¹ with barely a thought about individual well-being.

A key result of this is that, because we haven’t been paying proper attention, we have not been able properly to assess the value and status of real human Conversation in the digital age.

Sorry, does all of this sound a bit abstruse? Let me try to clarify.

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I’ll come back to Olaf but first let me reference a highly regarded English historian: Michael T. Clanchy (1936-2021), was an authority on the medieval world. Here’s how his essay, The Growth of Literacy, starts:

Literacy is unique among technologies in penetrating and structuring the intellect itself …²

Wow!

I just love it when a thought brings one up short. Two points immediately strike home:

One: Literacy is itself a technology. Yes. Just think back to the root of the word, techne, which was the Greek concept of craftsmanship, art, or the ability to make and perform.

Two: This particular technology has the power to change the human operating system.

Clanchy goes on:

… which makes it hard for scholars, whose own skills are shaped by literacy, to reconstruct the mental changes which it brings about.³

Does this perhaps illumine the root of a problem?

Are we constantly focusing upon mechanical and digital operating systems while neglecting our very own internal operating system, that which makes homo sapiens tick?

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Now bear with me, if you will, on another brief diversion; this time to an actual Conversation, albeit a fictional one.

The Conversation is from the pen of H.G. Wells in his story, The History of Mr Polly. Published a hundred and fifteen years ago, it tells the tale of a shopkeeper called Alfred Polly who hates being a shopkeeper and liberates himself by burning down his own shop and making a run for freedom.

He wanders for a while, living rough, in the English Home Counties, until …

It was about two o’ clock in the afternoon, one hot day in May, when Mr. Polly, unhurrying and serene, came upon that broad bend of the river to which the little lawn and garden of the Potwell Inn run down.⁴

For a while he admires the scene, then, feeling hungry, goes right up to the Potwell Inn. Through the door he sees the landlady, who is described with a refreshing lack of political correctness as ‘plump’. She is seated in an armchair.

Her head was a little on one side, not much, but just enough to speak of trustfulness, and rob her of the stiff effect of self-reliance. And she slept.
“My sort,” said Mr. Polly, and opened the door very softly, divided between the desire to enter and come nearer, and an instinctive indisposition to break slumbers so manifestly sweet and satisfying.
She awoke with a start, and it amazed Mr. Polly to see swift terror flash into her eyes. Instantly it had gone again.
“Law!” she said, her face softening with relief. “I thought you was Jim.”
“I’m never Jim,” said Mr. Polly.
“You’ve got his sort of hat.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Polly, and leaned over the bar.
“It just came into my head you was Jim,” said the plump lady, dismissed the topic and stood up. “I believe I was having forty winks,” she said, “if all the truth was told. What can I do for you?”
“Cold meat?” said Mr. Polly.
“There is cold meat,” the plump woman admitted. “And room for it.”
The plump woman came and leaned over the bar and regarded him judicially but kindly. “There’s some cold boiled beef,” she said, and added, “A bit of crisp lettuce?”
“New mustard,” said Mr. Polly.
“And a tankard?”
“A tankard.”
They understood each other perfectly.

Why this particular snippet? Because, it seems to me, it is so simple yet so perfectly demonstrates the depth and complexity of direct Conversation. And isn’t this what we risk losing or, at the very least, drastically diluting, now that so many of our conversations take place on screens?

Perhaps it’s not so much the doing of things on screens? Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that the screen-based world consumes great chunks of time that were until recently devoted to far more unstructured, bottom-up Conversations?

You know the sort of thing - bumping into someone at the water cooler: “That idea of Jim’s at this morning’s meeting - I think it’s bonkers.” And maybe, just maybe, it was.

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The entire digital world situation, it seems to me, is both of the moment and as old as the hills.

Here’s Clanchy again, discussing England in the Middle Ages, around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the technology of writing was asserting itself:

Writing had the profoundest effects on the nature of proof, as it seemed to be more durable and reliable than the spoken word. On the other hand, those who valued the traditional wisdom of remembrancers within their communities had reason to distrust it.

The written word versus ‘remembrancers’: doesn’t this bring to mind recent arguments about objective and subjective measures of truth - ‘the truth’ versus ‘my truth’? It’s the same argument, isn’t it? And as the late Queen Elizabeth II so wisely commented, in 2021, in response to some ‘my truth’ claims …

Recollections may vary.

Clanchy goes on:

The growth of literacy was not a simple matter of providing more clerks and better schooling, as it penetrated the mind and demanded changes in the way people articulated their thoughts, both individually and collectively in society. The shift from memory to written record, then, was a cultural one, taking place in the imaginations and assumptions of numerous individuals.

The same is surely true in the shift from pre-digital to digital technologies, but on a much grander scale than ever previously. It’s why the perceived power and certainty of digital tools gave some people (the davocracy as Renaud Camus has styled them) the confidence to attempt a preemptive hyper-globalization strike in the immediate aftermath of the West’s perceived victory in the Cold War.

So, yet again, in the twenty-first century as in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, we find ourselves with a crisis about how the mass of people can articulate their thoughts and opinions individually and collectively in society.

All we can say at the moment, I suspect, is that the balance of Communications Power has swung too far in favour of those who are in charge, those who run things, the ‘top-downers’. Meantime, those who are not in charge, those who do things, the ‘bottom-uppers’, risk suffering, both mentally and physically.

The question is, are we able to return some power to everyone in business and civil and social settings to comment on how they regard things that are going on around them? The potential value of so doing is an improvement in the mental and physical health of each individual, and for the group as a whole, and for specific outcomes (there often are diamonds in the rough!), and for the initiator of the action in the first place because it’s a great environment to judiciously introduce ideas and initiatives.

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Which brings me back to Dr Olaf Hermans who has been evolving a new system to enable mass Conversations in a digital world. Conversations that are contact and content agnostic. Conversations that reveal bottom-up, blank-sheet perspectives. Conversations with the power to reveal ideas and connections and possibilities and hopes and fears that otherwise would go undiscovered.

What particularly grabs my interest in all of this is the potential for Value growth and capture. My professional career has centered on Value, specifically Customer Value, and I am probably best known for my work with Customer Value Propositions.

Here, working with Olaf’s pioneering thinking, I see the opportunity to extend the Value theory and practice to … well … everyone - particularly employees and those embarking on projects of any kind.

Following on from and partly paraphrasing Clanchy’s thinking: The shift from human to digital/AI control is a cultural one, but, unremediated, over-reliance on the resulting top-down rules and ‘best practices’ risks causing human minds to atrophy, both individually and collectively in society. We need to offset this risk by re-introducing some truly human (bottom-up, blank sheet, anytime, everywhere) interactional technology.

Coming very soon, Olaf will come directly into this Conversation. I hope you will join us. To be part of it all, be sure to sign up as a free or paid subscriber to Aargh! by David Pinder:

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Let me conclude this post by mentioning the headline at the top. It is a line from T.S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) The Rock - one of a couplet that seemed to me to be germane:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?⁵

If you are a regular reader of my posts you may realize that I regard Eliot as one of the greatest literary voices not just of the twentieth century but of all time. Here’s a snippet from one of his greatest poems that so beautifully expresses the idea I have tried to deploy in this post of comparing thoughts from about a thousand years ago with events now:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.⁶

Yes, I buy that.

Thanks for reading.

1. Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)

2. M.T. Clanchy. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (2nd edition, 2009)

3. M.T. Clanchy. ibid.

4. H.G. Wells. The History of Mr Polly (1910)

5. T.S. Eliot. Choruses from ‘The Rock’ (1934)

6. T.S. Eliot. Four Quartets, Little Gidding (1942)