Information, Knowledge & Competence
Steve Schwartz just posted a humorous yet useful post, No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”) to which I responded here. I think he captures beautifully how we humans often feel in the digital universe of exploding knowledge. Read his post first, as this will make more sense. (disqus is broken, so no comments are working on his blog right now, should be fixed soon).
Steve, thanks for a humorous and useful post. Abstracting up a layer, I posit that society at large, including social attitudes, hasn’t caught up with the fact that, in the emerging Knowledge Economy, information is free.
If we define homo sapiens as “mankind,” for our entire history (save the last 15 years), information has been scarce and very expensive. We thought it was (relatively) finite. Encyclopedia? How quaint! Therefore, education, training and attitudes point to your first category, the assumption being that one can know something. But digital storage, and now, metainformation, makes us aware of “knowledge” on an exploding scale.
In my book, information is a production input in the Knowledge Economy; creating knowledge is the production floor. Therefore, “information” is best imported at the appropriate time. I think you’re right on with expanding the 2nd category and minimizing the 3rd as much as possible.
The other interesting wrinkle is, in the presence of social networks, which drive down the cost of interaction and collaboration, you can viciously attack the 3rd. I call it “peripheral vision”: when you encourage open communication and brainstorming at the appropriate time, it’s virtually free to invoke others to slay a large slice of the 3rd.
