knowledge and intelligence

home page contact us other notions

on this page [analysis] [confidence] [decision] [explanation] [google, googling] [intelligence] [judgement] [knowledge] [learning] [monster] [organizational intelligence] [practice] [scholarship] [trundle] [WIGO - what is going on]

	How do we know what we know?  How do we know what we don't know?
	How do we practise what we preach?  And what is going on when we attempt to preach what we practise?

Analysis

Confidence

Privileged access to knowledge, granted (in confidence) to trusted insiders.

---

Decision / Judgement

The IT (decision-support) agenda has been dominated by the Simon view, and has neglected alternative views. Vickers emphasises the subjective and value-laden nature of intelligent judgement. Lacan offers a useful way of understanding haste and delay in decision-making.
  

---

Explanation

When you can explain one of your primary constructs in terms of something else, it may cease to be a primary construct.

Blocks in physics have come from trying to understand the world as objects rather than fields. Physics throws away the concept of object in order to explain objects.

We understand COMPONENT by decomposing it into COMPONENT SPECIFICATION, COMPONENT INTERFACE, COMPONENT IMPLEMENTATION, and so on. When we look at the metamodel, COMPONENT has now vanished, and is represented implicitly by a cluster of related concepts.

---

Google, Googling

By far the leading google at present is the one maintained by the Google company. However, there are many other search engines around, whose differences may seem important, but which fall into the same general class and possess many of the same general characteristics. 

---

Intelligence

General Intelligence	How a complex system behaves in relation to knowledge, complexity and change. Practical cognitive ability.
Business Intelligence (Military Intelligence)	Actively collecting, interpreting, and using vast quantities of complex data.
Organizational Intelligence	Collaborative problem-solving between people and technical artefacts within and beyond complex enterprises.
Developmental Intelligence	The capacity to acquire and use knowledge effectively for personal and organizational learning.
Existential Intelligence	Authentic and flexible engagement with the demands of the environment - sometimes called Requisite Variety.

---

Knowledge

---

Learning

Learning may also involve replacing bad habits with good habits, or changing preferences and values. Something or somebody may be "an acquired taste". (But who gets to define what counts as a bad habit?)

Learning can also involve an irreversible change. Although we may forget the details of something, we can never go back to never-having-known.
  

---

Monster

---

Organizational intelligence

In contrast, some organizations display the same qualities that we can recognize in intelligent people:

• an eager and receptive curiosity
• a consistent but flexible set of responses (sometimes called 'requisite variety')
• and an ability to learn quickly.

Most organizations lie somewhere in between these two extremes.

To make an intelligent organization, it isn't enough to recruit the brightest people, locate them in state-of-the-art office buildings, and provide them with the smartest computer tools and networks. Super-intelligent individuals are often poor at talking to one another and sharing knowledge, let alone coordinating their work effectively. Each individual may only make a given mistake once, but if the people don't talk to each other, the same mistake can be repeated hundreds of times without any organizational learning.

And even if an organization is collectively oblivious to major threats and opportunities in its environment, that doesn't mean that the individual employees are unaware of these threats and opportunities. Intelligent people get very frustrated and demotivated in stupid organizations - they can see what is happening, and they can often see what needs to be done, but they don't have adequate channels of communication or action.
  

---

Practice

In some contexts, practice is distinguished from performance. This sets up an often misleading separation between actions intended to acquire or develop something, and actions intended to exploit or display it.
  

Scholarship

---

Trundle

"The scholar expends his entire strength in affirmation and denial, in criticizing what has already been thought - he himself no longer thinks." [Nietzsche, Ecce Homo]

---

WIGO (what is going on)

The world we are trying to "tune into" (appreciate, make sense of) is partly in our heads (or in our systems) and partly "out there". Some people refer to this world as "reality". But the term "reality" is presumptive, because we don't know (and we may never know) how much of it is external, how much of it is fixed/absolute or dynamic/relative.

So we prefer to use the term WIGO - WHAT is going on, what IS going on, what is GOING on, what is going ON.

Our knowledge and understanding of WIGO is rarely direct, but is mediated (screened) by technology and systems. We pick up the world through television and other media, through web portals and GOOGLE, through monitoring instruments and management information systems. Scientists learn about the world using telescopes and particle accelerators, scanners and filters. 

top home page contact us
in asssociation with	This page last updated on June 22nd, 2004 Copyright © 1999-2004 Veryard Projects Ltd http://www.veryard.com/kmoi/kmoinotions.htm