Museums in the Digital Age The WKID Pyramid

Wisdom, Knowledge, Information, Data

Wisdom, Knowledge, Information and Data. I use this diagram when teaching and writing about museums but actually it applies to any organisation. It is particularly directed towards the relationship between management and leadership and the main point of the argument is that the successful leader (amongst many things) is continuously monitoring the exchanges in his or her organisation between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. The managerial mindset tends to stay locked at the information and data level, to be instrumental and implementation in focus. The leader on the other hand is continuously translating information into knowledge, building a picture of patterns of change over period of time. The time signature wavy lines show how the time horizon expands as you move up through the pyramid and contracts as you move down.

One of the classic problems of organisational design and development is the circular movement between information and knowledge and then knowledge back to information; the reciprocal relationship between the two, is not interrogated frequently enough by the management and leadership teams. It’s only when timely, accurate and appropriate information is gathered longitudinally that the organisation can grow its knowledge base. Equally, the organisation and its leader or leaders have to have spaces and methods to reflect on the relationship between knowledge and wisdom.

Broadly; data is time, place and activity specific, information is a 1st level gathering of data and is less time and place bound and knowledge gathers information from many time, place and situation intersections. Thus as we rise through the pyramid these specific ties lessen; data and information tend to be location specific, whereas knowledge and wisdom are more situation independent. In human societies wisdom is the level of intergenerational learning. In organisations there is no exact equivalent though we often speak about succession planning, which is a way of thinking about the importance of carrying the accumulated wisdom across generations of CEOs and Boards. Clearly, wisdom cannot be held to be rigid, a set of doctrinaire beliefs or nostrums that apply to any human situation at any time. Wisdom in this intergenerational sense has to include both persistent themes and variation.

The diagram, which I originally drew after reading Stewart Brand’s book ‘The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility’ is based on what I call his ‘time-wave’ graphic which is a simple but powerful way of expressing the fact that human societies evolve and change but at different paces. The base level in Stewart’s diagram is geological. For museums, outside of the organisational exigencies of running them, collections form the core of the knowledge process. A singular fault of the museum mind is that the exhibitions it creates often fail to embrace the intergenerational lessons which may be drawn from the objects themselves. The movment between knowledge and wisdom is limited.