Information is not Enough
Why the world will become thinkers and doers
Let’s get one thing straight right now. Knowledge is power, but information is not knowledge. Heck even data isn’t knowledge.
How is that possible you wonder? Think about all the information you’ve ever encountered in your life. It’s useless. Like your buddy telling you they just went number 2, most information isn’t important to anybody. Now if your friend had said, they went to restaurant X, got food poisoning and had spent the past 24 hours in the bathroom, then each piece of information becomes a valuable piece in your quest to avoid becoming the next victim of bad cooking.
Now let’s apply the same thinking to the concept of data. Most data is useless. A single piece of data has no context. Each piece of data is like a drop of water. By itself it has no importance, but put that drop of water with a multitude of other drops of water and it becomes a pool. That’s the difference between information/data and knowledge. Knowledge is the accumulation of information and data.
We are living in an age of ever increasing information and data being created, transferred, and even destroyed. It is however, important to realize that a majority of that data is irrelevant. Even accumulating large swaths of the stuff doesn’t guarantee the quality of it. Any half-decent scientist will tell you three basic things: information and data needs to be properly collected, the more of it the better, and conclusions need to be drawn from your findings. In other words it needs to be filtered. To refine my earlier point, knowledge is more than the accumulation of information and data. Knowledge is also the purification and filtering of said information and/or data.
It’s an interesting metaphor to compare information with water. The world’s fresh water supply is estimated at meagre 2.5% of the entire supply of water, period. Just like most of the water on earth is unsuitable for consumption, most of the information you encounter can’t be used. You can aggregate it, you can buy it, you can hide it in a dossier in some underground facility, but unless you filter it, it’s of no use to anyone.
The future will find us in a world that has moved away from it’s ideals of a pure information economy. We’ll eventually move back to a more diverse one that relies on the highly theoretical thinking of university trained students along with the applied skills of apprentice trained individuals. The sum of the whole is greater than it’s parts, and the combined process of gathering information/data and turning it into applicable knowledge will be what determines the winners and losers of tomorrow. China knows this and America is increasingly waking up to this reality, as the push for “Made in America” begins.
The Information Age is over. An era powered by thinkers and doers has begun.
P.S. If you want to see a great talk on thinking and doing in Design, check out this great talk by Yves Béhar.
