Tim Wood Powell     The value of knowledge

I intended to leave you with a summary and rest stop for the series of the last four posts — a crisp, meme-worthy, resolution.  To recap so far:

1. our dual worlds — the Physical world (of atoms, tangible evidence, and sensation) and the Epistemic world (of symbols, words, meanings, narratives)
2. their connections (the “P-E Nexus”), which form a foundation of of our humanity
3. their contrasts and conflicts — including the “P-E Drift” that happens over time
4. their breaking apart entirely

There were two possible destinations in my journey:  the dark and the light. I went back and forth a half-dozen times, drafting, redrafting, trashing, starting over…the summer heat didn’t ease my malaise any.

At last, I broke my mental logjam by realizing I had been framing this as an either-or dilemma (dark OR light) — when it’s more useful to see it as both-and. I always try to consider both the upside and downside implications of any given thing — rather than stashing them away into tidy, separate mental ‘threat’ and ‘opportunity’ buckets, as is common practice.   Threat and opportunity are not separate; they’re different sides of the same coin — an example of what I call strategic ambiguity.

How can we thread the needle between the dark and light extremes? In short, we need to flip the narrative on itself.

The dark narrative

The dystopian narrative plays like this:  We have broken the primal, humanity-defining connection between the Epistemic and the Physical.  Our narratives have become unhinged, untethered from empirical reality. We are drowning in disinformation and in existential challenges to our epistemic structures and authorities — and our basic instincts for truth. The post-Enlightenment thinking that has made our material lives, overall, much better than they were in, say, in the 16th century is under siege — and may not survive intact.  We may be going backwards…

Scary, right?  While this may hold some truth, there are several problems:

In one recent example, there’s been a lot of research on the detrimental effects of smart phones and social media on adolescents.  There’s at least a correlation, if not causation, between obsessive social media use and loneliness and general unhappiness.

The narrative is not always a spelled-out, explicit message — it can be an inferred synthesis and interpretation of a pattern of smaller messages — a meta-narrative. For example, the meta-narrative that many of us apparently take away from social media is: Everyone else is cooler, richer, and better-looking than you. They have more friends, more fun, and overall a much more rewarding life than you.  But don’t worry, we’re here to help you if you can’t keep up.  This is not healthy for anyone — and is especially damaging to young people, whose values, aspirations, and sense of self and self-worth are still being formed.

The self-narrative

The most compelling form of narrative is the self-narrative — the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.  This is usually a pastiche of external narratives that we have stitched together into the presentation of self in everyday life.

This is also true for organizations, many of whom have formal efforts to capture and codify the enterprise narrative:  its purpose, its mission, its vision, its values.

Organizations do well to undertake a narrative self-assessment as a first step in any significant strategy or innovation initiative.  ‘The way we’ve always done it’ can be an anchor, a barrier to pivoting in a dynamic blue (or red) strategic ocean.  Hidden, tacit assumptions are typically the main source of such barriers.  Codified ‘knowledge’ is especially susceptible to becoming a barrier — if and when it becomes a stale proxy for how conditions actually are now.

Narrative suspension

We’re all continually bombarded by narratives.  Our brains get fatigued and burned-out — just like a muscle that, when overworked, starts to cramp and spasm.

Let’s harness the awesome power of the detachable narrative to help ourselves — rather than hurt ourselves.  Suspending a narrative can be difficult, even dangerous — especially when it’s a self-narrative.  While it’s theoretically possible to think of narratives as plug-and-play — drop one out, drop a new one in — in reality, it doesn’t work like that.  Why?  Narratives are inherently social — and social connections are arguably more resistant to change than beliefs.

In real life, there is no red pill — this takes time, focus, and will. We can begin to open that door with questions like:

• What narratives guide our thinking and behavior?  (And, for the individual equivalent of any of these questions, just drop in “my” and “I”.)
• Where do they come from?  Who is driving and enabling them?  Who stands to gain from them?  Who loses?
• Why do we need them? In what ways are they helping us?  Hindering us?  Hurting us?
• What assumptions, hidden or not, are the result?  How can we expose them (if hidden) and test them?
• Does this narrative (that used to work for us) still make sense, given what we now know?
• What constitutes ’signal’ versus ’noise’ in our epistemic environment?
• How can we escape the ‘Platonic cave’ that limits our perception and understanding?

In working with an organization where any kind of change is called for — which is, in some respects, all them — our essential first step in removing barriers to change consists of systematically identifying and decoding the narratives of that enterprise.

We as individuals need to do this, too — to get our heads out of our phones and into each other as people — not least, ourselves — if only for a moment.  Over time, people have developed various ways of doing this.  Some of these are informal:  perspective-altering drugs, including alcohol; vacations and travel; games and sports; the arts.

Digital detox is an essential element.  I try to take my own advice, so I’ve developed a workflow of taking one day a week — usually Saturday — as a ‘digital sabbath’ — minimal emails and texts, no obsessively reading and responding to LinkedIn posts, no newspapers or content sites.  At the gym, I leave my phone in my locker.  And, other than LinkedIn, I avoid social media as much as possible — a luxury I realize not everyone can afford.

Other methods are formal, and subject to extended study and practice.  In Zen meditation, there is a concept called beginner’s mind wherein you try to momentarily forget all you know and “be here now.”  Even medieval monks, though free of the many electronic distractions we have today, found concentration elusive and challenging to achieve — and rewarding.

Convenient untruths

Do you ever use a narrative that you know is not supported by the facts?  We all do — because it’s easy and a ‘good enough’ explanation.  For example, when I ask “What time does the sun set tonight?”, I’m fully aware the sun is not actually setting or moving relative to earth.  It just looks that way — and, until about 500 years ago, any educated adult would have accepted that as reality.  Since the development of modern astronomy, though, even a gradeschooler knows that’s not literally how things work.  Nonetheless, we still have ‘sunset’ times listed in our weather apps — it’s a convenient untruth.

It’s a silly example, granted — but my point is, we rarely fact-check life.  There’s a growing body of research revealing that, quite the contrary, we typically shop for information-based rationalizations or justifications for beliefs that we have developed previously. We cherry-pick our information, in other words, to confirm our socially-developed narratives.

“A pack of lies…”

When I studied finance, our professor would often get our attention by saying, “Financial statements are a pack of lies, agreed upon.” His mission, of course, was to teach us how to see beneath those lies into the reality of a client’s financial condition.

Some time later I learned that this general formulation has been applied (by no less than Napoleon, who would know) to history.  I contend that it could apply to pretty much any organized body of knowledge.  (Science is arguably an exception, in that it’s continually tested with empirical evidence.) Human knowledge is largely consensus-driven and socially-reinforced.

TL; DR

The signifier is not the signified.  Neither the Epistemic world nor the Physical world is the more ‘real.’  They are complementary and together form the reality of our modern perceivable world.  When we conflate the two — or grant one dominion over the other — we run into problems (as admittedly I did in drafting this note.) When they function as a seamless whole, we’re making progress.  We can modulate and manage their relationship — for good, or for not so good.

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