The Information Artisan
Communicating at the Edge of Understanding
In a business world that fetishises certainty, tackling uncertainty means being prepared to make mistakes and using them as information. There is an art to it.
I’m sure we’ve all done it (and I suspect me more than most). We stand before an audience, bring up our first slide, watch the faces and think, “Oh S**t.”
In a world where I talk about the map not being the territory, I found I had brought the wrong map. It happens - a combination of perhaps not listening to the briefing well enough, having favourite mental models which do not translate or not slowing down enough as we prepare our material.
In my world, working with people around uncertainty, it's something you want to happen (although not always at the first slide). We need to get into that space of the unknown or the misunderstood, ideally after we have created a relationship of trust, because uncertainty is a delicate area. The neural correlates of fear map directly to fear and the associated responses of fight, flight or freeze, which can lead to a barrel load of fun.
So we stopped and discussed the slide, what worked and what didn’t, what was clear to some but not others, and what we wanted from it in the context of our discussion. After working on it, I brought it back later, and our discussion was transformed.
As I altered the map in the light of the territory. Salman Rushdie came to mind:
“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.”
―Salman Rushdie
Learning happens at the edge of what we know, in the uncomfortable space where we have no status. It is about understanding, not process. Learning is not about the neatly packaged and certificated courses which train us in what is already known to others. Learning is visceral.
In his book, “A Universal Learning Process”, Brendan Dempsey identifies learning as information that moves us away from entropy, the attraction that converts order to disorder. Entropy always increases in isolated systems, which is, I think, a reasonable description of many businesses, and most corporations. The longer we stay inside the walls of such organisations, and the more we learn about how to operate inside them, we exchange skills for familiarity, and our ability to cope outside the walls gradually decays.
Margaret Heffernan calls it “wilful blindness”.
Learning itself is an art form. It involves occupying the space where we don’t know and doing the work of understanding the unfamiliar, of making mistakes. We persevere until what is unknown to us becomes known, and we start all over again, constantly pushing the boundaries.
For artisans who make things, it is about materials and techniques. For artisans of information, it is about ideas, hypotheses and models. We embrace the “Oh S**T” moment to examine it, talk about it, and rethink it in the company of others who see it differently rather than stand on our dignity or our qualifications or shelter behind the dogma of our profession.
If we truly understand what we are talking about, we can reshape it so that others can see it. There is something about mastery in it:
“Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.”
Derek Sivers
Look at most organisations, and what we see is not mastery of content, but of process. Of sausage machines producing uniform products of dubious provenance in perfectly formed packages of subjective truths designed for consumption by those who have been primed by skilful marketing.
When people specialise in sausages, they sell through supermarkets who have no idea of the content, only the brand and the profit margin. Our local butcher though will talk to you about his sausages, or offer an alternative based on a conversation.
In the session last week, we had long conversations about objective facts and subjective truths and what goes into the information sausages we are served in the media. We talked about heritage, provenance, relationships, and our awareness of what is happening around us to orient and make the decisions that will move us towards where we want, rather than the false trail set for us by those selling ultra-processed information sausages in digital supermarkets.
Getting information has never been easier, but working with information has rarely been harder. Ingredients matter, and unless we have deep knowledge of the subject matter, checking what we are consuming before we consume it is hard often slow work. But if what we create with it carries our name, it is work we must do.
Because in the sausage machine that is scale, everything eventually tastes the same. This week’s Jaguar rebrand homogenises it to look like any other premium sausage brand: (See here). Design Agencies like sausage machines, too.
As we enter a year of deep uncertainty, we do not know what the impact will be on our work. What we can be sure of is that when it comes to doing what matters, who we work with, and what we work with will matter. As artisans, our task is to create something that is important to a few, not indistinguishable to many. What we create must have integrity.
In markets where entropy is real, where brands are bland, and scale, rather than relevance, defines success, the information we provide to those who work with us matters if we are to keep them energised and far away from the equilibrium that is the easy average.
Anybody can operate a sausage machine.
We are experimenting with small groups to see what happens when artisans meet for no other reason than to share how they see the world. The first group is now full. The next will likely open in April 25.
Wilful Blindness
I like Margaret Heffernan’s work. Here’s a five-minute video on Wilful Blindness: