Introduction
I want to look at Knowledge Management’s future, but a warning — it may not be what you expect.
In the last few years, my work’s focus has turned towards the big picture of the evolution of human knowledge and how we need to think differently to tackle the long list of global issues that we face and avoid the collapse of our global civilization.
I have heavily linked this document to my blook on Conversational Leadership and other resources; if you wish to explore my thoughts in greater depth.
Predicting the future
We live in a complex socio-technical system — a VUCA world - a complex world that is volatile, uncertain, confusing, and ambiguous. One of the facets of a complex system is that it is inherently unpredictable, so these two quotations from Peter Drucker sum things up nicely.Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
Given this unpredictability, I try never to make any but the most general predictions and adopt Dennis Gabor's advice.
The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.
Paradoxically, in thinking about the future, I would like to start by briefly looking at humankind’s history.
Knowledge Management did not start in 1991 or thereabouts. It started 50,000 years earlier with the evolution of language when we first learned to speak.
200,000 years of human history
We (Homo sapiens) emerged from our hominid predecessors in Africa some 200,000 years ago.
For the first 150,000 years, we lived as hunter-gatherers like our cousins, the apes. We lived from day to day. Our behaviors changed only a little over time.
And then, about 50,000 years ago, something amazing happened - speech and language emerged, and with it, the so-called cultural big bang.
With the cultural big bang came a great leap forward. Now we could pass down our knowledge from generation to generation much faster through cumulative cultural evolution and not the biologically slower process through our genes.
Some 40,000 years later, we made another enormous leap with the Neolithic Revolution when we transitioned from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming and settlement (circa 11,000 years ago).
A little later, early cities emerged around 7,500 BCE, and Sumer, the first known civilization, developed about 4,100 BCE.
Over the following centuries, society and technology co-evolved, biological evolution having stopped with the big bang.
Then 500 years ago, during the 16th and 17th centuries, a drastic change in scientific thinking took place with the scientific revolution that laid the foundation for the Enlightenment. The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment were massive leaps forward in the evolution of our knowledge and how we thought about the world and our place in it.
Two hundred years later, in the late 18th century, circa 1760, the pace of change picked up with the dawn of the first industrial revolution, closely followed by the second industrial revolution.
Then, a mere 75 years ago, at the end of the second world war, change dramatically accelerated with the birth of the information/digital revolution (the third industrial revolution) and is further accelerating today with Industry 4.0 (the fourth industrial revolution).
This cumulative socio-technical-economic change has created a modern world that is a vastly different place from the hunter-gatherer world in which we evolved and the world of our farming ancestors of only a few hundred years ago.
Two Worlds
Since the cultural big bang, the changes over the last 50,000 years have been so significant that we can consider ourselves living in two worlds, World #1 and World #2.
World #1 is the old world, the natural world in which we lived and evolved for 150,000 years.
World #2 is the new world, the socio-technical-economic world we have constructed over the last 50,000 years, particularly the 250 years since the first industrial revolution and the previous 75 years since the third industrial revolution.
In World #1, direct relationships between cause and effect dominate, while in World #2, non-linear relationships between cause and effect dominate.
In terms of the Cynefin domains, World #1 is a simple or complicated world, while World # 2 is a complex one.
Both worlds co-exist, but most of the global population lives in World #2. For example, today, over 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, which is expected to increase to 68% by 2050.
The impact of human activity on the planet has been so great that it has been proposed we have entered a new geological and environmental era known as the Anthropocene.
We still have old World #1 brains
In World #1, our top priority was survival, to eat and not be eaten, to win in warfare, and to mate.
Although life was difficult, it was simple. Clear cause-and-effect relationships dominated. We lived from day to day in the here and now.
Think of other members of the human family tree — apes — such as the chimpanzee or the bonobo. In World #1, our lives were not so different.
We lived in the natural world in small bands of about 25 people and tribes of 500 or more. Lives were short, and we had few choices to make.
World #1 was the world in which our brain was shaped by evolution. Evolution wired our brains for short-term tribal thinking — to think in the moment. Our brains have not changed significantly in the last 50,000 years since we started our journey into World #2.
Fifty thousand years is not long in evolutionary terms, and it is not surprising that our modern-day brains have not evolved to handle the dynamics and complexity of World #2.
In the more complex and interconnected societies of World #2, tribal thinking no longer serves us well. We need to rethink our thinking.
Credit: I would like to give credit to Ted Cadsby for his concept of two worlds and the terms World # 1 and World #2 that he writes about in his book Closing the Mind Gap.
We evolved to be tribal.
For the first 150,000 years of our existence, we lived in tribes, even longer if we consider our earlier hominid ancestors.
There was a substantial survival advantage to cooperating and being loyal to members of our group, competing, and even engaging in warfare with outsiders struggling for the same resources.
Those more predisposed to tribalism were thus more likely to survive and pass down their genes to the next generation.
Tribalism is in our genes.
Tribal Thinking
We are innately tribal. We have a strong need to belong to groups and maintain fulfilling relationships with others.
This need warps our reasoning ability. It is known as tribal thinking.
Dan Kahan’s research at Yale, for example, demonstrates that people’s numerical reasoning is strongly influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by their political (tribal) pre-dispositions regardless of their political persuasion.
Surprisingly, the more numerate the individuals, the more likely they were to obtain the wrong answer if the correct answer did not align with their political (tribal) beliefs.
In other words, people with better numerical reasoning ability were more prone to letting their political (tribal) beliefs influence them.
In other research, Dan Kahan shows that it is not just strong numerical reasoning that compromises clear thinking but surprisingly also open-mindedness and science literacy.
So we don’t make rational decisions. We have a position that tends to correspond to the belief of our tribe, and we post-rationalize this decision by looking for evidence to support it and overlooking conflicting evidence. The smarter we are – the better we are at this rationalization.
We are not rational creatures. We are rationalizing ones.
The Knowledge Delusion
We have built hugely complex societies and technologies since the cultural big bang through cumulative cultural evolution, but most of us don’t even know how a toilet works.
As individuals, we know almost nothing compared to what we think we know. Our personal knowledge is more than just an illusion. It is a delusion. If we thought deeply for one moment, we would realize we are ignorant of our ignorance.
Knowledge is communal. Most of what we think to be our knowledge is in the heads of other people.
Our beliefs are tribal. They are not so much based on our personal experience or even our analysis of the evidence. They are based on our trust or distrust of other people and institutions who actually hold the knowledge.
We trust the beliefs and ideas of people and institutions that are part of one or more of the many tribes we belong to, and we distrust outsiders.
If we trust the scientific community, we will most likely believe in human-made global warming. On the other hand, if we distrust the scientific community, we are unlikely to believe in it.
Individually, we know very little and what we think we know has little to do with evidence or rational thinking.
Polarization
We are polarized across political, religious, moral, and racial divides. We fail to communicate with each other and treat people with conflicting beliefs as our enemies. We see conquering our ideological opponents as justifying the means.We wage information warfare, launch ad hominem attacks, make derogatory comments, lie, and sow fake news. We fail to appreciate the damage we do to the information ecosystem, so much so that there is little information we can trust.
Follow almost any discussion thread on social media or view any televised discussion or debate or read any political article to witness the utter disrespect we show for each other. There is precious little constructive disagreement.
Echo chambers and filter bubbles isolate us from the real world, distort reality, and help entrench our existing beliefs.
Furthermore, the pollution of the global information ecosystem by, for example, fake news makes it challenging to determine what is true and what is false and, in turn, makes it difficult to establish evidence for our beliefs.
Implications
As nation-states and as a global civilization, we face a long list of global issues.
Given these issues, our global civilization’s collapse seems increasingly likely, and this would be an obvious prediction to make, but I don’t think it needs to be this way.
A large part of our problem stems from the fact that our World #1 brains were “designed” for short-term tribal thinking in a relatively simple world and do not cope well with the complexity of World #2.
We need to rethink how we form our beliefs.
Rethinking our beliefs
The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.
Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.
Though we face enormous challenges and wish our global civilization to survive and improve, we have different beliefs, values, morals, and ideas about how we should go about it. We need to:
- Default to the fact that most people act in good faith until we have strong evidence otherwise.
- Start talking with each other about our beliefs and how we came to them.
- Understand better how we ourselves think and how others think.
- Be more tolerant of opposing beliefs, especially seemingly radical ones.
Conversation is crucial in achieving this. If we can't talk with each other, we will continue to see each other as enemies and fight.
Conversations across divides may seem fraught with difficulty, but they are possible. There are several preconditions, however, to engaging in what might seem futile, even impossible, conversations.
First and foremost, we need to understand and agree that we have not formed our beliefs via a rational process of evidence evaluation. We need to admit our ignorance on most matters, especially complex social ones, and be prepared to revise our beliefs.
It then follows that seeing each other as stupid or enemies makes no sense and that we need to talk.
These are the preconditions:
- Be prepared to question and revise our beliefs. Our beliefs rest on shaky ground.
- Cease seeing each other as enemies. We must not be enemies. If we are enemies, there can be no conversation.
- Be prepared to talk to people with whom we disagree. We need to recognize that talking is the only way forward. No progress can be made if someone refuses to speak or is violent or threatening.
- Be willing to trust each other and engage in good faith. To be sincere, fair, open, and honest, regardless of the outcome of the conversation.
- Be able to show respect for each other and each other's ideas. To recognize that showing respect is quite different from having respect.
- Be willing to abide by some rules of engagement. To create and use conversation covenants.
- Be ready to learn how to have impossible conversations.
People are enthusiastic about other people re-thinking their beliefs but are less motivated to re-think their own.
Credit: David Creelman
Conclusion
So what has this all got to do with Knowledge Management?
I hope you can see that although it has only a little to do with today’s KM, it is evident that what I have written is about how we manage our knowledge — not in a business or even an international development sense but at a societal level.
One might call it Societal Knowledge Management.
Today’s KM we know and love will continue to develop and improve, but I would like to see societal KM emerge as a new strand.
I’ll leave you with one last thought — a favorite quotation of mine.
We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.
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