The Pyramid

I vividly remember where I was standing when someone explained the knowledge pyramid to me. It’s called the DIKW (data, information, knowledge, wisdom) pyramid over here on Wikipedia, but when Laurie the PM scribbled it on the white board, I thought she was thinking out loud, and IT BLEW MY MIND.

My brain craves order. I seek patterns. I am curious. And I want to understand. The more I understand, the more rubrics I discover, the more likely the following curious situation that arrives at my desk…. will be less curious… faster. That’s what they pay me to do: build stuff and crush entropy while building.

The DIKW pyramid gave a very early version of Rands' hierarchy to discuss all the interesting learnings I was discovering as a developing leader. It described the difference between data and information. It showed that one part of the pyramid flowed into the rest. It gave me a language to discuss how I was learning and how I might teach.

This most recent piece throws a curveball at the knowledge pyramid. Hacks? Where does that fit? I assert that hacks are a processed experience. Neither of those words exists on the puzzling pyramid.  

The issue is that there are two pyramids. There is a boring one that exists on that Wikipedia page. A simple picture. There is another vastly more interesting one, which represents your experiences in filling out this pyramid. How much data have you turned into information? Knowledge? Wisdom? When did this happen? What happened to you? How did you promote a piece of data to information? When did it become knowledge? Then wisdom?

There are fascinating stories here because of your experiences, the stories you survived. That’s a thing the robots will never appreciate: how you earned those experiences.

(There's a new Important Thing, too)