Jack Vinson in The value of making things explicit

But in other situations, getting things out in the open or down on paper are just as valuable as direct tacit knowledge transfer via conversation. Jerry Ash of AOK just told this entertaining story about a state senator:

Jerry recounted this story in response to my saying that I wouldn’t bother writing this blog if I didn’t think anyone was reading.

In this sense, it is the very act of writing (or speaking) that is the knowledge opportunity. Writing and drawing are geared around organizing my thoughts and getting them out into the world, so that I can “see” what I am thinking. This can be in the form of text, mind maps, cocktail napkin drawings, or speaking to a crowd of one. How many ideas do I have bouncing around in my head that never see the light of day because I don’t articulate them in some way?

Which reminds me of a quote that I had saved in my “to blog” folder a year ago and recently rediscovered (Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation by Andy Clark):

If a tree is seen growing on an island, which do you suppose came first? It is natural (and usually correct) to assume that the island provided the fertile soil in which a lucky seed came to rest. Mangrove forests,{5} however, constitute a revealing exception to this general rule. The Mangrove grows from a floating seed which establishes itself in the water, rooting in shallow mud flats. The seedling sends complex vertical roots through the surface of the water, culminating in what looks to all intents and purposes like a small tree posing on stilts. The complex system of aerial roots, however, soon traps floating soil, weed and debris. After a time, the accumulation of trapped matter forms a small island. As more time passes, the island grows larger and larger. A growing mass of such islands can eventually merge, effectively extending the shoreline out to the trees! Throughout this process, and despite our prior intuitions, it is the land which is progressively built by the trees.

Something like the Mangrove effect, I suspect, is operative in some species of human thought. It is natural to suppose that words are always rooted in the fertile soil of pre-existing thoughts. But sometimes, at least, the influence seems to run in the other direction. A simple example is poetry. In constructing a poem, we do not simply use words to express thoughts. Rather, it is often the properties which of the words (their structure and cadence) which determine the thoughts that the poem comes to express. A similar partial reversal can occur during the construction of complex texts and arguments. By writing down our ideas we generate a trace in a format which opens up a range of new possibilities. We can then inspect and re-inspect the same ideas, coming at them from many different angles and in many different frames of mind. We can hold the original ideas steady so that we may judge them, and safely experiment with subtle alterations. We can store them in ways which allow us to compare and combine them with other complexes of ideas in ways which would quickly defeat the un-augmented imagination. In these ways, and as remarked in the previous section, the real properties of physical text transform the space of possible thoughts.

Don’t know how it works for you, but in my case I really become to know what I want to say in a paper only once I sit and struggle on writing – even when I have a detailed outline before starting, writing is always discovering something that was hiding in half-baked thoughts before.

For more on that check Research on how artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation, How artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation (2) and comments to the second one.

And, something else (from August 2002 :) – Uncovering the implicit, on how blogging seem to fit well professions that involve turning implicit into explicit. What is funny, is that then I write about the mangrove effect of blogging, not knowing that it would actually turn into a line of theoretical inquiry later on:

For me, blog is something for articulating ideas. They get some shape once they get out of my brain, and it becomes easier to deal with them. Blog is something for catching those difficult to catch things…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/21.html#a1784; comments are here.

The senator stood and orated for an hour to an empty chamber. When asked why he bothered, he responded, “I didn’t know what I thought about the issue until I heard what I had to say.”

• From creative mess to products (blogs and wikis for thinking)
• On blogging and book writing
• Time in blogging: catching a moment to write

Just an example: how selecting units and color-coding for visualisation can amplify one perspective. Is the US really a nation polarised as much as it seems?

Compare US election results:

• Red/blue by state vs. purple scale by state
• Red/blue by county vs. purple scale by county

This is a good example of the case where black and white (red and blue ;) lenzes would do more harm than good.

It’s interesting why do we slip into binary thinking so easily?

I’m guilty of binary representations myself. It’s so strange: even given my beliefs in complexity, continuums and multi-dimentional nature of personal knowledge management I often slip into binary mode in my texts, making my own arguments vulnerable and stirring polarisation.

It seems that thinking in binary/linear/tree structures (context) is more natural for our brains than embracing complexity, so we need some conscious effort for getting beyond simplification and polarisation.

Lois Ann Scheidt on this in a context of research:

As human beings it is very common for us to look at new ideas, technology, etc. compare them to their older antecedents and then slot them into a linear continuum between two older examples of similar phenomena. By so doing we position the new idea, technology, etc. as somewhat less then the exemplars that anchor the continuum.

[...]

In my own research while I am forced to background some discussions with linear models so I echo the point of view found in published literature, I quickly try to move to more dimensional modeling that symbolizes the complexity of the ideas without making the ideas I am expressing overly complex and difficult for some of my audience to grasp.

See also:

• similar associations & more examples – Theresa Senft on maps and a follow-up by Helena Kvarnstrom
• even more maps

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/05.html#a1413; comments are here.

• Paper – Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design
• Complex domains and researcher accountability
• WBC04: day 2 morning

My thinking about trees vs. webs was a bit implicit till I saw Clay Shirky pointing to A city is not a tree where Christopher Alexander talks about tree vs. semilattice structures. As I don’t have a good mental model of semilattice (and Google doesn’t give many pictures ;), I’ll talk about trees and webs. Or, to be more specific about tree-structures and web-structures.

For me it mainly has to do something with classification. I believe that one of the reasons classifying information is difficult has something to do with the fact that in most cases tree structures are used for classification, so we have to find “unique folder” to put an idea or a document into it. And ideas never belong to “unique folders”, they have multiple relations with other ideas, forming a web structure.

I’m thinking about tree vs. web structures in my own work:

About filers and pilers (longer abstract if you can’t access it full-text) when it comes to sorting out papers.

About saving a file on my hard drive, where I always have to remember specific folder I used, vs. adding a document to Docushare (used as a document management system in my company), which allows “placing” one document into several folders (e.g. if you scroll you’ll find out that this paper is available in four folders).

About using Favourites in IE vs. del.icio.us, which is free of “I have to decide in which folder it should go”.

And finally about using categories vs. liveTopics to organise my thinking in this weblog.

It probably matter of personal preferences or thinking style, but I always have problems with tree structures. For example, I’ve got Typepad Plus account because it offers an easy way to put photos online only to discover that I can hardly use it because it forces me to organise my photographs into albums. And I always want to sort my photos by location, by date, by theme and by many other ways that I’ll invent tomorrow.

Another example is about mind-mapping tools. Those that I tried force me to organise my ideas into tree structure. Of course, visualisation is nice to get an overview of ideas (especially if you use it for others), but forced tree structure makes these maps useless for (my) thinking. I tried to use mind-mapping software to structure my ideas for writing papers, but it didn’t work. It’s fine on paper for drawing a web of relations and thinking about steps of explaining them, but drawing a tree on my screen doesn’t make any sense: I would rather start outlining directly in Word…

Tree-relations may be easier to grasp than more complex structures. They are also easier to unfold into linear structure (think how you were taught to write an essay: introduction – body – conclusion, body consists of X parts, each of them is subdivided…). Trees are easy to draw. Easy to program.

But for me ideas live as webs. Tree structure of a paper is good to help others understand creative mess of ideas in my head, but it pains every time I try to squeeze a web of ideas into a tree structure when writing (I guess that’s why hyperlinks and cross-references were invented ;).

When I think about webs of ideas I associate a lot with Christopher Alexander talking about cities:

When we think in terms of trees we are trading the humanity and richness of the living city for a conceptual simplicity which benefits only designers, planners, administrators and developers. Every time a piece of a city is torn out, and a tree made to replace the semilattice that was there before, the city takes a further step toward dissociation.

In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a Person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide. An ominous example of city-wide dissociation is the separation of retired people from the rest of urban life, caused by the growth of desert cities for the old like Sun City, Arizona. This separation is only possible under the influence of treelike thought.

It not only takes from the young the company of those who have lived long, but worse, it causes the same rift inside each individual life. As you pass into Sun City, and into old age, your ties with your own past will be unacknowledged, lost and therefore broken. Your youth will no longer be alive in your old age – the two will be dissociated; your own life will be cut in two.

For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.

Site note: Thinking about writing texts, I think about stories that somehow fit linear format without breaking a web of relations. For me there is a lot to read and to think about to understand how stories emerge from webs and is there “tree” stage in between…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/20.html#a1216; comments are here.

• Finding in-house knowledge: patterns and implications
• Information overload workshop
• Experimenting with creating an ontology based on weblog content

Thinking of blogs vs. wikis to support thinking. For me blogging is easier – it shows how ideas unfold over time and somehow I don’t have a problem when I create new page (I do think twice in wikis – because it increases navigation mess). Blogging is also about permalinking and hypertexting half-baked ideas…

The problem is that at the certain moment there is a critical mass (critical mess ;) of bits related to a theme. At this moment you need a least an overview of all of them and then a way to construct something more coherent. Wikis are great for that. It’s much easier to get an overview of ideas (if they collected on one page :), edit them into something better or even go for refactoring the whole thing.

But then you get the clarity of a final product and lose an overview of path that took you there. And I’m getting more and more convinced that process and artefacts on the way is as important as the final product.

Of course, some wiki/weblog combination can make life easier (but not those where weblog post is edited as a wiki – you lose the path then).

The funny thing that so far I have my own work around: I use weblog for thinking in progress and then ideas are ripe I write papers. It also makes pretty clear distinction for content ownership in a case where someone (like me) gets paid to produce ideas: I’m building my “thought repository” (weblog) while my company benefits from more polished “knowledge artefacts” (papers and reports) I produce.

Hmm, have to dig out some research on process of creative thinking – something about stages in which clear ideas emerge from a mess of doing and thinking, reading and writing…

Lot’s of associative thinking instead of working :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/08.html#a1160; comments are here.

• Training the nodes in the network + Kaisen
• Personal <i>something</i> management
• Weblog and information overload