Model 2: data, information, knowledge, wisdom

There is an excellent post about wisdom on one of my favourite sites - Big Dog and Little Dog's Performance Juxtaposition (yes, really!).  It's a place I recommend you spend some time checking out.

I like the way this model gets me thinking about how we learn - there are connections here to the Honey & Mumford Learning styles.  The fact that there is a continuum for context is also thought-provoking.  This model has left me wondering whether in many of our quality improvement projects we focus too much on the bottom left hand corner and assume the progression to wisdom will be automatic. What would happen if we thought more and designed more of the journey to wisdom into our improvement interventions (and by extension, into our evaluations of projects)?

Model 1: data, information, knowledge, wisdom

The old adage goes along the lines that knowledge can be defined as knowing a tomato is a fruit, and that wisdom is therefore knowing that you don't add a tomato to a fruit salad...  There are a number of models and frameworks that investigate the data-information-knowledge-wisdom continuum and in the this series of posts I cover a few of these.

For the theorist a good place to start is with an online paper A Primer:, Enterprise Wisdom Management and the Flow of Understanding by ScottCarpenter@CognitiveCybernetics.com

I like the way environment and context have come into play as important factors in understanding that knowledge and wisdom have a contextual perspective.