Learning something is way harder and more complex than I thought. The same goes for teaching something new. I recently worked with my team to put together a day-long training session. All of us were very proud of it and it even had some success when we delivered it to folks. However, I could feel that it wasn’t catching on for real. People liked it, but I don’t think anyone changed what they were doing after they went back to their daily slog.
So, naturally, that got me on a big kick to try to understand how learning works. If I’m going to put the my and my team’s time toward doing something, we might as well do it as effectively as possible!
My quest brought me to Russell L. Ackoff, an accomplished systems thinker, who broke learning into 5 hierarchical levels: data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.
Data and Information
Ackoff describes data as the “symbols that represent objects, events, and their properties.” Data is the figures on a bank statement, the entries in a system log, and the raw measurements of an experiment. Data looks like: 42.
The next level in the hierarchy, Information, is the context of the data. In Ackoff’s words, it answers questions such as “who, what, where, when, and how many.” Information looks like “The year Johnson and Johnson invented Duct Tape,” “The ascii character ‘*’,” or “The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.”
Knowledge
The next level in Ackoff’s hierarchy of learning is Knowledge. This is “knowing how a system works or how to make it work in a desired way…” In fact, Ackoff posits that training is the “transmission of knowledge” and intelligence is the “ability to acquire knowledge.” This is where I lazily thought learning stopped. However, Ackoff argues for two more layers, Understanding and Wisdom.
Earlier this year, I called out how I can fall into a consumption as learning model, where I found myself consuming content under the guise of learning. It is clear to me that Consuming is not learning. Capturing knowledge is not enough for me to be effective at anything other than Trivial Pursuit.
Understanding
Understanding answers the “why questions.” From my perspective, it is being able to apply my acquired knowledge to a problem. I can have knowledge of how to do something, but I need understanding to recognize when, where, or why to apply that knowledge correctly to a real-world scenario. We all have that friend who has massive amounts of knowledge but can’t seem to get anything accomplished. Our friend lacks the understanding necessary to use all of that knowledge.
To that point, I don’t think you can claim to have learned something without achieving the knowledge of how to do something along with understanding of when, where, and why to apply that knowledge. However, all of our training through grade school and university seems to end with knowledge. It is how tests and lectures are structured. It was the rare professor who expected us to make mental leaps in their exams, proving not only that we had the knowledge, but also the understanding of the course material. Because of this, I feel like our brains were trained that gathering knowledge is learning.
Quick shout out to Fr. Michael C. McFarland who taught some of my tougher comp sci classes at Boston College. Thanks to his pushing us to make the mental leaps indicative of understanding in his exams, my gpa suffered but my brain grew.
Back to the course I mentioned above. I realized that we designed this course to impart knowledge as effectively as possible, completely ignoring the need to develop understanding. For a sufficiently motivated student, this is enough. They will apply their understanding to their own real-world problems under the guise of achieving a goal. As a result, they will develop their own understanding. Most of us, however, will file our knowledge away without doing the hard work to tie it back to the real world.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but Harvard proved out this theory in a recent study. They split their students into two groups: one group had nothing but lecture, the other had a mix of lecture and applied labs. The students who attended only lectures had a higher level of satisfaction and felt that they learned more. However, when tested, the students who had the applied labs learned much more. We all learn more when we apply our knowledge to real world problems. This is hard and uncomfortable. We would rather passively consume knowledge than work to shape our understanding.
Wisdom
Earlier, I mentioned how I want us to be as effective as we can be when designing our course. I chose the word “effective” deliberately. It was my call out to Ackoff’s take on wisdom. He argues that the last stop on the learning hierarchy, Wisdom, is required to make the distinction between “doing things right and doing the right thing.” In other words, you can do the wrong things right. This might be efficient, but not effective. Wisdom helps us understand that it is better to do the right thing incorrectly! An absolutely beautiful observation by Ackoff and one that requires quite a bit of wisdom to achieve.
Wisdom is also the perception of value across short and long-term outcomes and how that value aligns with the greater system. I don’t think you can get there without experience. Which is why it is so important to Master the habit of showing up. If we strive to do the right thing (even if we execute poorly), we’ll get there eventually!
How to use the hierarchy of learning
I have found this hierarchy to be extremely useful when gauging my current level of learning. I use it when trying to understand where I am in my learning process. Am I still gathering information and knowledge, or have I crossed over into understanding? It helps me break out of my habit of lazy knowledge acquisition and into the hard work of processing my acquired knowledge into understanding.
Thanks to Jeremy Bezanger for his photo of the Great Pyramid of Giza