Relationships ≠ Structure

Here is an image I removed from The Shape of Knowledge:

I removed it, not because it isn't a great visual - it is - but because I didn't want to violate the copyright of the creators. But here, in a blog entry, it falls into the 'fair use' category so I will show it and not just describe it, as I did in the book. This illustration is famous; it did, after all, make the front page of the New York Times!

This diagram was in a presentation made to General Stanley McChrystal, during the time he was  leading the United States' efforts in the Afghan war. On seeing it he is said to have remarked "when we understand that slide we will have won the war".

One of the premises of TSOK is that structure arises from relationships, from connections. The 'materials' cause that Aristotle wrote about is about 'things' or concepts; structure is about the relationships between things or concepts.

My point in showing the Afghanistan slide is that the existence of relationships, depicted by the many arrows in the diagram, does not ensure the existence of structure. A logician would say that relationships are 'necessary but not sufficient' for structure to exist. The absence of structure is what General McChrystal was bemoaning when he made his ironic statement. Here is a visual that 'connects the dots' but no picture emerges.

Sense-making arises from structure, and the best structures for sense-making are those that naturally fit the patterns of relationships our brains make when we are exercising important cognitive skills such as classification and composition. The Shape of Knowledge is about recognizing structure in our thought processes and mirroring that structure in the knowledge artifacts ("knowtifacts") we create to communicate those thought processes.

Knowledge is more than a group of facts or collection of interesting information -- it's knowing how to link those facts together to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Communicating knowledge is about communicating a way of thinking that is useful, and doing it in such a way that others can replicate that thought process successfully in new situations. Creating artifacts to transmit knowledge successfully requires more than domain expertise, it requires an understanding of best practices for creating knowledge artifacts.

I think a good analogy is teaching. A good teacher knows a subject really well: for example, a good science teacher knows a lot about science. But a good teacher also knows a lot about teaching. Teaching is a skill; it can be taught and it is perfected through practice. Creating knowledge artifacts to convey knowledge is also a skill, one that requires an understanding of the role of structure in transmitting knowledge.

The PowerPoint slide above is a knowledge artifact. It was intended to transmit knowledge about the conflict in Afghanistan. It is clear from General McChrystal's comment that it fell short of its goal. Why? How could structure have been used to make its message clearer?