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The dullest, and probably the most important chapter in The Cognitive Enterprise (Bob Lewis and Scott Lee, 2016) addresses a central topic when it comes to cognition: What does it mean for an organization to “know” something?

We started with the tired old “knowledge pyramid” — you know, the one that starts with Data and progresses through Information and Knowledge until arriving at Wisdom (DIKW).

The old pyramid gets just about everything wrong, at least as it’s usually explained. And the flaws matter: For an enterprise to act as if it thinks, getting this right is essential.

Here’s an overview. To get the whole story you’ll need to buy the book. It pains me to say this, and I plan to continue in my agony until you … that’s right, you, the person reading these words right now … until you get yourself a copy and write an honest review on Amazon.

Where was I. That’s right — the old DIKW pyramid and what to do about it.

Start with Data. Most of DIKW’s proponents would have you think that every byte stored on your company’s hard drives, NASes and SANs is data. When you read an awe-inducing statistic about the data explosion, it’s probably based on the every-byte-stored definition. You’d think the GIGO principle (Garbage In/Garbage Out) was still waiting to be formulated.

Data (plural of datum if anyone still cares about such things) is actually a collection of individually verifiable facts. Your eye color is a datum. So are your driver’s license number, your annual income, and how many miles you walk every week.

Data aren’t always verified, but they must be verifiable.

Information next. No, it isn’t data that have been processed to provide something useful. Definitions like this entirely ignore the well-developed branch of mathematics upon which the entire data process industry is founded: Information theory.

Information is the stuff that reduces uncertainty. It comes in bits, one of which is the quantity of information that cuts your uncertainty about something in half. The classic example is a coin toss. You know it either landed heads or tails. One bit of information will resolve your uncertainty about the result.

For the most part, though, information doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. It reduces it — a very different matter. Even in the case of the coin toss, if someone tells you it landed heads you still aren’t absolutely sure. Your informant might, for example, be an untrustworthy source.

Information is, by the way, what a good system of metrics provides.

Which gets us to knowledge – a word that’s been hard to pin down since Plato first wrote about it a few millennia back, not that he got anywhere with his ponderings.

I’m not criticizing, mind you. Epistemology is an eyeball-crossing domain.

Scientists generally rely on Karl Popper’s approach to things: You start with a proposition and do everything you can to disprove it. A proposition that’s survived all the tests human ingenuity can subject it to — nobody can think of any more tests that might disprove it — is considered by scientists to be something they “know,” in quotes because they know that everything they “know” is just one additional test away from being something they used to know, only now they know better.

Business managers (and, for that matter, consultants) don’t have the luxury of subjecting their knowledge to testing that’s as thorough as what scientists are able to manage. We have to make do.

Scott and I are practical guys, not epistemologists. We figure you know something if you’ve looked into it extensively and have concluded there’s just no point in worrying about it anymore. You still might be wrong, but you’re more than certain enough to act.

Then we added a new layer: Judgment. It sits between knowledge and wisdom in the pyramid. Judgment is about tempering your knowledge about something with related insights that come from experience. It’s your safety net when making difficult decisions.

At the top of the pyramid there’s wisdom — broad principles about important subjects, which you don’t find very often, and when you do it’s rarely in the domain of commerce.

Now, finally, we’re ready to talk about what it means for an enterprise to be cognitive. It means the enterprise does a fair imitation of knowing things, as distinct from the people in it knowing things.

In a cognitive enterprise, when it comes to the most important subjects, most people share similar views, with similar levels of certainty, and so can be trusted to make similar decisions when it’s their turn to do so.

A different way of saying it: In a cognitive enterprise, knowledge becomes culture, and culture becomes the centerpiece of governance.

Clichés are the rotting corpses of insights.

“Agile,” sadly, has become one. It has joined the long parade of business concepts that, like “entrepreneurial,” “professional,” and “proactive,” once meant something, but now just mean “good.”

Let’s resurrect the corpse.

Last week’s column focused on Agile development. This week we’re going to talk about the business as a whole. The questions: What does it mean for an organization to be agile, and what does it take?

What it means isn’t especially complicated. While Wikipedia’s entry on the subject is less than stellar, its definition is as good as any: “Business agility is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in response to changes in the business environment.”

There is, inevitably, a complication. As pointed out in KJR from time to time, delayed feedback is destabilizing when delay approaches the speed with which system inputs change.

Call it Agile characteristic #1: Feedback loops need to be much quicker than the speed with which the business environment changes.

Agile characteristic #2 is a superset of AC#1: Fast decision-making.

Yes, this is a cliché. But quick decision-making is by no means automatic.

Look at what slows down decisions in most companies and you’ll find two factors are what pour most of the sand into the gears of progress: Lack of trust, and controls.

Lack of trust leads to overreliance on consensus, as people don’t trust decisions they weren’t involved in making. And as consensus is the slowest way to make decisions, and also isn’t how to make the highest quality decisions, Q.E.D.

Then there are controls — requiring, for example, six signatures to approve a $1,000 expenditure. Why all the signatures? The organization’s trust in an employee’s judgment is pegged to their altitude in the organizational hierarchy.

Not that all controls are a bad idea. You might recall the London Whale — JPMorgan Chase’s trader who lost the company more than $6 billion, violating securities laws as he did so. Requiring a second, and even a third pair of eyes on decisions is just fine. It’s the fourth, fifth, and sixth pairs that slow things to an unnecessary crawl.

Agile businesses prize speed, but speed has the same consequences when it comes to decisions it has when driving a car: The faster you go, the more skillful you have to be so you don’t cause a flaming crash — see “London Whale,” above. So Agile Characteristic #3 is an enormous emphasis on making sure everyone who makes important decisions — which in an agile business is, in the context of their responsibilities, pretty much everyone — is in a position to make them well.

So agile businesses invest heavily in education to make employees experts in their areas of responsibility. They invest heavily in defining and promoting, as Jim Collins put it in Good to Great, a culture of discipline. And, they invest heavily in both a “culture of honest inquiry” and the practices and tools required to support evidence-based decision-making without the desire for evidence slowing decisions down to the point they become destabilizing.

Next … this is Agile Characteristic #4 … agile businesses promote another cultural characteristic: Utter contempt for the organizational chart.

Okay, not really the org chart, but close — for the organizational siloes most org charts turn into. In an agile enterprise, everyone collaborates with anyone who (1) will be useful in pursuing an interesting idea; and (2) is interested in pursuing the idea. And not just individuals. Workgroups and departments show the same behavior.

Which gets us to Agile Characteristic #5. People. Very good people. People who have the expertise, judgment, and attitude required to get things done. Because (drumroll …) …

Agile makes software development a practice rather than a process. In a process, it’s all about following the recipe to deliver repeatable, predictable results. In a process, intelligence resides in the recipe.

In a practice, it’s all about the practitioners. Because by the time a competitor has perfected the processes it needs to compete, the agile business has innovated to the next generation of whatever it is.

Processes and the assembly lines they depend on, physical or virtual, take too long to figure out and perfect.

Skilled employees know how to reach the exalted state of good enough, and how to get there fast enough to stay ahead.