The Knowledge Package Paradigm

Although I'm a big fan of using technology to catalyze sensemaking, I think this post at Headshift identifies a serious challenge impeding a fundamental business/societal shift in that direction. I've seen this issue arise repeatedly over the past few years, so it's nice to see someone else writing about it.

I won't try to cover everything in the post, but a key thread is that our tools tend to be what I call a "knowledge chunk" that are (a) relatively static, and (b) relatively decoupled from the contexts in which we use them. This is true of high information density tools (e.g., Word) and low information density tools (e.g., a hammer).

There are at least two reasons for this: (a) it's much easier to monetize these tools (Google, eBay, etc. being a few notable exceptions), and (b) our mental models/frames/fragments are based on this paradigm (and it may be that our cognitive ability to basically do only compare/contrast means that we'll never find it easy to adopt any other paradigm).

As I've noted previously, it's unclear how we use the new decentralizing technologies to catalyze Exploration & improve Exploitation simultaneously...amazing opportunities, but the organizational and cognitive challenges seem to rarely receive the attention they deserve.