We Participate, Therefore We Are
A conversation with John Seely Brown
By Joe Flower
Information downloads instantly, data flows unimpeded, bits by the billions flood us every day. So why are we not all as happy as kings?
Because information is not knowledge, data is not wisdom, bits are not experience. The difference is us: we make knowledge out of information together, in our communities of practice.
The most forceful explanation of this comes not from a poet or a monk, but from an uber-geek, a "technoid" as he puts it: John Seely Brown, chief scientist for Xerox and director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), an institution famed for creating much of tour familiar modern computer environment.
In their book The Social Life of Information, Brown and his co-author Paul Duguid explore what are, for organizations, some of the core questions of our age - and they turn out to be epistemological: How do we know what we know? How do we learn? How do we transmit knowledge? How do we get in its way? How do we make learning happen faster, better, deeper?
We drove down to PARC, on its hilltop overlooking Silicon Valley, past the oaks and the horses, to sit for an hour with Brown and talk about knowledge:
What's missing from information?
We computer scientists, high technoids and digerati are always taking information out of context, representing it in data bases, processing that information, and then putting it back. What's missing?
A medical record, for instance, is a sparse rendering of the real condition of the patient. Its little pieces of data are the tips of icebergs. If you are not physically present, if you aren't a participant in the context of that particular patient interview, you don't understand what those measurements and utterances really mean. You have left the context behind.
Yet implicit cues in the context carry at least as much information as the record does. Look at this book. It's not just the text that carries the message. The cover, the design, the way it wraps around the spine, the back of the cover, the packaging, all create a frame through which you interpret the the text.
The magazine uses the graphic layout to carry information. As much meaning is carried by the implicit as by the explicit. Let me change the soundtrack of a movie and I will change the meaning of that movie.
Look at the newspaper. If everybody had a personalized
newspaper tailored to their interests, would that artifact be a newspaper?
It wouldn't have a social context. Newspapers make news as much as they deliver information. A newspaper is a one-day bestseller the everybody reads. It makes news by creating a common experience across the whole community, an experience which brings people together, anchors and grounds conversations, creates openings and comments.
The newspaper is also formatted in a way that renders it efficient to read because of the notions of genre - sports, business, entertainment. And we all know that stories that start above the fold are more important than stories that start below the fold. In Kansas City, a fall in the wholesale price of beef is an above-the-fold phenomenon. In the Bay Area, Alta Vista pulling its IPO goes above the fold, the price of beef below the fold several pages in the business section. We have turned a physical constraint — the need to fold the paper — into a social resource, a way to categorize and frame information socially.
In the digital world we remove that physical constraint — and at the same time we destroy a social resource. The newspaper acts as a powerful centripetal force to pull things together, a force that acts as a counter balance to the centrifugal force of the radical demassification of our society.
Why do we have such an incredible sense of information overload? It's not just because so much information is flowing our way. It is also because everything is being rendered explicitly. We get no help from the context in shaping our ability to interpret it.
Turning data into meaning
Digital design has tunnel vision. It connects the individual with the information — as if those are the only things that matter.
What are the social and physical resources that we use day in and day out to help create meaning in our own social context, in how we interact with people? How do we keep ourselves located in this very complex information space?
For example, look at the Web. We created the GUI — the Graphic User Interface metaphor of the computer screen as a desktop — here at Xerox PARC. The Web has taken that metaphor — your point-and-click graphical user interface desk top — and lifted it to become the defining metaphor for the world. Point click jump. Point click jump....
Guess what? You surf the web, and after a very short time you feel dis-located, dis-oriented. Without the sense of being embedded in social and physical context you feel confused and alienated.
Imagine, for instance, a shift change on a nursing floor. How do the nurses going off shift pass on information about the patients to nurses coming on shift? Imagine a meeting in which the nurses discuss the patients and the patient records. Then imagine, instead, that all the information is in a computer printout, rather than a face-to-face discussion. What's that do to the social fabric?
When the people in the conversation are part of a community of practice, they know how to read each other. They have their own condensed language.
A simple grunt can communicate meaning. It can happen with blinding speed.
The meaning of the patient record is socially constructed. What matters is not just the information on the sheet, but the conversation that sheet fosters: Why this dosage? What does the change in dosage mean? The document is the grounding element for a fast, efficient conversation at the boundary between two people or two groups — night shift and day shift, for instance, or doctors and nurses.
Between nurses and doctors, the patient record operates as a "boundary object" between two communities of practice. Each community of practice — the nurses and the doctors — have their own ways to interpret that record, and they negotiate about what it actually means.
Knowledge flows down the channels of practice
Here at PARC, we started off by thinking about patient records, and then moved quickly to the whole problem of innovation within any organization. We have a history here of an enormous fecundity of ideas, many of which have not turned into products — or (like the Graphic User desktop) have been turned into products by other organizations. We have a community of practice of researchers here, and Xerox in Rochester, New York, has a community of practice of engineers. How do we communicate across the boundary?
It's difficult. Within your own community of practice you have a sense of trust, so knowledge flows very rapidly within a community of practice.
But it often stops at the boundaries of that community of practice, because it has left the context behind, including the machinery of trust.
The knowledge of the GUI, which couldn't make the jump from Xerox Park to Xerox Rochester, spread to Apple with great ease. This caused Paul Duguid and I to ask, "Why do ideas stick in some places, while they spread easily to someplace else?"
That knowledge flowed into another company that had a set of engineers who had a tremendous sense of shared practice with some of the researchers in this building. Knowledge flows down the channels of practice.
Trust creates knowledge
Knowledge is information that is warranted enough, trusted enough, for people to act on it. Shared practices build the trust structure that allows people to accept knowledge and act on it.
If all you look at is connecting individuals with information, there is no room for practice, or for the warrants that practice creates — the warrants of trust that are necessary to transform information into knowledge.
At the same time, this is why knowledge may not jump to a different community of practice. The warrant structure inside the medical profession is different than within the nursing profession.
Here at PARC, we are redesigning many of the processes of the firm to get more leverage out of such boundary objects as medical records and "phase gates" in time-to-market processes as a product moves from research to market.
Blueprints function as boundary objects between contractors, architects, engineers, and bankers — four different worlds with different meaning structures. They all have their own communities, but around this blueprint they will come together and negotiate what something actually means.
That negotiation goes beyond the verbal. It has to do with how we bring our practices into alignment, so that knowledge flows down those rails.
As we move to streamlined MIS-type systems, we are leaving behind that space for negotiation between the practices. On the other hand, if you take the need for that space into account, then MIS systems can have increasing power. You can use use information technologies to build the strength of social networks.
The medical profession is more and more dealing with the value, for example, of having patients that are well educated in their own concept of their disease. In some sense we, the patients, are the data. The more we can become articulate about ourselves, the more we can engage in careful reflection on the state of our own health, the greater is our chance for well being, as well as our chance for a meaningful conversation and a joint diagnosis between patient and doctor.
Creating knowledge, creating ourselves
Learning is something we construct between us.
The community of practice, through its improvisations and discoveries, becomes a major learning unit for the organization. At the same time it becomes a major form of identity creation for the individuals in that particular cadre.
It is a wonderfully natural process. If you begin to see what is happening invisibly in the social milieu, then you can start to figure out how to amplify it — or at least try to honor it. So many of our technologies would destroy the very fabric of the community of practice — which is where the real work is getting done and the real innovation arising under the guise of efficiency.
My wife Susan is an architect and artist. A number of years ago she did a Matisse-like drawing for me that has been pivotal in my thinking ever since. It has to do with an epistemological shift. Most of the Western world, including medical care, is driven by the basic Cartesian belief, as Descarte put it: "I think therefore I am." The implication is a clear separation between mind and body, between the individual and others, between thinking and being.
Susan labeled her beautiful diagram: "We participate, therefore we are."
The notion is that in participation we come into being. To participate is the fundamental act by which we construct self.
Participation is active. It's in this participative action that we turn information into knowledge and define our selves.
A conversation is action. In a good conversation I say something that evokes something in you, which evokes something in me, and soon we are scaffolding each other into constructing something that was beyond either of us. We create knowledge and meaning, and we shape our our identity.
Transforming healthcare
This epistemological shift — "We participate therefore we are" — can transform the effectiveness of health delivery, health care, and well being.
How does the patient become a participant in the whole diagnostic process in a much more profound way? How does the patient become a participant who is grounded in information, not only about their own potential disease, but about what is going on around the world of healthcare? The more we do to create an educated public, the more we can do to transform the effectiveness and costs of healthcare.
This means that I have to take responsibility and be a co-participant in my own health. This way well start in selecting my insurance. We in the corporate world want to bring consumer choice into insurance process so that people understand that insurance isn't free, you have to make choices, you have to become a participant. The more we participate the more we learn. And the more we learn, the more effective we are at our own diagnosis and our own communication with the medical establishment.
Trust within healthcare
Co-creating meaning between, say, doctors and nurses starts not with the authority structure, but with an assumption that each brings something to the table. What really facilitates communication is shared trust. Show me the shared trust between the silos of healthcare. How can we rebuild the architecture of the system in such a way that it causes trust to emerge?
Shared trust does not inherently mean inefficiencies. In fact, the irony is that the more you trust, the more you have good social capital across the different components
of the system, the faster the system works and the more efficient it becomes.
The system has social resources that are used day in and day out to make things work. But at best we tend to be blind to these resources, or at worse we actually see them as bottlenecks rather than resources. Under the guise of informational efficiency, we engineer things that tear the social fabric rather than strengthen it.
Touch someone
Why are some technologies worth fighting for? No matter what you do, some technologies, such as books and paper, are not going to disappear. Book being one, paper being another. For years all the digerati have been calling the fax machine a dinosaur technology. And yet there is something wonderfully satisfying about a fax machine.
I interviewed a PR person recently. She had a fine email system, but she loved to send hand-written faxes, or add little hand-written notes to printed faxes — and she had interesting handwriting. I said, "Why do you use the fax machine?"
She said, "John, every time I send out a fax, I send a part of myself. I reach out and touch somebody. Tell me, how would I do that in email?"
Xerox builds fax machines. Those of us who design these systems never thought of it the way she did. For her, the fax is an incredibly efficient mechanism for extending her sense of herself into the world.
A new technology rarely supplants the older technology. The new augments the old. Fax and email, for instance, become part of a system, augmenting the phone,
where we can deftly read the silences, the intonation, the hesitation — and they all augment the physical meeting, where we can read the body language,
the look, which tell you an infinite amount more than what actually gets said in words.
The design challenge, then, is: How do we create a generative dance between the virtual and the physical? For instance, most of the rooms here at Xerox PARC have teleconferencing equipment, which we use day in and day out. But we also spend a tremendous amount of time flying, because we want to be constantly renewing context in that very high-bandwidth physical shared space. We can extend that for a week or a month or two in the virtual space, then we enforce it again physically. It's the mixture that matters.
Place matters
There is a context of genre, and a context of place, and they carry tremendous meaning. For instance, one way to trash someone's career in a corporation is to take something said around the water cooler, or in the men's room, and disseminate it in email, or re-format it as an official office memo, each of which is a different genre and carries a different warrant. Flaming out in the restroom is one thing, flaming out in a memo is another thing entirely.
We all implicitly understand that different spaces have different protocols for interpreting what people say. And we have lived with those, we grew up with those. For example what gets said on the playground by a kid is going to be different from what is allowed to be said in a hallway versus a classroom. Those are three completely different spaces. They have different social protocols that govern them.
In cyberspace, we haven't had a chance to enact the social protocols that separate a conference room from a golf course. That will happen, but it's going to take some time.
Communities on the Internet
Learning is nurtured by community, and the Internet fosters communities.
Metcalf's Law says that the power of the Internet goes up as the square of the number of people on it. But the number of possible communities that you can create out of N people online is not N squared, but actually 2 to the N power, an exponentially greater number. The number of niche communities of interest on the Internet is nearly infinite. And those communities of interest become major resources for content, for both kids and adults who want to learn. A whole new form of content seems to be emerging from these communities of interest. Learning becomes a form of cognitive apprenticeship: first you lurk on the periphery of these communities of interest, listening to what is going on. Then you can move from lurking to acting.
Apprenticeship is the most powerful form of learning that we have. If we come to understand and leverage this new form of "cyber apprenticeship," this could be one of the greatest opportunities we We tend to think of some people (professors, "experts," consultants) as knowledge producers, and others (students, firms, and such) as knowledge consumers. On the web, if you are of the web culture, you consume and produce at the same time.
We are back to: "We participate, therefore we are." Lift that notion of the fluid consumption and production of knowledge into these communities of interest, into this notion of cognitive apprenticeship, and you begin to get a new tapestry of learning. It may well slash through the digital divide, and through problems of educating people about their own health and well being.
Once you do that, a whole bunch of things start to happen: exercising judgment, making discriminations, asking questions — learning as an active, social process. We could turn this country into a a culture of learners.
If this is correct — "We participate therefore we are" — then we have to re-architect a lot of social and information protocols. Top-down management is anthithetical to participation. It springs from the Cartesian belief: There are thinkers and there are doers. We that think, pontificate to those that absorb.
That's why top-down "cascade communication" does not work — it does not open the pores for the construction of meaning.
How would you restructure the whole value web of all the participants that are a part of the medical system: the insurers, the providers, the doctors, the patients, the community, the employers? How might you re-design the value web around the sense that "we participate therefore we are," that we build meaning together?
This article first appeared in the September 1, 2000 issue of Health Forum Journal.
