I saw a post on LinkedIn from Don Taylor last week that has – as he regularly does – prompted me to think.

Don Taylor recently suggested that face-to-face facilitators must evolve into highly skilled specialists—able to build context, facilitate knowledge-sharing, and surface organisational know-how. That struck a chord with me.

The use of the word knowledge prompted me to look at the DIKW pyramid; also known as the knowledge pyramid, knowledge hierarchy, information hierarchy, etc. While the DIKW pyramid has its critics, it’s still a useful lens for thinking about how people move from raw data to meaningful, applied action. What interests me most are the spaces between each layer – those messy, human moments where learning really happens.

The gap between data and information is the first place we need to look.

Let’s assume data is everywhere. It is entity which exists, whether physical, virtual, sensory, etc. For example, tomatoes exist. Whether they are familiar to me or not is moot; they exist. The same happens in organisations – data is everywhere across the organisation. Sponsors often approach L&D functions and ask us to translate this data for people so it becomes information. The act of translation by an individual is PROCESSING. How we process, what we process, in which order, when, etc. is the action and activity we should be looking at in learning. Understanding the context of processing is essential to good learning design. This is where our evaluation focus should lie too: how much of the essential data has actually been processed into usable information? When someone makes me aware of tomatoes I am told they are plants which produce edible red berries. This is now information I have processed.

This processed information becomes deeper and more layered. I now know that tomatoes are a fruit, pulpy, taste better when ripe and red, and can be eaten hot or cold. This is COGNITION in action as it becomes knowledge. I might remember these things, but they become knowledge through repeated exposure, in context, which I code into memory. Cognition doesn’t occur once – layers of information require multiple moments when we recognise and begin to understand how the information we have processed works in our context. Cognition probably won’t happen on a course, in a workshop, on an eLearning module. It’s when people are in the world and trying things out. You can attempt to replicate the environment in a training scenario but it will ‘never’ be quite the same. We need to be measuring cognition better than we do right now. Post course assessments won’t cut it and this is where the 10-week approach I’ve mentioned matters; we’re looking to establish that people have taken information and made it knowledge.

Knowing tomatoes are fruit but not putting them in a fruit salad is wisdom. To that point we need to understand JUDGEMENT. The balancing of knowledge to make decisions is judgement and demonstrates wisdom in action. From a L&D perspective, this is the workplace performance. The judgment of which tools, techniques, skills and behaviours to operate, in sequence, to perform. The measurement in this space is not about the wisdom displayed – that’s subjective – but the process of decision making. This judgment, within the organisation’s policies, procedures and rules, is organisational wisdom. How L&D harnesses this power, and demonstrates its impact at this level is where we will differentiate us from the things we’ve done before.

If we want to be taken seriously as strategic partners, this is the territory we need to own. What do you think? How are you helping people move from data to wisdom?