After
Nancy White pointed me to Chris Lott's articles on Northern Voice, and
on love, and Chris replied to my Tuesday post on how easily we
unintentionally hurt each other through our actions, I did a bit more
research on Chris' work and discovered the remarkable chart above on
Information Fluency. Chris put this together a couple of years ago for
an IT audience and has since expanded on it, but for me it produced an
immediate aha!
Our
professional 'value' really is a function of the extent of, and our
ability to integrate, our knowledge, our thinking competencies, and our
communication competencies. Insight depends on our ability to apply
critical thinking to what we know. Reportage is the application of our
communication skills to what we know. Rhetoric is the articulation of
our thinking. And the ability to do all of these things in an integral
way is what Chris calls 'information fluency'.
I think this is brilliant, and it got me thinking about how this model could be broadened to represent our social
fluency -- our ability to function socially in the modern complex
world, to be of use socially to others in our communities. The chart
below is what I came up with.
What this chart says is that:
- Our
social value to others is a function of (a) the extent of our
knowledge, our thinking competency (critical, creative and
imaginative), and our communication skills (conversation, presentation
and demonstration), and (b) our ability to integrate these three things.
- This
ability to integrate these three things gives rise to insight, ideas
and new perspectives (application of thinking competency to knowledge),
reportage and stories (application of communication skills to
knowledge), rhetoric and provocation (articulation of our thinking
competency), and art (the
expression of thinking competency applied to knowledge). Chris and I
love the addition of art, in its broadest sense (the representation of
reality), to the model.
- This ability to integrate is social fluency.
If we represented individuals' different social fluency graphically,
those with high levels of fluency would have larger circles (more
knowledge, greater thinking competency and communication skills) with
greater overlap (better integration of these three things).
In thinking about this further and reading Nancy White's blog, I realized that what was missing from the model was learning. I realized that the model was from the perspective of the actor (presenter, demonstrator, creator, artist) and not the perspective of the reactor (audience, listener, student, learner).
It
occurred to me that since social activity is like a dance, there should
be a 'mirror' set of attributes for effective response-ability
(responsibility). My first cut at these is in red brackets above:
- Our ability to derive social value from others (to learn)
is a function of (a) our openness to others' knowledge and ideas, our
learning competency (ability to learn) and our attention skills, and
(b) our ability to integrate these three things.
- This ability
to integrate these three things gives rise to understanding (openness
to new ideas and knowledge, and the learning competency to process it),
appreciation (openness to new ideas and knowledge, and the attention
skills to be aware of them), and self-change (attention skills to be
aware of change opportunities, and the learning competency to be able
to apply them).
- The reactive counterpart to art is improvisation.
Social fluency requires not only the ability to integrate knowledge,
thinking competency and communication skills as an 'actor', but the
ability to integrate openness, learning competency and attention skills
as a 'reactor', a learner. That's precisely what improvisation is about.
What's interesting to me about this is that some people are terrific 'artists' (they re-present reality
well, as teachers, painters, presenters etc.) but not very good
'improvisers' (they are closed-minded and not open to new ideas and new
learning). This is a terrible shame -- such people are underskilled for
a peer-to-peer world where social exchange is two-way. Likewise, there
are some great 'improvisers' (people who have learned a great deal) who
are unskilled at expressing that learning, 'passing it on'.
It
would be interesting to see a social network map that depicted
individuals not just as dots (nodes) but with their six circles. This
could show what people value in others in their networks/communities,
and what they offer, and how that effects both their 'popularity' and
the strength of the community as a whole.
So what can we do, as
individuals, to improve our social fluency -- to become better artists
and improvisers? I think the first step is self-knowledge -- to know
what our strengths and weaknesses are in each of the six circles. And
the second step is practice, with others who are both better and worse than we are at each.
What do you think of this model? Have I overloaded it? Is it useful? Is it missing something? Where does presence fit into it? Where does love fit?.
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MADE IN CANADA
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