Imagination & Evidence in Decision Making
Hello friends. This is a subscriber-exclusive edition of others. I wanted to give you a preview of some of the conversation we’ll be having at my first event in August; Unwordable World Building. I also wanted to extend a special invite to you – your support of me and this journey has been phenomenal, and it still astounds me that people would give real dollars to this endeavor. For that, I’d like to make the Unwordable World Building event free to you. Just use the code others when registering here, and you’ll be registered free of charge. I hope you’ll join us.
I want to build on my post from a few weeks ago and talk about decision making. To do so we’ll cover a little philosophy and a little history. For those of you familiar with some of these concepts, you know that these concepts are extremely vast and nuanced. You'll also recognize that I’m simplifying some things to hedge against rabbit trails and philosophical tangents that could steer us off track.
First, a philosophical word for you to know – epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. Epistemology is concerned with the 'how we know what we know,’ and ‘what we know.' Epistemology is important to us as humans because our epistemology (we all have one) shapes the way we engage the world around us.
It is generally agreed that the history of epistemology as a philosophical concept began both in ancient India and ancient Greece around the same time. Sometime between 600 and 200 BCE the Indian philosopher Kanada began to socialize the idea that perception and inference were the only two reliable sources of knowledge. Meanwhile in the third century BCE Aristotle and others (such as the founders of the Empiric School in Alexandria) also began to explore the role of our senses in knowing and concluded that knowledge could only be derived from personal experience.
These ideas were built upon incrementally through the centuries by eastern and western philosophers, but it was the philosophers of the enlightenment and the renaissance (too many to name here, but Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume where a few of the major players) that ultimately catalyzed what we understand today as the scientific method and the underlying forms of 'knowing' grounded in empiricism, skepticism, and rationalism.
For the first time in human history, myth, story, and metaphor surrendered its position as the primary human orientation towards reality. With the enlightenment, evidence superseded imagination as the primary paradigm for knowledge.
Underlying this new way of knowing was a new conception of 'numbers.' For thinkers of previous centuries, numbers represented a quality of something more so than a quantity. The philosopher Gary Lachman points out that for the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, "numbers had a metaphysical reality; they were symbols or expressions of certain qualities, certain fundamental characteristics or essences that provided the pattern and shape of reality. There was a quality of what we would call 'twoness' just as there was a quality of 'threeness.'"
The enlightenment redefined our relationship to numbers, and to counting. Numbers came to be primarily an agent of measurement. This shift from quality to quantity was a seismic shift in western civilization's relationship to the world and had profound effects. This shift – what the 19th century philosopher Rene Guenon called the "reign of quantity” – gave us the scientific revolution in which the quantification of experience imparted to civilization a new capacity for understanding and invention.
It also gave us the industrial revolution.
In the late 1800s F.W. Taylor was the first to begin applying these scientific epistemologies to the world of work. With his pocket watch, he began to measure (through time) the activities of steelworkers with the intent to derive standards for productivity. Scientific management was born and today instead of pocket watches, we apply scientific management through the collection, organization, and analysis of data.
In business today, "data driven" as a term is so ubiquitous we don't think twice about it. This is be because data is evidence, and you can’t make decisions without evidence. The data revolution of the last 25 years has further reinforced this way of knowing built on evidence. With the ability to understand the behaviors of our customers (by measuring the ways they interact with our products) we have been able to create unprecedented products and services at scale.
Yet here is the kicker – while we fetishize data and evidence, our intuition and our hunches still guide much of our decision making. Our business processes and paradigms have made evidence the hero, yet our capacity for imagination never went away. Our ability to grasp realities that aren't immediately present didn't go anywhere. The technologies, products, and services invented over the last 20 years – smart phones and touchscreen glass, self-driving cars, electric vehicles, tablets, VR/AR, video streaming, multiple use rockets, tokenization, 3D printing, gene editing – all started with imagination.
This is the truth we must embrace: data is nothing without imagination. Knowing how to count is worthless if you don’t know what counts. Data and evidence on its own is great for optimization, but will only lead to derivative outcomes. Generative outcomes require imagination, a belief in a world or a possibility that has no precedent. In other words, we must have the organizational capacity to grasp realities that are not immediately present – what 'could be' – while ingeniously collecting, organizing, and applying evidence towards what 'should be.'
We must embrace a more sophisticated way of 'knowing' to thrive in a VUCA world. We must acknowledge and embrace that there are different kinds of 'knowing' that work better in certain situations and for making different kinds of decisions. We must accept the insufficiency of being ‘data driven,’ and instead champion decision making processes that are ‘imagination driven and data informed.’ We must recognize that modern epistemologies are very new in the grand scheme of things, and maybe there is some value in reclaiming our pre-enlightenment orientation towards reality. An orientation characterized by mystery, wonder, and imagination.