On Knowledge

Could you imagine if Carl Marx met Adam Smith in the spring of 1859 in Copenhagen... I would have bought that PPV... But I just learned that an even more epic encounter did in fact take place some 2500 years ago, a little while before ShowTime existed. The mighty Confuscious met the equally important Lao Tzu (Not Sun Tzu from the Art of War, this is a different Tzu who's kinda the father of Taoism, an important school of thought).

If you're like me, you probably didn't know what these things are about. Confusism is about order, structure, function, and clarity. Taoism is more about harmony, connection, and flexibility. The picture is a passage from their conversation.

Pretty much all of China and parts of east Asia's history was spent explicitly trying to follow Confucius. He was their Socrates, in a sense. Western society didn't know much about him, yet we did our own version of his teachings.

I detect, in today's economy, insofar as I'm exposed to it, an exaggeration in these rules and regulations. I feel a lack of reliance on more organic measures. In a meeting, it feels wrong when one says: "let's do this because it feels right to me". That's a fast way to receive copious amounts of resentment from one's colleagues. We have a tendency to want to regulate and document and structure things. Taoism teaches us that the essence of things (the truth, in a sense) cannot be articulated or is at least diminished when spoken.

I'm doing a lot of documentation for a design system these days. Some of this rings true. The more you document and establish rules, the more you need to document. It's like carbohydrates. they feel satisfying but they make you more hungry quickly.

I can sense the limits of this approach to knowledge management. There's plenty of science that demonstrates it. I don't know what to do with this information. It just seems to me like there's room to learn something here.