Evolution and 4 types of knowing

Do individuals automatically grow and evolve? And how does that work?

Living systems need to have the capacity to develop, evolve and adapt. That can also mean to differentiate and integrate.

The more a system integrates. For example, the more information an organization gathers about its clients’ needs, the better it will be able to respond. But that is only half true. The more different parts there are to a system, the easier it is for integration challenges to coordination failures to occur. In a differentiated system, information flow and resource allocation also get more complex.

Systems theory (e.g. Donella Meadows), suggests that the key to sustainable growth and development in a system lies in balancing differentiation with integration. A well-integrated system can gain the advantages of differentiation while mitigating its downsides.

How can we make good choices about that? One key seems to lie within having access to different kinds of knowing.

Four Types of Knowing

Vervaeke discusses four interconnected types of knowing that are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of ourselves and the world:

1. Propositional Knowing: knowledge about facts or truths. (See explicit knowing.)
2. Procedural Knowing: knowing “how” to do something and is related to skills.
3. Perspectival Knowing: a first-person insight into what it’s like to be in a particular situation or state; this includes context knowledge.
4. Participatory Knowing: a deep, embodied engagement with the world. It shapes our identity and how we relate to other beings and the environment. Participatory knowing is about co-creation and transformation through our interaction with the world.

Vervaeke argues that wisdom involves the integration of these different forms of knowing. It’s not about one over the other. For example, just because someone has experienced a lot doesn’t mean they become wise. If someone has read a lot, they might not be wiser. The key is the ability to weave them together, navigating between them as appropriate to the context.

Relevance

One key factor in our ability to develop is to know what is relevant. Vervaeke shows at length and with great compelling detail how relevance plays out on a sub/prepropositional level. We don’t think our way into discerning what’s relevant. Instead, we sense our way into it.

In fact, it is our capacity to discern what’s relevant that keeps us from falling into the trap of combinatorial explosion. If we always considered everything, we would be paralyzed.

It is relevance that connects us back to the balancing of integration and differentiation in systems. In order to balance, we have to have a good grasp on what is relevant. We discern that by engaging deeply with our environment and continuously refining our understanding through the interplay of all four types of knowing. (More on relevance)

Literacy and fluency

Many technologies and practices make it easier for us to engage more quickly and effectively. For example, mindfulness helps us engage with our own mind, and targeted physical therapy can help us rebuild motorical skills.

• Propositional knowing improves with more cultural literacy, and fluency in understanding complex ideas.
• Procedural knowing improves with fluency in processes like typing or building, and literacy helps us solidify that knowing.
• Perspectival knowing is supported by emotional literacy, theory of mind, and fluency being able to effortlessly shift perspectives.
• Participatory Knowing builds on first-hand experience and fluency is the seamless integration of this understanding into one’s way of being.

With this approach, literacy and fluency are beyond just language. They are multi-dimensional, contextual interdependent with each other and dependent on integration. Transframing is a skill requiring perspective and participatory knowing; it helps us step out of our self-referential or set frames and therefore helps us “step out of the box” and make new connections and have new insights.

The better flow we can create, the more we can integrate, which enhances our learning and development as well as our adaptability. As an example, as new readers, we lack many of these knowings, and we have to focus (in a Kahneman System 2 kind of way) and use all our effort to read. Later on, we can read and do something else simultaneously, for example empathize and integrate what we read with who we are.

Groupness

In this book project, I’m playing with the idea to apply these ideas to collectives or organizations. What are the counterparts of these forms of knowing in an organization? To each of these kinds of knowing, there are two different levels: the individual-in-the-group and the collective level as a second-order entity. (Note that this relates to the level of integration as talked about here.)

• Propositional knowing in organizations goes to the question of how the collective manages information, internally and at the interface with its environment.
  • Indivdual level. This refers to how the organization can make sure that individuals have (and share) information. Another aspect of that is to improve the inference of existing information so we can connect the dots between existing information and infer information from it.
  • Organizational level. The key question here is: what kinds of systems and practices support the organization in holding information institutionally, not just among more individuals. I’m not aware of frameworks in this area (but extremely curious) beyond maybe ORKs and the like, but any practice that supports fluency and literacy of information management can support an organization in developing and taking in more information and therefore more opportunity for insight.
• Procedural Knowing in organizations can refer to the specific crafts and skills relevant to the organization’s work.
  • Individual level: This is the typical area of professional development. To get better in our work, all members need to improve their skills.
  • Organizational level. This is more about the collective skills. For example, a filmmaking organization will need to learn how to collaboratively make a film (while on teh individual level, it’s about how to edit a film as an individually). Some aspects of that will be specific to its context, and others will be generic, like meeting facilitation or group decision-making or governance skills like dividing up authority or responsibilities.
• Perspectival knowing in organizations relates to the ability to include different standpoints.
  • The individuals in the organization need to be able to share their unique perspectives to enrich the learning, for example by including diverse perspectives in the work. A general care about psychological safety is useful so more different perspectives surface. Other ideas are deliberate forums like World Café or Dynamic Faciliation make sure individual voices become visible to the whole system.
  • The other level is the question of how that perspectives are held institutionally. It’s unclear to me by what mechanisms we can go beyond out of a first-hand account of an individual being heard by “the organization” so that the multi-perspectival knowing is lived on the organizational level. Maybe it comes back again to governance systems that formalize and elevate individual voices (via consent). In that case, the organizational level doesn’t have perspectival knowing, it just has a system to invite and institutionally hold them. Another example may be the mechanisms of how to build a multi-stakeholder organizations.
  • (Both levels blur because people make decisions, and organizations consist of people who speak on behalf of groups.)
• Participatory knowing in organizations is about the knowledge and meaning we get by participating in something.
  • The individuals in the system need to have information from participating in the arena of the organization. For example, former engineers can be excellent consultants to other engineers because they understand the work and know what it’s like. If we have many people who are deeply involved somewhere, we can create more meaningful activities that are more directly tailored to and informed by the organization’s ecosystem. So this might apply on the level of hiring practices.
  • On a higher level, all systems that encourage a deliberate and intermeshed growth and development of an organization can be seen as belonging to this category. For example, the practice of a lean startup or disruptive and lab situations help the organization to “try on” a certain position in the market that then gives information about what it’s like to be a player in a certain market.

Learning is not something that happens in isolation. As Maria Montessori says about child education:

“The adult, the child, and the environment are a trinity. They should be considered as one. ” Maria Montessori

The 1946 London Lectures, p. 213

Now in this case, we don’t have an “adult” guiding us through the developmental process with sheltered and orderly environments tailored to our specific moment of development. As self-tranforming minds (Keegan) and collective beings, we need to seek out those prepared environments ourselves and follow a non-linear path towards more maturity.

Last update: Feb 3, 2024