The Whole Elephant's Theories of Everything: String Theory, Software Process, Knowledge Management and the UML
For no particular reason, I've run across a driving idea in many disparate areas in the last few weeks, and find myself mulling over why this might be so. Why do people strive toward one single unified Theory of Everything?
But I was left wondering why it was so important to have one theory. Just one. For everything. And why Everything went from the universe to the atom, but seemed to skip over the earth and its inhabitants, at the tangible scale where humans live daily lives. My first and favorite definition of geography, after all, was "the study of the earth as the home of human beings." As an educator, I adored Brian Green's vision, facility, and depth. As a visual modeler, I was blown away. As a humanist, I got a kick out of the skeptics who classed string theory as a philosophy (with the implication that it bordered on religion). As a social scientist, I felt left out. The elegant Everything of the string theorists, in short, is beautiful and satisfying: but it isn't my Everything. I feel a vague guilt about this, but the feeling persists. After all, the ancient Buddhist story tells us that enlightenment means seeing the whole elephant.
They want the entire version history of a document: but they want the most current one, now, with a guarantee that no one has a newer one somewhere else. They want the Statement of Work: but only because they want to know the one contractual line item that will make a developer code something he's declined to code. They want the scope of all the bugs: but they want to see just the ones that are going to cost the most to fix, and the client's #1 top priorities, ranked in order. They want to know, for all workers and all documents: for three days of meetings, one session per hour (some concurrent), they want who must attend, which 2-3 documents they must review, what issues they must address, and what action items they must take. Only for their group. Just the trunk, the tail, the leg. But for them, it's their whole elephant.
Since I am the project's process manager, SharePoint admin, and project librarian, all this comes to me. I synchronize, I synthesize, I update and clean data, I strive for version control, I run gap analyses, I report, I estimate and forecast, I prepare agendas and minutes, and I do all this work (by and large) invisibly until someone wants its output. Now. In two sentences. Summarized. And while I've made significant strides in promoting and implementing self-service and best practices, as a "truth broker" I continue to meet with resistance to the curious idea that one person's truth may be different from another's. So, I'm a short-order cook, slicing elephant into single servings to order. Order up!
In order to know where everything is, I have to know not just where I put it, not just where person B might have put it, but where persons C-Z might think to look for it. And what's in it. And the kicker: whether the idea they're looking for really is in the thing they think it's in. That's meta-requirements gathering in spades. Why memorize the Dewey Decimal System when you can ask a librarian? They just Google me on IM or email. Obviously, to them I'm more effective than Google (!). I am the Oracle of their Theory of Everything. That's my job.
Yet drowning in data is nothing new. When I earned my master's in geography in 1987, the most famous aphorism of my advisor Yi-Fu Tuan was, in my paraphrase from memory, "The greatest fallacy of the modern age is the presumption that information (data) leads to knowledge, and that knowledge leads to wisdom." Twenty years later, we have personal computers, the Internet, Google, and the semantic web. Information management is a mainstream career. Knowledge management is a recognized discipline. What, then, might wisdom management be? I wonder if I might be doing it.
I seem to be looking for a Theory of Everything that fits my experience. I wonder about the string theorists, here, and how and why their Theory of Everything fits them. I certainly share their gut-level pleasure in an elegant solution.
Some particularly fertile and provocative search results have come from the disparate keywords of web 2.0, maps, modeling and metamodeling, knowledge management, business intelligence, process whether agile or no, metadata, and the semantic web. This article frames a problem set to guide my exploration of these terms and their relationships to a Web Theory of Everything as seen from (or by) my elephant.
"The Buddha compared this [quarrel] to the scholars and preachers holding various blind views, framed by their own ignorance, fighting among themselves, each one arguing that reality is such and such. All too often in history, revolutionary ideas and understandings by great thinkers have gone unacknowledged and even irrationally persecuted by those with different beliefs and values."
I certainly experience this in my daily work. But the moral seems a bit arrogant at times. Can all my coworkers be so unenlightened? Or perhaps could there just be lots of elephants?
Maybe, says my inner geographer, your view of the elephant is a matter of scale. Maybe the key to a Theory of Everything is to choose the right scale(s) for your given Everything. Imagine a Google Earth model of knowledge management that zooms seamlessly from the tail to the elephant to the herd. Now that would be a Model of Everything.
String Theory
At home, I watched the NOVA PBS series The Elegant Universe by Brian Green, who "explains why string theory might hold the key to unifying the four forces of nature" in a "Theory of Everything." Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm no scientist, let alone a particle physicist. But I am, or at least have been, a social scientist and an educator of environmental science and history. And a cartographer, studying and creating visual representations of data. So I adored this series, that has both phenomenal visualizations of relativity and particle physics, and a narrator with the clarity and passion that makes for great history of science.But I was left wondering why it was so important to have one theory. Just one. For everything. And why Everything went from the universe to the atom, but seemed to skip over the earth and its inhabitants, at the tangible scale where humans live daily lives. My first and favorite definition of geography, after all, was "the study of the earth as the home of human beings." As an educator, I adored Brian Green's vision, facility, and depth. As a visual modeler, I was blown away. As a humanist, I got a kick out of the skeptics who classed string theory as a philosophy (with the implication that it bordered on religion). As a social scientist, I felt left out. The elegant Everything of the string theorists, in short, is beautiful and satisfying: but it isn't my Everything. I feel a vague guilt about this, but the feeling persists. After all, the ancient Buddhist story tells us that enlightenment means seeing the whole elephant.
Software Process
At work, I experienced one of my periodic surges in requests for data, analytics, and daily advice from clients and consultants struggling to get their arms, heads, and workloads around a huge ($5M, 90-person, 2-3 year) project to build a web application for the MA Dept. of Public Health. Everyone desires a clean, current, and ordered master view: all the documents, all the defects, all the use cases, all the problem spaces, all the requirements, &c. They want and need to see the whole elephant. But then again, they don't. Each wants it all customized, data-cleaned, and reported on so they can see THEIR view of the elephant. Which is, of course, their truth.They want the entire version history of a document: but they want the most current one, now, with a guarantee that no one has a newer one somewhere else. They want the Statement of Work: but only because they want to know the one contractual line item that will make a developer code something he's declined to code. They want the scope of all the bugs: but they want to see just the ones that are going to cost the most to fix, and the client's #1 top priorities, ranked in order. They want to know, for all workers and all documents: for three days of meetings, one session per hour (some concurrent), they want who must attend, which 2-3 documents they must review, what issues they must address, and what action items they must take. Only for their group. Just the trunk, the tail, the leg. But for them, it's their whole elephant.
Since I am the project's process manager, SharePoint admin, and project librarian, all this comes to me. I synchronize, I synthesize, I update and clean data, I strive for version control, I run gap analyses, I report, I estimate and forecast, I prepare agendas and minutes, and I do all this work (by and large) invisibly until someone wants its output. Now. In two sentences. Summarized. And while I've made significant strides in promoting and implementing self-service and best practices, as a "truth broker" I continue to meet with resistance to the curious idea that one person's truth may be different from another's. So, I'm a short-order cook, slicing elephant into single servings to order. Order up!
Knowledge Management
In my head, I model the elephant. To be pragmatic, I have to have a highly abstract mental model so I can respond to all these requests for The Truth without falling into the data pit with the rest of the team. More formally, the project has several explicit models for knowledge management: a use case model, a process model, and an information architecture. They were designed at the beginning of the project, then abandoned as artifacts. Day to day, my users don't learn those models: they come to me. I am--my work is--the model. Not in the sense of a role model, heaven knows, but in the practical sense of the Dewey Decimal System.In order to know where everything is, I have to know not just where I put it, not just where person B might have put it, but where persons C-Z might think to look for it. And what's in it. And the kicker: whether the idea they're looking for really is in the thing they think it's in. That's meta-requirements gathering in spades. Why memorize the Dewey Decimal System when you can ask a librarian? They just Google me on IM or email. Obviously, to them I'm more effective than Google (!). I am the Oracle of their Theory of Everything. That's my job.
Yet drowning in data is nothing new. When I earned my master's in geography in 1987, the most famous aphorism of my advisor Yi-Fu Tuan was, in my paraphrase from memory, "The greatest fallacy of the modern age is the presumption that information (data) leads to knowledge, and that knowledge leads to wisdom." Twenty years later, we have personal computers, the Internet, Google, and the semantic web. Information management is a mainstream career. Knowledge management is a recognized discipline. What, then, might wisdom management be? I wonder if I might be doing it.
Modeling, Metamodeling, and the Unified Modeling Language
In my personal research, I surf the web looking for how other people solve these problems. Not always so that I'll find a solution I can apply (though I often do), but so as not to feel so alone, an atom of ideas in a vast universe of information. Sometimes, especially late at night, it's an intuitive, associative, gut-level search for that shock of recognition, the cosmic YES! to an elegant solution or problem expression.I seem to be looking for a Theory of Everything that fits my experience. I wonder about the string theorists, here, and how and why their Theory of Everything fits them. I certainly share their gut-level pleasure in an elegant solution.
Some particularly fertile and provocative search results have come from the disparate keywords of web 2.0, maps, modeling and metamodeling, knowledge management, business intelligence, process whether agile or no, metadata, and the semantic web. This article frames a problem set to guide my exploration of these terms and their relationships to a Web Theory of Everything as seen from (or by) my elephant.
The Whole Elephant
The moral of the Blind Men and the Elephant says that seeing the whole elephant is a Good Thing."The Buddha compared this [quarrel] to the scholars and preachers holding various blind views, framed by their own ignorance, fighting among themselves, each one arguing that reality is such and such. All too often in history, revolutionary ideas and understandings by great thinkers have gone unacknowledged and even irrationally persecuted by those with different beliefs and values."
I certainly experience this in my daily work. But the moral seems a bit arrogant at times. Can all my coworkers be so unenlightened? Or perhaps could there just be lots of elephants?
Maybe, says my inner geographer, your view of the elephant is a matter of scale. Maybe the key to a Theory of Everything is to choose the right scale(s) for your given Everything. Imagine a Google Earth model of knowledge management that zooms seamlessly from the tail to the elephant to the herd. Now that would be a Model of Everything.
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