This is Shit, Sherlock. No! This is Information, Watson.

There have been a lot of ‘shite’ references on LinkedIn lately. From Daragh O Brien ’s “The Enshittening of Knowledge” to .Rogier Werschkull Werschkull’s ‘Calling Data Bullshit’ interview with Joe Reis Reis and Matt Housley, "scatt is where it’s at" these past few weeks.

I want to continue the trend but in a slightly different way. In their excellent book, “The Neo-Generalist” authors Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin identify a process of detection – and famous ‘detectives’ like Sherlock Holmes, Alan Turing, Marie Curie that is consistent with my view that Data is captured Information using encoding patterns of Language.

People formulating answers follow a three-phase often ‘looped’ approach:

·????????They Seek existing knowledge in various recorded and unrecorded forms

·????????They Synthesize new hypothesis, information, and conclusions

·????????They Share their new knowledge in various recorded and unrecorded forms

In Chapter 9, one of the illustrations of this technique comes in the form of one Susy Paisley-Day a conservationist studying the wanderings of the Spectacled Bear in Bolivia. She has an extensive understanding of their diet and their general habitat through research, but wants to know more about the ecosystems they travel in and more specifically how human development is affecting their range.

To acquire the information she wants, she needs to do two things. The first is to collar the bears electronically. The second is to connect what she knows about their omnivorous diet to new information about where the bears are finding food. Where the bears find food is where Susy will find the bears. Collar the bears to acquire more information. Discuss, record, and publish her findings.

The lynchpin in her journey is scatt: Spectacled Bear poop. Where the bears ‘shit in the woods’ is not where they eat, however, Information expressed ad scatt will point Susy in the right direction. Part of her ‘seeking’ phase is recording her observations as Data.

So, to summarize ‘Seeking’ is at once searching for relevant knowledge while acquiring new information. ‘Sense-making’ is about synthesizing new information, and ‘Sharing’ is recording that new understanding as Data and/or Stories.

And that’s no shit, Sherlock.