Information

The picture that I designed to illustrate the component of Information symbolised my own idea that relevant facts can help us to lift our independent thinking up. ‘Enough’ facts act as a scaffold that root us to reality without limiting our creativity or our sense of possibility. Too little information could thwart our efforts to think because the foundation of the structure would not be sound. Too much information could be overwhelming and limit us in different ways, leaving no room for us to build. Scaffolding can also be reshaped or removed!

I put this image together a few years ago and although it still represents Information well on those levels, the ‘official’ definition has changed in that time from ‘Supplying facts, dismantling denial’ to ‘Supplying facts, recognising social context, dismantling denial’ and most recently to ‘Absorbing all the relevant facts’. Lou and I found ourselves discussing the changes in this month’s video dialogue, where we had to check in with the latest facts, live, as they unfolded!

In a Thinking Environment the commitment to independent thinking and the welcoming of difference ensures that each component evolves in the light of the people who practice it, teach it and live it. Nobody sits complacently imagining that this is a tick box exercise, or that they know all that there is to know about the framework. The constant is that it is always a voyage of discovery through experience, observation and reflection. So, of course, Information has been back under Nancy Kline’s microscope. She has scrutinised her learnings and considered all of her conversations with the wider Thinking Environment community about their observations. The truth of Information has been unpacked, tested and redefined. Assumptions have been unearthed, examined and ‘is it true?’ has been asked many times.

So, what about Information in the broadest sense, beyond the Thinking Environment? It has really made me think again about how important it is to consider what information is, where we get it from and how we interrogate the truth of it. And, ultimately, how we can chase down the incomplete or faulty information that holds us back or gets in our way.

Let’s face it, this world that we live in today has more information flying around than it ever has before. Technology has revolutionised the way that we can investigate, analyse, access and communicate information. It has also fuelled a surge in ‘fake news’ and the general manipulation of facts to encourage us to buy into beliefs, things and trends. It’s hard to trust that anything is actually fact anymore.

In contrast, back in the day, I had limited ways to find things out, a couple of TV channels, Radio 4, teachers and text books, and of course the wisdom of my parents. Were facts easier to trust and rely on? I don’t honestly think so. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was considered a great source of general information, was only able to draw on the knowledge at the time of print, and of course it was written and edited through the lens of the people who gathered the evidence and fitted it into each volume.

My biggest fact source in my formative years was actually the database of my parents’ knowledge, behaviour and actions. My first encounters with the information about who I was and how the world worked. And how many of those facts and ‘truths’ I have had to unlearn?!

It turns out that so many of my ‘absorbed relevant facts’ were potentially faulty from the very start … and I’d like to avoid gathering any more.

I decided to look on the internet (ironically) to define what facts were a bit more. I found some definitions and some ideas of the different kinds of information that we come across. Then I thought it through a bit more for myself so that I could digest the ideas that I had come across, along with things that I ‘knew’ already. Finally, I filtered it all down to some kind of essential key points to try to convey to you what I had discovered. It turned out that I came up with more questions than facts. To be fair they were questions that could possibly help to test the truth of facts.

How reliable are the sources?
Are they subjective or objective?
Are they assumptions rather than facts?
Are they stopping me from thinking, feeling, saying or doing something that I think is important?
Are they true or could there be other possibilities?

I suppose the thing that I found myself intrigued to discover was that these questions that I arrived at are not so far from some that are very familiar already! They resonate with the questions in the Thinking Environment framework, the ones that have already been ‘discovered’ and seem to mirror the way that we think things through. Perhaps this only because I have worked with it for many years now and it is familiar and hard to see past? Or is it genuinely true that they are questions that are fundamental to the process that we are all innately capable of, because we are a curious species and they help us to stay safe, learn and grow? We shall see!

There may of course be lots of other great questions that could help us to get to the relevant true facts that will help us to think things through in a more informed way. At this point in time, with the information that I currently believe to be true, my freshest thinking is that we just need to keep asking questions, approaching everything with curiosity, and regularly putting things to the test, because information is growing, changing and adapting too.