The Four Levels of Business Knowledge
While I was looking over my notes of my conversation with Ryan Kubacki, president of the sales consulting firm Holden International, I ran across this neat little definition of the "knowledge continuum." According to Ryan, there are four levels of business knowledge:
- Level 1: Data. This consists of points in a domain, the sort of material that's typically provided as the result of searching the Internet or various data bases.
- Level 2: Information. At this level, the data has context and purpose. The data points make sense in relation to each other and begin to tell a simple story.
- Level 3: Insight. Human creativity begins to come into play. A human understands and decides what's important and what the information actually means.
- Level 4: Wisdom. Human creativity is now predominant. Based upon experience and insight, the human decides what needs to be done to accomplish a goal.
But seriously, I think this is a clever model that maps out to how to think about all the data sources in your life. The trick is to moving yourself, your career and your opportunities up to level 4 (and avoid level 5 at all costs!).
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