Figure It Out. Stephen P. Anderson
makes this difficult, even mind-numbingly so, but it can be done. Such documents should be more understandable since they have legal implications. Yet we should also acknowledge their complexity and accept that understanding them will never be as simple as interpreting the red, yellow, and green of a traffic light.
We have grown so used to “problems of understanding” (as we’ll call them) that it can be hard to even see them as problems. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, we often go through life, accustomed to or unaware of these problems of understanding. We do not always realize the ways in which we can solve this puzzle and create understanding. We joke about incomprehensible privacy policies. We expect medical explanations to be confusing. We’re frustrated by confusing parking signs. But all these things, and more, can be understood and, more precisely, can be made understandable.
Information Is a Resource
We tend to think of information as an object, some thing, however ephemeral, that was created to inform: a newspaper story, a podcast episode, an airline ticket, a restaurant menu, a privacy policy, or a street sign telling us if, when, and where we can park. In this book, we will take a somewhat different view. We will treat information as a resource—more like wheat than bread. Wheat is a resource from which we can make bread, or the crust for a cherry pie, or paper mâché. By treating information as a resource, as raw material rather than a finished product, we give ourselves permission to transform it into a shape that aids understanding and makes us better thinkers.
“Information must be that which leads to understanding,” wrote the designer Richard Saul Wurman in the late 1980s, an era that was, even then, concerned about information overload.3 Information that failed to inform was merely data, he argued, but as data, it became a malleable material through which understanding could be created. “What constitutes information to one person may be data to another,” Wurman explained, and “if it doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t qualify for the appellation.”4
In this book, we will also take the perspective that information is understandable in relation to people and their needs. This means that information may be perfectly understandable to some people and, at the same time, perfect gobbledy-gook to others. But unlike Wurman and many others, we will avoid fretting over the distinction between information and data (as well as how information and data relate to knowledge and wisdom).5 For our purposes, there is simply information. And how understandable some information is depends on who is using it and what they need it for. The privacy policy is information to lawyers and judges since they are trained to read and write documents in that style. For the rest of us, it is also information; it’s just information in a form that befuddles us. Even so, information can be made understandable, or at least more understandable, and in the coming pages, we will explore the ways that this happens as we adapt, modify, and transform information to our needs.
To be sure, it’s infuriating when we need information to be clear and it isn’t. We should expect more from the information in our lives, especially when it comes from experts and professionals. But we should also remember that nobody can predict, or control, how information will be used. This does not absolve those who produce information as a shoddy, disorganized, and baffling mess. The diabetes chart should not endanger. The terms of service should not obfuscate. But we should neither abdicate, nor overlook, how understanding also depends on what we, as we seek to understand, bring to the table. When we have information, we always do something as we figure it out.
Consider this very book. As authors, we want to be understood. We wrote and rewrote the manuscript (ad nauseam, it often seemed) to hone our ideas and clarify our prose. Yet we also knew it would never be perfectly understandable and, more importantly, we knew that you, the reader, would do things to create your own understanding. You might mark interesting passages, perhaps with a pencil or a sticky note. You might write in the margins to say “don’t quite get it” or “Huh?!” or “great example!”6 You will, almost for sure, use a bookmark instead of remembering the current page in your head. We hope you’ll discuss the book with friends and colleagues, perhaps as part of a book club. And if you are a designer, or anyone whose work requires producing information in any form, we hope you will do all this, and more, as you wrestle with applying the concepts to your understanding projects. We wrote this book to give you information and understanding, but these pages cannot do that well if you just scan your eyes over the words. Understanding information demands more from you than consumption.
Understanding often means adjusting the balance between the information you have and the understanding you need. In some cases, this balance should be strongly tipped toward writers, graphic designers, podcasters, filmmakers, and anyone who creates information, even if it’s just a lunch menu or a yard sale poster. When you create information, you should always strive to make it understandable.
Yet this always comes with a cost, whether that cost is time and effort or learning new tools and developing better skills. It often means establishing a process for testing information with the intended audience, evaluating how well it is understood, and iterating until it reaches an acceptable level of understanding. This book, for example, was reviewed by many people (to whom we are wildly grateful) and from that we retooled much of the manuscript, followed by more reviews, editing, and revisions.
This balance also tips the other way. Understanding doesn’t happen like Neo in The Matrix; we don’t plug a cable into our brain and suddenly know Ju Jitsu. We do things all the time to create understanding, whether it’s making notes in the margins of a book, rearranging sticky notes to find a meaningful pattern, or a child asking their teacher to walk them through the steps of long division. We often need to rebalance the information in our lives, making it support our goals, align it with our abilities, and adapt it to our needs.
Information is cheap; understanding is expensive. Much of the cost rests with the people who created the information. But not all, if only because they can’t control how the information will be used. Some of the cost lies with the reader, the watcher, the listener—with us, with the person who has this information and wants to understand. We all figure things out, all the time, and in this book we will explore the many ways we create understanding from the information in our lives.
Figuring It Out
If access to information led directly to understanding, then we would illustrate the relationship as follows in Figure 1.4.
FIGURE 1.4 Access to information is sufficient where there is a simple mapping between information and understanding.
Sometimes, of course, straightforward access to information is all that’s required. When we ask narrow questions with specific answers—Who wrote Fahrenheit 451? or What time will my train arrive? or How do you pronounce Cynefin?—the information we get back, whether it comes from a book, or an app, or a person, is sufficient. There’s a simple mapping between information asked for and understanding.
But life is filled with questions that don’t have simple answers. Should I buy a solar roof? What will the changes to the tax laws mean for me? How is imitation learning different from supervised learning? The formulation of access = understanding breaks down as our information needs increase in scope and complexity. For anything more than a narrow question, understanding takes effort. There is always a cost involved, always trade-offs to be made. Someone or something must analyze and synthesize and transform the information at hand into something that will lead to understanding. Someone or something must transform the many different strands of information into something that leads to understanding. Thus, our illustration might look more like Figure 1.5.
FIGURE