Three articles on meaning making

Wendell Berry has died. Patti Digh's was the first obituary I saw this morning. And so here is her brilliance, as she offers a characteristic take on his work and legacy:

Most of us are not good at staying. We are trained for leaving—for the bigger market, the better opportunity, the next thing, the bright lights. Berry’s work is a patient argument that this training has cost us something we can barely name anymore: the knowledge that comes only from affection, and the affection that comes only from time. You cannot love a place in general. You can only love it in particular—this hillside, this river, this church pew where the same men have held court about the weather for thirty years.

My friend Scott has run a series of 20 Questions posts for years now, and today he released an edition with Andrea Jones-Rooy, a data scientist and circus performer.  She has a solid take on why numbers are less important than what they mean:

Question 6: Where do you feel the general populace's level of data understanding tends to exist? Where do you feel data conversations tend to leave people lost?

Oh man this is a mega wonderful question and is maybe at the core of my VERY BEING!

Of course there's a ton of variation on this, but extremely generally speaking, I think most people without (much) formal training in data or statistics — or who haven't interacted with data training recently — tend to overly focus on specific numbers rather than broader trends or the actual context or validity of the number. As in, we get very sucked into conversations about whether a number is 2.66 or 2.67 and we lose sight of whether that number is meaningfully different from, say, the same value in a previous time period or whether we are even capturing the thing we are trying to understand in the first place.

For example, most large companies run engagement surveys. Sometimes they ask me to come in and help them analyze them — usually I find that when we present results even to the top level leaders, they get all wound up about ohhhh it's 5.6, how do you know it's not 5.5? Or 5.7? And is it statistically significant?

When what they really should be asking is:
_- Is this value meaningfully different from other times we've conducted similar surveys? Why or why not? How might we probe which of our plausible explanations are likely correct?
__- Is this value a number that I, as a leader of a company, am happy with? (Statistical significance tends to be less interesting to me, I recommend substantive significance)
_– Do I really think I'm measuring "engagement" at my company? Why or why not?

I'm in the process of preparing a proposal for a client, and making the case that the strategic question is more strategically important than the survey answer seems self-evident, but the seduction of numbers works hard against that.

I miss Bernie DeKoven.  I had the chance to meet him once at the Applied Improv Network Conference in San Francisco.  We played games. His website DeepFun, which is still up, was an endless source of inspiration to me when I was raising my kids. It also inspired teaching activities and work with clients. Today in Aeon is a lovely article exploring the vast territory about why play matters for it's own sake: 

Simply put: adults need play as desperately as children do – a zone where inner life meets outer materiality and something unpredictable emerges. The Greeks, of course, had a term for this. Aristotle’s medieval fanboy Thomas Aquinas identified eutrapelia, the habit of knowing when and how to play well, as a genuine and discrete virtue. A person who never plays is as disordered as one who never works. I’m not talking about ‘work-life balance’, an exhausted metaphor that still treats play as recovery time for the next productive thing. To practise the virtue of eutrapelia means that a good life requires play. You don’t earn it. You practise it, daily.

If the writer Justin Neuman was sitting with Bernie right now trying to explain this, I'm sure old Blue would have invited him to make it into a game instead. Blogging is play for me. Finding neat little bits and pieces, letting them sit and sharing them with you.  Thanks for playing along.