Bernard Lietaer - The Future of Money - Full Book

into knowledge and handled with wisdom. We therefore need to define the subtle but critical differences between the adjacent concepts of data, information, knowledge and wisdom.

A good starting point is T.S. Eliot's question: 'Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?'

To which Harlan Cleveland adds: 'Where is the information we have lost in data?'

Data are undigested observations without context. A list of phone numbers is an example of raw data.

Information is data organised, according to some system aimed at making it retrievable and hopefully useful to someone like you. An alphabetical listing in a phone book organises the raw data of phone numbers in such a usable way.

Knowledge is information that has been internalised by you, integrated into everything else you know from experience and study, and that is therefore available to you as a basis for action in your life.

You know that this particular phone number is your friend's number, and this links it with everything else you know about that friend. An increasingly important form of knowledge is learning how to find the information that is useful to you.

Wisdom adds depth, perspective and meaning to knowledge by integrating ways of knowing other than logic and analysis, such as intuition, or the intelligence and compassion from the heart. Wisdom is by definition multi-dimensional, crossing the boundaries between different fields and ways to knowledge. It is the ultimate synthesis, which cannot be forced on or taught to someone else: