Sometimes, when I coach or when I train, things seem too easy. We seem to go from one evidence to another, and yet it isn’t the case.

One way, this can happen, is when we are able to go beyond logic and “feel the logic, that is when we come into a situation in which we experience the logic. It happens when we are able to give that logic a context.

In a training, a participant shared his experience of participating in Inktober. He described it as a challenge which meant to commit to drawing a picture each day in October and post it onto social media. Actually doing it served him well, as it confronted him with his doubts about his own art and allowed him to see that the reactions to it were far away from his fears.

The shift he experienced was from understanding intellectually that his art would find interest to actually knowing it.

Something similar happens, when we share knowledge and ask participants to apply it to their own project. As they work to bring this information into their own context it starts to find meaning.

For me, this happens also when I can find analogies.

Here is one, an idea of how moving from data to ability is leveling up on our learning:

Data being a sometimes chaotic set of data points and information being data points which have been connected, we’ll notice that data and information most often are useless as long as they don’t have a context. The collection of data called “Big data” is at its beginning simply a set of data points, it only finds meaning when the data is being analyzed with a question, the resulting information has become an answer and received meaning through the question which put the data into a context. A list of everyone’s browsing data doesn’t help a lot, but investigating this data to find what device most people use to browse will help to decide which browsing tools can benefit from further development.

Knowledge develops through the learning and integration of information and data. It is a step in which data and information find meaning. It is similar to understanding something intellectually as described above.

To move to the next level and develop our ability, it is necessary to start solving the problem for which we didn’t have any answer until now. It is a step in which we create new knowledge, as the understanding described above of how one’s art is being received. What happens is that the knowledge we’ve built up is being applied for example to our own project and leads to building new knowledge, i.e. knowledge about our own project and how we can develop it when applying the learned “theory”. As in the Inktober example, we created ourselves a new experience by transforming our project with a new method.

And sometimes this experience is evident, a data point we’ve known before without connecting them with each other. We even wonder what is new about it.