TurningAnswersIntoStories

My Goal: Turning Answers Into Stories

Answers are only valuable to the degree that they are available to those with the motivating questions. Without proper organization the plethora of answers made available my modern communications tend to hide eachother, making it hard to rediscover answers when you need them. I see the crucial challenge being arranging for answer-organizing structures that scale - where everyone participating in the generation and transmission of answers situates them in ways sensible to themselves and to others with similar or related questions. For want of a more precise way to express it, i am referring to these structures as stories, and the holy grail as processes for promoting their construction, "turning answers into stories".

A theme i'm coming to consider crucial is "seeing the forest for the trees". On one hand, people need to focus in on specific aspects of a situation in order to take action - we have to work on manageable pieces at a time. However, in order to work on the right thing in the first place, and produce something that others (or we, ourselves, as time passes) can use and integrate with their efforts, we have to connect the results with other pieces of the world - we have to integrate, and document. Generally, someone has to put the smaller pieces into larger contexts.

I believe that the increased communications and synergy computers increases the amount that our efforts can - and will - have interplay with the efforts of others. We can build upon and incoporate others work, and the ability for our own work to be integrated with that of others takes higher priority, as that integration is increasingly possible and productive. What this implies to me is greater importance in being able to see how things fit together in the larger picture.