Last night I enjoyed chatting with folks at the Rose-Hulman sesquicentennial celebration.

I met Jim Grey whose blogs I’ve read frequently.

We were talking about value in engineering etc. leadership, good judgment, and good decision-making.

The title of this post is a large part of my perspective. One of my goals is to always be moving myself and others:

from knowledge worker to wisdom worker

Being a wisdom worker can entail a lot of things. But for me, it’s considering things like:

  • how easy is this choice to adopt or adapt to?
  • does this scale?
  • can we maintain this easily?
  • what are the unintended or knock-on effects?
  • what are the likely failure modes?
  • how would we tell if this was effective/successful?

Knowledge, information, data: they sometimes help. They can provide answers to questions.

Wisdom, challenges, lessons: these are what help us come up with the most important questions to consider and detect bad answers.

Especially in a world where people have more and more ways and places to quickly get (all-too-often low quality) answers, it becomes more important to be able to ask the right questions, and interrogate the results when they don’t pass the sniff test.

How are you moving from knowledge worker to wisdom worker?