Imagination is more important than knowledge

I like simple statements that communicate a lot of meaning. The other day, I thought about the distinction between these two:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Einstein)

We can know more than we can tell. (Polanyi)

There is actually no distinction. These two mean one and the same thing. They both refer to how people, if knowing what they know, can use this knowledge, for good or not so good things. Both of these refer to creativity that people are able to express through being in touch with their tacit knowledge.

People, all people, even the statisticians, the accountants, the programmers, i.e., all those who you would think are not creative (but this is just my presumption), ARE creative. YOU ARE CREATIVE. We are all able to connect experiences and memories in ways that are relevant to here and now. Some are doing it pretty well, others do not know how but are trying, others are just on different wavelenghts. The key is to see through complexity and reduce it to simplicity for everyone, or just those whom we are targeting, to understand.

Talking about creativity, I recently read in a book (”The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman) that in today’s increasing digitization and over-growing complexity of information, what truly matters, and increasingly so, is the ability to explain. ‘The Great Explainers’, I think this was the name of the chapter. Ability to see through the complexity and reduce it to simplicity. For me, this is creativity per se. Ability to pin it all down in a flash and then just let it all go. Ability to bring tacit and explicit together in an instant and then be the string of those or what you have chosen.

This is what I am trying to do in this blog. See through complexity and reduce to simplicity for the purpose of (hopefully) knowing more about how to be in the world where we are now and how to create conditions for us to live and work in a world more ethical, more participatory, more our own world and not somebody else’s.

What may not change, ever, is our need to communicate, relate to each other, to our world and environment, and keep things simple for quick and complelling communication. Simple in the sense of being focused on the issues and not on the process in order to enable the process to take the shape it needs to take. Simple in these sense of not thinking about ourselves but rather the people we want to address.

I guess this is a buddist way of looking at things?