Working with Lore

Forever and forever—longer than the soil is brown and solid—longer than water ebbs and flows.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems,

And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality

Walt Whitman, Starting form Paumanok. 1891

The first step in understanding how teams use lore is to build a shared understanding of the word. This is no easy task. Venkatesh Rao, spent an entire series of essays exploring this topic. And Other Internet has put out two great essays on the subject. Yet, the meaning of the word remains murky. Perhaps it's no accident—an instance of functional ambiguity—the multifaceted nature of the word preserving its potency. This is fitting because lore is deeply entangled with judgment, narrative, patterns, and instruction. To understand lore will require seeing how and why people make use these qualities to accomplish goals.

When judgment, or narrative come up in the context of digital networks, the conversation often goes one of two directions. The first is to identify the lack of common context on social media, noting the confusion and contention that emerges from this kind of discourse. The second is to note that knowledge communities tend to cloister themselves on discord or within other private, semi-private settings. Often the first observation will be followed by the second. This makes sense—both statements are inherently connected, expressing the two sides of group knowledge problems.

This is the paradox of information technology. Access to information does not necessarily make it meaningful. Shared context, histories, patterns, and systems of symbols are required to provide a meaningful context that enables information to be transformed into knowledge. But these things are fragile, contextual, and often opaque. The transparency of information technology writes Haridimos Tsoukas is "illusory." ¹ He describes how complete transparency undermines the formation of what he calls expert systems, or closely attuned bodies of group knowledge, to effectively operate. He continues, writing:

An expert system cannot be made fully transparent for all to see its workings; there is no detached Olympian high ground from which it may be inspected. Transparency inevitably presupposes a subject: transparent to whom? If this question is raised, one realizes that what the outsiders see (and the significance they attach to what they see) is not the same as what the insiders see (and the significance they attach to their experiences). ¹

Information in public becomes contentious and is subject to conflicting sets of assumptions and contextualization. In contrast, expert systems utilize shared experience, context, and intent to frame information in a way that is meaningful. In other words, this shared context enables the development of group knowledge. However a trade-off is required. To promote the coherence of this shared context, a distinction is required, meaning expert systems are less permeable.

In How to Read the Internet notes Libby Marrs and Tiger Dingsun succinctly capture this phenomenon. They describe "Loss", a meme, that plays with the divergence that happens when one group begins to make a distinction that others do not. Knowledge of Loss instills both a sensitivity to the patterns that characterize the meme, while also providing knowledge about how to make use of these patterns to generate new permutations. In this way it is possible to imagine the meme as "a cloud of ancestral nodes connected by branching paths. Each branch encodes the process of copying, editing, and re-contextualizing that produces a new version of the meme." ²

Loss establishes a pattern which makes certain kinds of data meaningful. The pattern is not hard to learn, as demonstrated by popularity of the meme. Yet at the same time, what makes the meme funny is the knowledge that most people seeing the image will not draw the same significance from it. For this reason, the more remote the connection, and the more abstract the image, the better the meme becomes. And yet the meme remains entirely legible to people who can read the pattern. This is because meaning is derived from all previous encounters with examples of this pattern, drawing distinctions in the context of memory and experiences in communities of like minded individuals. Marrs and Dingsun write:

This communal meaning-making through cycles of abstraction and concretization is the oil in the machine of language itself. In conditions where more knowledge remains embodied in memory than in written archives, there’s a greater need for modular linguistic fragments that signify highly situational, nuanced meaning. ²

Often the ability to detect patterns is associated with expertise. For many areas of expertise, there is no substitute for gaining embodied experience which serves as the foundation for correctly ascribing meaning to information. In much the same way that a person learns to "diagnose" the pattern of loss in an image, so too does a medical student in residency learn to diagnose a clump of cells visualized by MRI. while the stakes are significantly higher, it is through repeated exposure to different manifestations of the pattern, in combination with observations of patient health outcomes, and input from expert practitioners that the medical student is able to derive a nuanced judgment about the observed patterns.

This gets a key characteristic of lore. Lore helps enable communication about the meaning making that provides the basis for judgment. Lore establishes patterns that aid people in ascribing significance to data and articulating that significance to others, often in contexts where memory and experience are key.

Making the right judgment can be challenging, especially when there's a lot at stake. This is one reason why organizations develop. Organizations help people navigate information problems and provide frameworks to facilitate the passage of judgment. Organizations also help to distribute the risk involved in decision making. ³

People in organizations need to be able to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, and make judgments about the risks involved that are informed by the knowledge they posses. In many organizations, this takes on a specific form. In Narrative Construction as Sensemaking: How a Central Bank Thinks, Mitchel Abolafia stresses that judgment is arrived at through the collective process of narrative craft:

Narrative construction begins with the selection and interpretation of facts. These facts are not so much given by the situation, but rather chosen from an accessible, conventionalized repertoire of indicators because they seem resonant and appropriate in the current circumstances. But selection of a conventionalized set of indicators alone is an inchoate form of explanation. These indicators offer inadequate causal accounts for the positive or negative conditions in the environment. As the ‘facts’ are assembled in the early part of the meeting, we begin to see members’ efforts to impose explanatory order on them. ⁴

He continues writing: "Narrative enables the interpreter to explain the misfit between facts and models. It clarifies discrepancies and fills in absent complexities. Most importantly, it specifies ‘tempo, duration, and pace’ of narrative elements ⁴" Narrative structure provide a method to establish agreement about what patterns are being observed. It enables people to chart connective lines between observations. It facilitates a process of establishing next steps, and finally articulates the manner in which those next steps will be undertaken.

This points to the next feature of lore. It enables communication about meaning making, providing basis for judgment, while also supplying structures and strategies to determine how and in what manner to put these judgments to work. Lore helps order insights and transform them into operationalizable pathways. Lore enables the application of patterns of meaning making, and patterns of activity.

This corresponds closely to Christopher Alexander's idea of pattern languages. ⁵ When building a cathedral, Alexander says that the structure is first built in language. The conversations of the masons and carpenters, speaking in common patterns, approach key judgments and apply these insights to the specific contexts on the challenges they face. In this way, the structure emerges out of the language of all involved. Alexander goes further. For him a pattern language not only facilitates common understanding, and decision making, they also serve to coordinate the work of people towards a shared goal

There were hundreds of people, each making his part within the whole, working, often for generations. At any given moment there was usually one master builder, who directed the overall layout... but each person in the whole had, in his mind, the same overall language. Each person executed each detail in the same general way, but but with minor differences. The master builders did not need to force design of the details down the builders' throats, because the builders themselves knew enough of the shared pattern language to make the details correctly, with their own individual flair. ⁵

Working semi-autonomously, holding a shared set of patterns enabled the builders to "run" the project in their head, acting in conjunction with the others involved in the project and approach the problem space with the same intention. When this happens the shared goals are emergent within the patterns of activity themselves.

Alexander, adds one more quality to the language of people building together. He stresses the importance of that language being grounded in a life beyond the professional world. "First to be living as a language, it must be the shared vision of a group of people, very specific to their culture, able to capture their hopes and dreams, containing many childhood memories, and special local ways of doing things, " ⁵ Alexander makes a special point to identify the fact that this language is rooted in a constellation of people—that it emerges from community.

This provides two more clues about the nature of lore. Lore enables communication about meaning making, providing basis for judgment, while also supplying structures and strategies to determine how and in what manner to put these judgments to work. Lore also give people insight into how their work connects to the work of others and situates this within a network of people, culture and cosmology.

This fits with the work of Venkatesh Rao. When describing lore, Rao writes, in its raw form, lore "is all the competing mental models for effective action going around, under conditions of imperfect knowledge. Lore is some mix of received wisdom you opt-in (or buy in) to, lazy imitation, and some original thought and ideation." ⁶ He adds to this, identifying that lore is an "aggregate of all these molecules, across all individuals." ⁶

Putting all these pieces together, it's clear what lore does, yet it still remains illusive. Lore is a nebulous linguistic landscape of aesthetics, narratives, and patterns held within the minds of many people. Lore is the substance of effective communications. It is the connective tissue of people working towards common goals. While lore can be put to work, as Alexander Pitsis writes, it has "the characteristic of belonging to the amorphous levels of human consciousness, such as sleep and dreams." ⁷

To get a handle for lore requires looking at how it is manifest in specific contexts. This does not get at the substance of raw lore itself, but rather requires looking at the artifacts that lore has produced. In an organization, these may consist of:

1. Categories. Categories are built on top of lore. These can include moral categories that shape the values of the organization. They can also include the ontologies which operate within an organization. Together these frame information and help to shape data that enters an organization, contextualizing it in a meaningful way. Categories can also describe the information architecture of an organization, framing how documents and work are organized. Similarly categories inform the creation of KPMs, defining what information is collected and how it is interpreted.
2. Origin Stories Lore informs the creation of origins stories. The events of founding an organization, or partners meeting happen on their own, but they enter the domain of lore when framed in a narrative structure that articulate the goals and aspirations of the organization, establishes patterns of work and connects to the life stories of contributors to the organization.
3. Roles Lore shapes roles, defining responsibilities, building mental models of the job to be done, and helping to coordinate the work of autonomous contributors. Lore can enable people to run the role virtually in their head, or take on another role when needed based on the patterns and narratives they have absorbed. Lore also plays a role helping people to understand the responsibilities and expectations of their position, making them more reliable within the context of the organization. Moreover, lore enables people to speak within a history of practitioners. Often this element becomes invisible, but the lore is manifest in the specific vocabulary of a domain, and sometimes emerges when justification is required, citing stories, experience, principals or thinkers which have shaped their practice.
4. Documents Lore facilitates the passage of judgment, by providing frameworks for how choices are advocated for and decided upon. Lore becomes froze in document such as memos, drawing upon categories, origin stories, common goals, roles, and histories of practice within an organization to make an argument within a specific context.

Lore can become manifest in many different ways. For instance, the categories of an organization may find expression in the channels of a discord server. Or a key point of thinking may be expressed in a meme. But to focus on the end form is to miss the dynamic process happening beneath the surface. Lore is something that happens. Its application is emergent and discursive.

Stepping into web3 lore presents two significant challenges. 1. horizontal organizations have specific coordination problems to solve which requires putting lore to work in specific ways. 2. Default to writing indicates a fundamental shift has taken place. The domain of lore has migrated from the spoken language to the written language. These two facts have huge ramifications. The next segment will explore these qualities in detail.

Footnotes

1. Tsoukas, Haridimos. Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ↩ ↩²

2. Marrs, Libby, and Tiger Dingsun. “How to Read the Internet.” https://otherinter.net/research/lore/how-to-read-the-internet/. ↩ ↩²

3. Demsetz, Harold. “The Theory of the Firm Revisited.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 4, no. 1 (1988): 141–61. ↩

4. Abolafia, Mitchel Y. “Narrative Construction as Sensemaking: How a Central Bank Thinks.” Organization Studies 31, no. 3 (March 2010): 349–67. ↩ ↩²

5. Alexander, Christopher. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Rao, Venkatesh. “Raw Lore.” https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/raw-lore. ↩ ↩²

7. Pitsis, Alexandra. The Poetic Organization. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014. ↩