Barry Jones, author of Labor’s Knowledge Nation and creator of the so-called ‘spaghetti’ diagram, answers his critics.
In the Knowledge Nation Task Force Report the now famous diagram, labelled Figure 1: The complex interactions between the elements of the Knowledge Nation appears on page 9.
The diagram has become a matter of controversy, diverting commentators from the content of the Report itself, much to my regret. It has also led to personal abuse of its creator – namely, me. The central theme of the critics has been to say: “We can’t handle complexity and the report should have ignored it.”
It is essentially a graphic illustration of the text (largely ignored) set out on the same page above the diagram.
It might have been better, indeed, if Bruce Petty had designed the diagram, suggesting dynamic processes, rather than static ones.
The whole fracas raises the question: If the diagram had been omitted (as it could well have been), what would the commentators have written about?
The diagram evolved over several months. When I talked about Knowledge Nation to various groups, schools, service clubs, public meetings or ALP branches, I often used a simplified version, either on white board, black board or overhead projection.
There were a variety of responses. Some groups thought it was overcomplicated and confusing. One observer suggested that, with its circles and lines, it looked like an Aboriginal bark painting. But generally the response was favourable, especially with young people.
So I became committed to the diagram as a useful teaching tool.
Kim Beazley’s office was always anxious that the diagram would become the story and that it might short circuit serious discussion about the report. I thought this was an overanxious reaction and that press commentators would be far more sophisticated than they feared.
They were right, and I was wrong.
Nevertheless, the diagram makes several important points – and it would repay examination for several minutes.
1. The diagram is a diagrammatic representation of complexity, but pointing out how the complexity can be integrated. As it turned out, the challenge is hard to ignore. Our nation, as society and economy, is marked by extremely complex interactions involving the generation and transfer of knowledge. People who suffer from knowledge deficits, because of remoteness, lack of access, limited language skills or poverty, are seriously disadvantaged. In the current situation where the control of, or access to, Information is in a very few hands (Murdoch, Packer, Stokes, the Fairfax group) means that the Information Revolution actually strengthens the powerful, at the expense of the weak. I speculated about this in Sleepers, Wake! in 1982. Not one commentator has referred to the concentration of media power. If they obsess on the format of the diagram, what more needs to be written?
2. Knowledge Nation is the central concept – the area in which diverse knowledge-based activities and transactions meet, involving individuals, industry or professional groups, and Government itself.
3. Government plays an important role in Knowledge Nation, as a catalyst, generator, provider and user of knowledge, but it is not central. The facile argument that Knowledge Nation would be an instrument of Big Government, Big Spending and the Command Economy, misses our argument completely. If individuals were empowered by their use of knowledge, the role of government might actually contract.
4. Before the Report was published, commentators made sweeping assumptions about what Knowledge Nation would be about. It was often assumed that Knowledge Nation = Education. Well, education is of major importance to Knowledge Nation, but it is only one element, although a central one. Other writers, depending on their areas of expertise, assumed that Knowledge Nation = the generation of new industries, especially in IT and biotechnology. Well, yes, both propositions are true, but they are only elements. Others hoped, at least, that Knowledge Nation = preserving our great national institutions, such as the ABC, CSIRO, the Australia Council, and enhancing creativity. That is also true. Another view was that we must use knowledge resources to protect the environment and heritage. Indeed all the propositions are correect. The diagram attempts to make all those points.
5. A central element in our thinking involved the concepts of ‘silos’ and ‘linkages’. Perhaps it might have been better if the elipses in the diagram had been circles because that might have suggested the silos in which we store much of the knowledge we have generated. The lines, with arrows at both ends, indicate dynamic, two-way linkages. Task Force members concluded in the Report that Australia already has most of the building blocks to be a Knowledge Nation, but that we are underperforming badly. The main reason is that the linkages or connections are very weak. We need more dynamic connections for effective synergy. What are the linkages? They are ways of communicating, negotiating and integrating. We thought this would be a relatively inexpensive process – indeed that the returns from existing expenditure would be far higher. There is much unnecessary duplication of effort where parallel agencies operate in competition with each other – and this is counterproductive, expensive and wasteful. We were also enthusiastic about the concept of a National Inventory or National Data Bank (whatever called) which would link together information already collected about physical and human resources – including health, education, environmental, and make it freely available to citizens and governments alike.
Data alone does not produce knowledge, let alone wisdom. It is how we make connections. The diagram is an illustration of the central theme ‘Connecting the nation’.
I would have welcomed some assistance from professional designers, to improve the diagram. Perhaps somebody could offer to design it as a moving, dynamic set of computer images. But that still would not be appropriate for the print medium, on which most citizens rely.
On reflection, it might have been better for the elipses to have been grouped differently. For example, schools, universities, TAFE/Learning, ‘Third Age’ Lifelong Learning, should probably have been next to each other. So should ABC/Media, Communications IT and Print. There should have been a line linking CSIRO and Trade/Commerce. Libraries, Museums and Galleries should have had an elipse of their own.
But these are all trivial points – or, at least, I thought they were trivial. I doubt if they would satisfy my attackers!