Money, Materials and Methods

Feb 05 2010

Money, Materials and Methods

Post #11 in a series seeking to answer "What is Understanding made of?"

“First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.”
- Aristotle

In all my previous posts, I have talked about aspects of understanding that can be explored and even counted, but rarely touched. In this post I want to talk about the components of understanding that are physical in nature or that upon implementation take a physical form, for what we build our understanding with and how we implement it has a direct impact on how useful any of it will be.

When we build something, we mostly take things we have experience with and tie them together to create something entirely different. Beautiful dresses, a new type of aircraft, a new business strategy and execution plan… the success of each are all dependent not just on how they are designed, but also on what they are constructed with and what it takes to hold them together.

Utilizing all available resources may be tempting, but looking at our ability to use any of it may be more important. As CEO Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase has said, “I’d rather have a mediocre strategy that is well executed than a brilliant strategy executed poorly.” In other words, need, form, function and usability all better mesh if we don’t want our understanding to fail us.

But failure happens a lot. When our understanding doesn’t provide the comfort we desire or correct the social ills we abhor, we rarely question our own understanding’s construction or execution. Instead we get angry, try to ignore the failures, or blame somebody or something else for the failure. It is possible that all we really need to do is examine a little more closely those materials of construction and the practices used to meld them, and we may find out that our understanding has been thwarted or derailed by quality problems at the construction and implementation level, not the design level. But even if that is the case, we should seriously consider changing the design to accommodate the materials and methods that are actually available. If we don’t, we’ll likely fail again.

For example I have heard complaints throughout my life that economic models like laissez-faire capitalism and dictator-controlled socialism have never been allowed to work as designed because they just haven’t been implemented correctly. My point is that those who do the implementing may not have it in their nature to implement either extreme faithfully. Perhaps that is why modern governments seem to implement a mix of the two economic models in lieu of one over the other, because there is not enough money, materials, methods or committed people available to make either extreme a successful reality.