Digital Valley

4:48 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

Valley is open to embrace inclusiveness.

Valley is quiet to express profundity.

Valley is deep to develop insight.

Valley is hidden to balance aggressiveness and humility.

Digital Valley is fluid and nourishing to flow with the abundance of wisdom.


We are moving to the deep, deep digital dynamic, hopefully, we are also moving from the Industrial Age to the Digital Era with the abundance of wisdom slowly and steadily. The purpose of Digital Valley - Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence is to guide digital leaders and professionals to understand the multidimensional digital wisdom in making fair judgments and sound decisions on the daily basis, also, inspire them to make a profound positive influence on both professional career and personal life. If knowledge is concrete, intelligence is contextual, and then wisdom is abstract and wider, with the following dimensions:
  • Creative Wisdom is about thinking beyond conventional wisdom; thinking things differently and making imagination roll into reality.
  • Strategic Wisdom is the application of knowledge and intelligence to solve problems with long term perspectives.
  • System Wisdom is the ability to think conceptually on a higher level, to see the forest for the trees.
  • Decision Wisdom has to do with the soundness of judgment. It takes wisdom, not just the intelligence to make better decisions.
  • Culture wisdom is the type of intelligence for a tolerance of ambiguity, mastery of cultural cognition, learning agility, handling complexity, and gaining empathy.
Wisdom is wider and intelligence is narrow: Wisdom is broader and abstract, and knowledge is narrow and detailed. Wisdom comes through the result of life experience or knowledge transcendence. Knowledge helps you figure out “HOW” - the practices, and wisdom guides you through “WHY” - the principles. Wisdom is the ultimate human intelligence -timeless and wordless, to unify and harmonize. Wisdom is something gained through experience, people around, self-seeking, environment, etc. Intelligence has to do with the ability to learn and retain knowledge, wisdom has to do with the ability to apply what has been learned. Wisdom overtakes intelligence. Knowledge pertains to knowing and to intelligence while wisdom has to do with the soundness of judgment. Many people do the wrong things, not because of ignorance, but because of poor judgment. It is imperative to identify what causes manifestly intelligent people so frequently make such poor decisions. Wisdom is to be understood within this context, wisdom is the ability to learn from every experience, to be able to gather small bits of information from all sources, and apply that to current or future challenges.
Wisdom is the full learning cycle: Learning, unlearning and relearning. Wisdom is not knowledge; one cannot have wisdom without knowledge, but one cannot substitute wisdom for knowledge as well. More often, learning knowledge is focused on one track, knowing more and more about less and less; but wisdom is multidimensional, open and circular. There is a hidden and growing imbalance in the human mind that results from the contrasting nature of the progressing intellect and stagnant instincts. If knowledge is gained from learning, insight is captured from re-learning, and then wisdom is a full set of learning, unlearning and relearning. Wisdom is a full awareness of the situation and applying it right. Wisdom mainly consists of having experience and yet knowing when to discard that experience, when you come across new knowledge, new frontiers to existing knowledge. Plus an open mind. Wisdom is a function of knowing what you don't know and keeps curiosity to know more. Knowledge tends to be linear, but wisdom is multidimensional.
The ultimate aim of learning knowledge is to gain wisdom: There is known known, known unknown and unknown unknown. To know what we don’t know is knowledge. We become intelligent or informative by knowing what we don’t know, and then we capture insight from the static knowledge and apply it to varying disciplines. Every bit of knowledge we acquire should either increase our confidence or better our judgment or then do both. We have limited bandwidth and hence choose to pursue knowledge that will benefit us in some way - an eminently logical choice. However, being knowledgeable shouldn’t become an obstacle to stop you from continuous learning, unlearning and relearning; or make your brain too saturated to be free or flexible; or only boost your ego, not grow your character. Ultimately the knowledge and insight can be abstracted into human wisdom which can be shared broadly and timelessly, also makes one humble enough to admit known unknown and unknown unknown.
Chapter 1 Creative wisdom: Creativity is a higher level of thinking which could leads to wisdom because it often imposes a higher cognitive load as you think 'harder' and consciously use different kinds of thought processes and thinking tools like association, perspective shifting, opposites, etc., when you are wanting to come up with a creative solution to a challenge. A certain mental, psychological and conditional chemistry is needed to break-away from thoughts that others have thought about. So creativity appears to be beyond the conventional thinking - where you have left the confines of other people's thoughts. Creativity is context - dependent, so it could mean a type of contextual intelligence.
Chapter 2 Strategic wisdom: Strategic Thinking is the ability to think on a temporal plane. Strategic Thinking is about where you are, where you want to be, identify the gap and create the alternate approaches to anticipate and provide solutions. Strategic Thinking is more about making decisions directly towards achieving defined outcomes as a purposive activity, so it is the “keep the end in mind” thought process. It is the wisdom because the strategy is often the guide and roadmap to navigate us in the right direction.
Chapter 3 System Wisdom: Systems Thinking is a way of understanding complexity. Systems Thinking by definition is a cognitive thinking process, a profound thinking process to embrace holism and nonlinearity. Systems Thinking is a type of synthetic thinking with a complex mix of several components, typically it includes: Dynamic Thinking (positioning your issue as part of a pattern of behavior that has developed over time); Scientific Thinking (using models to test hypotheses and discard falsehoods, not just to ascertain ‘the truth’); Cause-effective Thinking (constructing a model to explain how the problem behavior arises); ‘Forest’ Thinking (seeing the ‘big picture’ and taking a more holistic view of that system); Analytical Thinking (analyzing how things actually work, the cause and effect relationships), and Quantitative’ Thinking: (quantifying not just the hard data but also the soft variables that are operating in the system).
Chapter 4 Decision wisdom: The majority of leaders and professionals spend a significant amount of time on making large or small decisions in work and life. It takes wisdom (and often collective wisdom) to make effective decisions. There is fuzziness in the decision because there is fuzziness in conflicting criteria. At the digital era, making data-based decisions means to leverage analytical thinking, advanced analytic tools, the human’s intuition, and add the “wisdom” in the decision process to improve the overall effectiveness of decision making.
Chapter 5 Culture wisdom: The definition of culture is “the mindsets, attitudes, feelings, values, and behaviors that characterize and inform a group and its members.” From a business perspective, culture is the way how we think and do things around here, it is the collective mindset; with the trend of digitalization and globalization, culture wisdom is the type of intelligence for tolerance of ambiguity, a set of capabilities for cultural cognition, learning agility, handling complexity, communicating virtually, and working across cultures with flexibility. Therefore, culture intelligence becomes more critical for digital leaders and professional to work in today’s multi-generational, multicultural and multi-devicing work environment, it is the wisdom to bring understanding and workforce harmony.

Cleverness is not wisdom. -Euripides Wisdom is on how to dig into root cause or hunt for essentials; wisdom is the guide for the purpose, progress, and change the world for better. The power of wisdom overcomes the barriers; the shallow of cleverness creates new problems. Wisdom is multi-dimensional pursuit: cleverness is a single layer of understanding; wisdom is a perception, cleverness is what you see; it’s not what you see matters, it’s what you perceive. Wisdom speaks of nature; cleverness appreciates artifact; wisdom is a substance, and cleverness is a style. Leadership is an influence, influence is from wisdom.




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