Why value Warm Data? – inviting our humanity back to the table. Synergistic Accounting Part 6.
Warm Data – information that is alive,” emphasising relationships and the contextual webbing between various elements (culture, technology, ecology). Transcontextual: It looks across multiple contexts simultaneously, acknowledging that meaning emerges from the interplay of relationships. It is a term created by Nora Bateson.
Without warm data, we exist in a world of the rational, linear, scientific ….empty of emotion, love, beauty, great art, design, music.
How do we put a dollar price on these?
How do you reduce to a dollar value the experience of seeing a work of art that moves you from the mundane to awe? Or from the simple joys of a family ritual of all together for a celebratory dinner time? For the punctuation points in life, celebrating birth, naming, graduation, marriage and death?
Warm Data is the glue that holds societies and communities together. Warm Data allows membership and belonging. It restores humanity. It keeps us humble.
Warm Data as custom is a way of doing or engaging. It is customary in Australia, for example, to celebrate Christmas playing beach cricket, eating seafood or ham, followed by either Pavlova or Plum Pudding. It is also customary in Australia not to allow people to get ‘too big for their boots.’ We call that the tall poppy syndrome.
Warm Data as custom may also be applied to techniques of delivery. An athlete may have a ritual of breathing or visualisation before each performance. A master chef may hold in reverence all of the ingredients and the process of cooking.
I wrote an article about 6 years ago on reverence as a business practice. (revised) What I know to be true is that when you experience a business that reveres their product or service delivery and their people and customers, the effect is felt in multiple ways. I also know that in our world of fast food, fast money, fast love…people are yearning for the sacred. Does the sacred have a price tag?
When we enter into the domains of others, whether that be their homes, their countries, or their workplaces, respect for others allows a sensitivity to what may not feel comfortable or familiar to you. It is through observation, the willingness to accept and not impose, that we may learn a rich dimension of another’s culture and Warm Data that adds to our own life experience. This is what lives in the word, to be a guest.
As colonial invaders, we had little regard for this. There was our way, period. We did not value the thousands of years of heritable wisdom that preceded our domination. And in being so arrogant, we missed out on the richness that we are only now beginning to recognise. Not to mention the harm we have done to people, land, communities, and language.
Valuing Warm Data invites a deeper relationship with the very threads that make us human.
To read Part 2. What is matter?
Money – but one element of six to consider in Synergistic Accounting – Part 3.
Knowledge and the pain of being discounted for your knowledge – Synergistic Accounting Part 4.
Tools and Artefacts – Synergistic Accounting Part 5.
Why value Warm Data? – inviting our humanity back to the table. Synergistic Accounting Part 6.
Well being – evidence of systems and humanity working – Synergistic Accounting Part 7
Deploying Synergistic Accounting – Part 8
Photo credit : Brett Davies via Compfight
