Premise
I was introduced to John Vervaeke and his work by the inimitable Matt Church who leads the Thought Leaders Business School and is based in Australia.
John is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He says that there are four different ways we can know things, which he calls the 4P’s of Knowing.
These are about the manners in which and the mechanisms of knowing something rather than the content of the knowledge itself or how we know about something rather than what we know of.
The four ways (4P’s) are Propositional, Procedural, Perspectival and Participatory knowing.
Here is John explaining these ways of knowing.
Propositional Knowing
Propositional knowing is all about knowing “that”. For example, we know that the capital of Russia is Moscow. We know that Narendra Modi is an Indian politician and is the current prime minister of India.
There is no ambiguity. There is no potential of debate with this kind of knowledge. It is common knowledge. We can acquire this kind of knowledge through reading and learning from others who have gone before us.
Procedural Knowing
Procedural knowing all about knowing “how to”. For example, we know how to manufacture a car. We know how to go from Singapore to India. Knowing how to run a brainstorming session or a meeting is procedural knowledge.
Usually, there could be many ways to do something. However, there could also be what we can call standard operating process to do something, which is also procedural knowledge. We can acquire this kind of knowledge by watching someone do this and or by improvising the same using experiments.
Perspectival Knowing
Perspectival knowing is all about situational awareness or knowing from someone’s perspective. For example, How does it feel to be an Indian, Ukrainian or an Israeli today or What does the situation look like in Gaza? It could also be about what does work for our employees when every one of them is paired with an AI assistant?
To acquire this kind of knowledge, we need to be empathetic and be curious about other’s experiences. There is no right or wrong in this kind of knowledge. It is all about looking from a specific point of view and is generated from within us.
Participatory Knowing
Participatory knowing is all about the knowledge we gain from participating in a given situation. This is about what roles and identities that we take on and assign to others and the resulting interactions.
We gain this knowledge through these interactions we the people in the contexts within which we are operating in. This kind of knowledge emerges through the interactions. We will never know this until the interactions happen.
Conclusion
As leaders, we are better off if we know something through all these four ways of knowing. The more ways we employ in getting to know about something, the better is the depth of our understanding.
If we need to know something in order to make critical decisions or choices, more ways we know of it, the better will be the inputs for our decision.
For example, we are better off if we know the facts about something (Propositional), how it came about to be (Procedural), how do the stakeholders see and feel about this (perspectival) and what can we learn by interacting with them (participatory).
Each one of us tends to have a preference to one or two of these ways of knowing and tend to always revert to them when put under stress.
If we learn to use all the 4 ways of knowing when not under stress, we would be better prepared to use them when put under stress.
So, let’s become aware of our default way of knowing and become intentional about knowing things through the other ways.
