In this book, I am pointing at the moon. You can see where I’m pointing and understand my words. But you are not experiencing the moon. You won’t get much from this book if you just look. I want you to jump around in your space suit, gather rocks, stick flags in the dust, and test new equipment. When I point at the moon, you see moonlight, the mother of pathos and pity. I see a bad moon rising. It’s a marvelous night for a moondance. Perhaps Jacob, from Twilight, will appear in wolf form.What’s really gonna bake your noodle is: There is no moonlight — you are seeing sunlight. The sun is in your blindspot. Knowledge is like that. It illuminates what see and what you must infer. Unfortunately, I can’t simply tell you what knowledge is … you have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You can put the book down, the story ends, you go back to work and believe whatever you want to believe. You continue reading, you stay in Wunderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.All I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.You will experience resistance from others. The Pain Train will try to push you in the wrong direction, compelled by a gravity all its own. You will be confused as you dentangle your knowing from your knowing. Resistance, you’ll discover, will be coming from inside yourself. These are all good signs.This chapter is where we name and confront potentially-unsettling myths: the Six Dominant Delusions of Unusual Size. You’ll recognize them immediately, and maybe they’ll make you gringe. That’s okay, just keep in mind, in the long run, the Pain Train is scarier.
The Notorious RBG
In 1960, Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn't find a job. She had graduated first in her class from Columbia Law School. While studying, she was the first woman to serve on two major law reviews: Harvard and Columbia. Despite that, no New York City firm would hire her. When a dean at Harvard Law School, Albert Sachs, recommended her as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, he said, “I’m not ready to hire a woman.”A decade later, Ginsberg appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States, presenting oral arguments in Frontiero v. Richardson. She won the case in an 8-1 decision. She argued six Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, winning five of them. In 1993, she became the second female Supreme Court Justice (the first was Sandra Day O'Connor). When she died in 2020, Ginserg had become a cultural icon: the Notorious RBG. She mastered the art of shaping and reshaping knowledge itself. Her legal decisions were written to be understood by everyone. For her, legal reasoning architects social systems and is inextricable from lived experience. My technology career began while RBG was a Supreme Court Justice. I’d love to say that my experience in STEM was smooth sailing. Not so much. According to a 2022 study, 91.88% of software developers worldwide are male. For the first ten years, I was often the only woman in the room.
The gender gap, ‘splains one Google engineer in 2017 memo, is biologically determined. Women are focused on feelings rather than ideas, more interested in empathizing than systemizing. Empathy should be de-emphasized, he says because “being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts”. (It’s worth mentioning here that I am a systems architect who wrote a book on systems thinking.)
Neuroticism is why women aren’t in leadership. (High-stress jobs make us anxious.) Plus, men have a higher drive for status. The memo triggered widespread public backlash and he was fired. His response included, “I've gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say.”Oh, my friend, they have the courage to say it.After giving a talk at a technology conference about software engineering, with slides showing code samples, that I wrote, three different people ask me if I am the project manager.
I join the hackathon at a conference where I am a speaker, When I enter, the organizer asks me, three times, in front of everyone, if I am in the right room. While architecting a major transformational initiative, I am told by the Head of Product that I serve no purpose. I am only in my role, he says, because the CTO likes me. I’m sitting in a pub with my team, we are having a beer with a similar engineering team from another company. The team lead is sitting across from me. “What’s your role?” he asks me. My team chuckles, they’ve seen this before. One of them says, “She’s our boss.” The team lead responds, “Oh, so are you the den mother who makes sure everybody keeps their desks neat?”
(My teammates had never seen that before.)
Now ... pause with me for a moment. This is important! I’m not telling you stories about sexism. “Right?!”, you scoff, “That certainly seems like your focus! Complaining about men, in general, and specifically, men who work in technology.”Yes, these are true stories. I can also tell you many true stories about male colleagues who have been instrumental in my success. I told you about “den mother” guy, but not how my teammates responded to him (once they got over their shock.) I didn’t need to say a thing. I can also tell you a few heartbreaking true stories about women in tech behaving badly.
Pointing at the moon, remember?
The Power of Myths
I’m telling you stories about the power, and impact, of epistemological myths: widely-held but false or misleading beliefs about what knowledge is, who possesses it, or how it works. This mythos, the powerful narrative layer humans project onto reality, constrains, builds on, and distorts knowledge. Mythopoesis
The generative human capacity to construct meaning, stories, symbols, and conceptual frameworks that shape perception, behavior, and reality — at both individual and collective scales.When we mistake mythopoesis for knowledge, we reinforce the very myths that block knowledge flow.
These myths are difficult to see because they are usually somewhat true, under some circumstances, whether by systemic design, valid science or personal preferences. A hint that you are engaging in one is: The discussion is based on a binary (right, wrong, true, false, male, female) and over-simplifies complexity. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine this: An uber nerd who loves coding, talking about event-driven systems, playing board games and reading snarky science fiction. Did your mother come to mind?My son’s mother would come to mind - it is a description of me. But the people in my stories didn’t know me. If I asked you to imagine a female nerd who loves coding and board games, it’s still unlikely you would imagine someone who looks like me. In some cases, I may have been the first female in my role they met. They were experiencing cognitive dissonance, my existence contradicted a widely-held belief.
I’m not letting den mother guy off the hook here. On the contrary, I’m not letting anyone off the hook, including and perhaps especially you, my reader friend. As knowledge workers we are responsible for our cognitive dissonance. The delusions we share are not sacrosanct simply because we agree on them, though we often treat them as if they are. You will be in situations today where you act on and reinforce epistemological myths and never question them. So will I! If you want to experience the flow of knowledge, trying to see them, when we can, is a never-ending practice. The sun in the moonlight. We decide when to act on them and when to toss them in the recycle bin.The guy who wrote the Google memo wants us to respect his assertions as innocent differences of opinions. Rather than respond to them as cultural and systemic narratives that maintain control.
I don’t need to argue. I am living, breathing disproof. You could argue that I’m an outlier. That’s statistically true. It’s also a chicken / egg discussion. Am I a statistical anomaly or simply willing to weather the storm of pushback?
Is male genetalia required for, involved in, or even directly related to ... coding skills? Regardless of your position on biological determinism, the value of empathy or the US Supreme Court ... remember that the myths we invented are not knowledge structures. Some of them might, sometimes, encourage the flow of knowledge. In those circumstances, act on them. Keeping in mind that they also shape “knowledge" into social hierarchies that are neither naturally arising nor set in stone.Consider this:What was your experience, reading this section?
The Six Dominant Delusions (of Unusual Size)
There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. -- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Roughly 70,000 years ago, humans developed a unique ability to communicate about things that don't physically exist. This cognitive revolution transformed the rate of evolutionary change. "Large-scale human cooperation," Harari said in his book Sapiens, "is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination." Concepts like timezone, language, companies, education, trading, social media, and “the planet” shape how we live, work and understand our world. Their impact is so powerful, you probably don’t remember, day to day, that humans are making all this stuff up.Every concept impacts knowledge because ... what is knowledge if not the process of making up concepts? Here are six examples of dominant delusions (of unusual size) that impact organizational knowledge flow.
- Knowledge is a Static Possession
- Knowledge is Hierarchical Authority
- Knowledge is Efficiency of Execution
- Knowledge Leadership is Command and Control
- Knowledge is Just Delivery
- Knowledge is Pure Rationality
Knowledge is a Static Possession
With great power comes great…great mountains of artifacts — not SpidermanKnowledge is not something you own. This myth confuses knowledge with inert information, inventory, data. Static assets that are stored, quantified, and controlled.
Including information you’ve stored in your mind. We conflate winning at Jeopardy!, recalling trivia at lightning speed, with knowledge. Winning at Jeopardy is impressive and requires devoted practice. But trivia is information stored and retrieved. Knowledge is information interpreted, connected, and applied in context. Facts do not generate intelligent organizations, caught up in the flow of producing and accumulating as many static assets as possible, an information hoard protected by dragons. Knowledge is the applied insight that arises by working with others, testing meaning, and adapting information in real time.Knowledge is not a possession, it's a process you participate in, shaped by time, and where you invest your energy and attention.
Knowledge is Hierarchical Authority
Help! Help! I’m being epistemologically repressed! — not Monty Python and the Holy GrailKnowledge can’t be crafted in a boardroom and handed out to teams like so much halloween candy. Knowledge isn’t a possession, therefore it can’t be owned by leadership or institutions. Social performance achievements, like advanced degrees, certifications or Instagram followers, are not (necessarily) knowledge. Neither are the roles we play in a social system, like an elected official, senior engineer or TikTok Influencer. This myth that knowledge is the same as authority generates self-reinforcing feedback loops. Authority decides who gets to speak and who should be ignored. Therefore, authority defines authority, not by the application of knowledge but by the creation of gated communities.Ironically, the myths that conflate knowledge with social hierarchies are the genesis for these myths.For example, the capacity for deep rational thinking, as well as deep feeling, is not determined by gender. Yet gender essentialism, the belief that men are rational and objective, while women are emotional and subjective, persists. As do beliefs that associate skin color, big stock portfolios, country of origin and even the avoidance of male-pattern baldness with knowledge.Knowledge is the facilitation of insight, the ability to effectively integrate different ways of knowing. Synthesizing what the CTO knows about systemic patterns with what the Head of Product knows about user behavoir with what the junior developer, building the software, knows about the code. The more we are concerned with control, the more we stifle the flow of knowledge.
Knowledge emerges through reciprocity (not rank) when people, teams, and tools exchange perspective, context, and care—giving and receiving.
Knowledge is Efficiency of Execution
There is no spoon. There is only your manager who does not bend. - not The MatrixThe myth that efficiency, throughput, and control are the ultimate markers of organizational intelligence is a construct we inherited from scientific management. This construct over-values compliance with tasks and timelines, and ignores the value of reflection, abstraction, and emergence. As a result, it produces brittle systems that optimize for immediate execution but erode adaptability, learning, and long-term value.This focus reinforces the beliefs that knowledge arises in the pure mind, a mind separate from the body, independent of physical or material influences, objective and neutral. A mind that discovers the right answers rather than better questions. Solutions that are certain, concrete, and unambiguous. Then we wonder why we are entangled in “legacy” systems, which reduced complexity through reductionism and therefore, can’t evolve as circumstances change. Knowledge arises from patterns of interaction that increase effectiveness. These patterns can only emerge when there is slack in the system.
Knowledge Leadership is Command and Control
The first rule of Knowledge Club is: You do not talk about Knowledge Club.— not Fight ClubSince the cognitive revolution, humans tell a story of Progress, knowledge as a stairway to heaven. We’ve been to the moon! We invented iPhones!That story celebrates knowledge as extraction and domination. It ignores systemic feedback loops that indicate that we are also accelerating our own extinctionFor example, humans have wiped out more than 85% of large land mammals and most of the rainforests. Each year, we add eight million tons of plastic to to the oceans. Microplastics are found in the placentas of unborn babies. We've lost over 90% of crop diversity in the last century. 75% of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. Many farmlands have less than 60 years of life left.We produce electric cars to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While factory farms and data centers emit more carbon annually than all forms of transportation. When our approach to knowledge leadership mirrors this command and control myth, we squander the knowledge inherent in impact. We inhibit our ability to learn as we progress.Without the facilitation of learning, we act as if situations are governed by stables rules and repetative results. Rules change. Patterns don’t just repeat. Feedback can be difficult to accurately apply. Complex dynamics mean that our solutions are often the cause of our problems once things change.Leadership creates the conditions in which contributions and decisions enable adaptation, based on feedback loops designed to measure systemic impact.
Knowledge is Just Delivery
Show me the knowledge! — not Jerry MaquireW. Edwards Demming said that “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.” When we act on the myth the knowledge flow dead ends a delivery, we have architected a system that does not, and can not, learn. Delivery is not design, and many of the problems we are busy solving are simply organizational blindspots that never get illuminated.Unless an organization is delivering things meant to live in a vaccuum, the lifecycle of knowledge includes the impacts and experiences that happen after delivery. If knowledge workers are not learning from those impacts and experiences ... they aren’t applying knowledge. I can build software using Javascript and host it on AWS. My approach today is signficantly different from my approach 10 years ago. Not simply because the technology has changed. I have changed. Everything valuable that I’ve learn about software has been taught by the context in which the software does it’s job. And that job has changed as the world has changed around me.
Knowledge is engineered through learning.
Knowledge is Pure Rationality
I love the smell of knowledge in the morning. — not Apocalypse NowThe myth is that there are “hard” skills and “soft” skills is disabling. Critical insight arises from diverse ways of knowing. Data, logic, and rational argument are are necessary for problem solving. So are embodied, relational and systemic ways of thinking. Our minds are one organ in a system of information gathering.Experience is a valuable asset and our knowledge heirarchies reflect that belief. But we are not climbing a linear ladder, we are on spiral pathways of experience. Knowledge is a lifelong process that includes developing tacit knowledge that we can’t easily articulate. Any wisdom we gain is shared relationally, through experiences we create for others, as well as through hard-coded solutions.
Diverse types of thinking (critical, abstract, concrete, creative, strategic) and cognitive modes (rational analysis, embodied intuition, collective sensemaking, creative storytelling, liminal thinking) generate knowledge. If you don’t believe everything you just read, that’s okay. Perhaps you will, down the road. Perhaps you will discover that I am wrong, at least about some of them.
That’s okay. My goal here is not to be right. My goal is to encourage you to try to see the sun, even when we are basking in the moonlight.Consider this:Which of the Six Dominant Delusions (of Unusual Size) impact your daily live? How?
Leaving the Fire Swamp
You can live quite happily, even thrive, in the Fire Swamp where mythopoesis is alive and well and orchestrating your daily life. There are many books that will encourage you to do just that. Somedays, the best we can do is adapt, like Wesley and Buttercup, by learning survival skills.You do have a choice, though. As individuals, teams and organizations, we don't need to rely on these rigid, deterministic delusions in order to generate intelligent, productive organizations. As a matter of fact, despite token examples of monolithic corporations that rise up, destroy their competition, and make a few people megawealthy ... human groups prosper in self-organizing, learning-driven systems where there is enough slack to adapt. As a matter of fact, that's how healthy systems work.Thank you, reader friend, for doing this hard work first. The Delusions are loud, confounding, and everywhere.
But they’re not the whole story. Each delusion an opposite Truth. Each Truth points to a path out of the Fire Swamp. That’s where we are heading next. ... follow the yellow brick road.