Coherent, and Still Not Knowing
We take in more than we can make sense of. Coherence is often all we have time for, and it feels exactly like knowing.
In my last post, a young midfielder stopped defending because her story made perfect sense. Her story is not only about soccer. It is about how all of us think now.
More than we can process
Every day we take in more than we have time to understand. Clips, scores, messages, headlines, opinions. Each one arrives before we have finished with the last.
When information comes that fast, the mind does what it has always done. It keeps what seems important, fills in the gaps, and builds a story that holds together. That story is coherence. It lets us act.
The problem is that coherence feels exactly like understanding. A story that holds together does not announce what it left out. So the faster we consume, the more coherent we feel, and the less we notice what we do not know.
Three people, one pattern
The athlete watches highlight clips of better players and concludes she is behind. The story holds together. It leaves out that clips show ten seconds of a ninety-minute game.
The coach checks the stats after every match and changes the plan each week. The story holds together. It leaves out that development is measured in years, not weekends.
The parent reads one bad report and decides the season is lost. The story holds together. It leaves out where the player was six months ago.
None of them is careless. Each of them is coherent. And each of them is missing something important.
What gets lost
Coherence answers one question: what happened? Meaning needs two more.
Purpose: where is this leading? Not the next result, the direction.
Significance: why does it matter? To me, not only to the scoreboard.
These two take time. They do not arrive with the information. They have to be built, and the speed of the information we consume leaves almost no time to build them. So we end up full of coherent stories, and short of meaning.
The answer is not more information
More data, more clips and more opinions only make the stories tighter. What helps is time and a habit.
The habit is four questions after anything important:
What happened?
Where is it leading?
Why does it matter?
What did I leave out?
The last question is the one that keeps a story open. It does not make us know everything. It makes us aware of what we don't.
The time is the harder part. In our work, it is built in: the athlete writes first, then we look at the data together, then we choose the best way for now. Protected time to make sense, after every game and not only after a crisis.
More information isn't the answer. Meaning is.
