🪴 Quartz 4.0

Misunderstanding is Value Creation

Dec 17, 20182 min read

  • Readers often misunderstand what the author is trying to say

  • But this is not a “mistake” or “point deduction” as in a school test.

  • The phenomenon that the concept that the reader reconstructs from a list of letters on paper is not equal to that of the author.

    • This kind of “reconstructing a new form” is not something authors can do.

  • In other words, misunderstanding and communicating that misunderstanding to the author is a productive activity.

  • Conversely, someone who understands 100% of what the author is trying to say without misunderstanding has not yet done any Value Creation at that point

  • There is a negative bias in the expression “misunderstanding.

    • When there is a discrepancy between the author’s understanding and the reader’s understanding, that alone does not make either right
    • The author has invested more time on the subject than the reader and is more likely to have arrived at useful knowledge
    • On the other hand, this is not true if the reader has knowledge that the author does not have - experience is different for each person.
    • Thought experiment:.
      • Author who read programming books for 3 years, did not write a single line of programming, and put it all together
      • Readers with one year of programming experience

  • Need measures on the author’s side

    • When you observe someone who has interpreted something differently from what you intended to express, instead of cutting them off and saying, “That’s a misunderstanding.
    • I wonder if there is something useful in that interpretation, or something else.

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/誤解は価値創造 using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.

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