Is there a more important, fundamental and useful skill than interpretation? How many people understand this importance and dedicate much of their (brain) energy into optimizing their interpretation skill?
Starting on the level of computers – drawing from some notes I made for my lectures on Environmental Informatics, we can compare and contrast syntactic interoperability and semantic interoperability – extending it to human communications (not necessarily human-to-human linguistics). The syntactic type simply requires channels for communications and flow in those channels. The semantic type extends this by requiring that the information exchange have unambiguous meaning. Human-computer interaction is largely semantic, although the semantic weight is more on the programming end (have to follow the computer language reference model), and there is significant syntactic weight on the user end (ie, the computer program doesn’t check whether you understood the information).
There are various human-to-human interpretation frameworks we can also consider. At the most familiar level, there is communication between different languages or dialects – we train ourselves to become familiar with the syntax, and a small portion eventually become acquainted with the semantics. Even within the same language, there can be significant variability in interpreted meaning and sometimes it is due to cultural constraints where direct meaning is not permitted (see description of KAL 801 crash by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers”, Chapter 7).
I would also note, as another example, the art/skill of data interpretation that scientists are regularly engaged in. In the aqueous geochemical computer modeling that I was engaged in, interpretation of numeric output was (and still is) subject to limits of confidence. Take for example, calculated saturation indices for multi-component systems – it was impossible to predict with absolute confidence whether precipitation would occur, lest a supersaturation condition. This relates to the relationship between uncertainty and risk; risk is greatest when there is maximum uncertainty. Similarly, we find ourselves with divergent (but hotly contested) interpretations of earth temperature data, amidst close-to-maximum risk and uncertainty.
OK, back to the topic of youth and leadership. How do we think youth perform with regards to managing information streamed to them via various channels (eg, in school by lecture, in school by books, through the broadcast media, through the internet, from friends and family)? Do they interpret efficiently and with accurate meaning? Do youth develop good reference frameworks that both interpret and filter well?
As an example, think about communication between a parent and his/her newborn child. The child often cries and/or screams to communicate something, whereas the parent utilizes “baby talk”. There is something instinctual and yet highly ambiguous about this. From this starting point, we must realize that youth interpretation skills need to be developed – but like creativity, do we squander the opportunity?
The Sustainable Leadership that is one of the objectives of this program relies heavily on highly developed interpretation skills. At the highest level, a leader needs to be able to communicate (vision, tasks, …) with others and learn (from colleagues, staff, …) from others. So, in order for youth to achieve sustainable (ie, long term and developing) leadership, one should understand the importance of interpretation – and we can do that by encouraging creative interpretation of things they observe (eg, the divergence test described in “Outliers”).