Welcome to the Gurteen Knowledge Log. In this blog I blog items of interest that I have found on the web, experiences or insights that I think you will find useful mainly but not strictly limited to the area of knowledge management and learning. Like the rest of my site - it an eclectic mix.
Business is a Conversation - It's Good To Talk - Comments
Why, for all our knowledge, do we so poorly understand what is going on in our business world?
Since the advent of the world wide web and corporate intranets we have had unprecedented access to information.
Are we that much more effective, productive or creative? I don't think so.
I could give you all the information you desired. Perfect information. But would you be able to readily act on it. Probably not!
We don't need more information or knowledge. We need to understand what we have better. We need to make better sense of it all.
How have human beings made sense of the world since the dawn of time? Through conversation! Through storytelling and anecdotes.
Conversation allows us to become aware of different perspectives; it allows us to better crystalise and articulate our own thoughts and views. It improves our understanding.
And better understanding leads to improved decision making and innovation.
What's more, open conversations, learning conversations or dialogue - help build relationships. And its through relationships that everything gets done in the world.
Good conversation about subjects that matter also help surface people's passion and engagement and their propensity to act.
So why then, do so many mangers stifle and inhibit conversation within their organizations and teams when it is good to talk?
The Knowledge Cafe and the World Cafe are simple ways of encouraging and supporting conversation within organisations and thus improving understanding, decision making and innovation leading to deeper engagement and action.
Credit: Business is a Conversation - It's Good To Talk, David Gurteen
I wasn't expecting any comments but Bob Kanegis has stimulated the beginnings of an interesting discussion by posing the question So why then, do so many managers stifle and inhibit conversation within their organizations and teams when it is good to talk?
Why do you think conversation is so undervalued by many managers? Hop on over to the World Cafe and join the conversation but note its a closed forum, so you will need to join to read the discussion and to participate.
There are a number of conversational tools that can be used to great effect to improve learning and sharing in organisations.
The Knowledge Cafe and World Cafe are two such tools.
But you can also include peer-assists, after-action reviews and post-project reviews in the list along with tools such as Open Space.
Collectively, I refer to these tools a "Conversational Cafes" as they are all about face-to-face conversation.
But there is another conversational tool that is far more widely known and used than any of the above and that's the brown bag lunch
You are not familiar with the concept then quite simply a brown bag lunch is an informal training or information or knowledge session during a lunch break.
The term brown bag comes from the fact that in the USA meals brought along by the attendees are often packed in brown paper bags.
From a knowledge management perspective, a brown bag lunch is a structured social gathering during an organizational lunch time period which is used specifically for the purpose of transferring knowledge, building trust, social learning, problem solving, establishing networking or brain storming
They are an excellent way of stimulating informal conversation and connecting people but note they do not have to take place at lunch time, they can take place during any break including breakfast and a brown paper bag is not a requirement!
Reading PDF and HTML articles on my Kindle - Comments
A few months ago I bought a Kindle. Funnily, I did not buy it for reading books, I bought it for reading PDF articles.
So many papers and articles are only available in PDF format and I find them almost impossible to read on-line, especially if they are formatted in two columns.
I used to have dozens of the things printed-off and lying around at any one time on my coffee table, by the side of my bed, in my book case and I could never find the one I wanted when I needed it and even then they were never easy to read even on paper.
What is great about the Kindle, is that I can email my PDFs to Amazon where they convert them to the Kindle format and usually within the hour, like magic, they appear on my Kindle.
I love it. But it gets better.
I often find interesting articles on a website in HTML format. I don't want to read them there and then and I don't want to read them online or print them off with all the headers, footers and margins.
bookmark the page with Instapaper (Instapaper is a free web service that saves articles for later reading on web browsers, Apple iOS devices, and Amazon Kindle in a sripped-down text format.)
later, go to the stripped-down text document in Instapaper
print the plain text to a PDF file (I use a free printer driver called CutePDF Writer)
save the PDF file to a folder on my laptop. I have created one called Kindle PDFs just for the purpose.
email the file to my Kindle
I have just discovered, however, that I can configure Instapaper to send articles I have bookmarked directly to my Kindle. It will even compile several articles into one file. Now that's really cool.
You can forget facts but cannot forget understanding - Comments
This short video clip Confessions of a Converted Lecturer from a talk by Professor Erik Mazur who teaches Physics at Harvard is quite mind blowing.
Professor Mazur discovered that his
students can "learn" something conceptually and re-iterate it and pass exams but still fail to understand the subject or acquire the ability to apply that learning in real world situations. No amount of "lecturing", how ever good, solves this problem.
In the first video, you get to learn his solution "to teach by questioning rather than telling".
Note how he says to the students "So turn to your neighbour and see if you can convince one another of the correct choice" and then observe the conversation and engagement with the topic and how the students effectively teach each other.
This is the essence of my Knowledge Cafes and why I feel conversation is so important in business. Its the way we really get to engage with the world and to understand stuff. It's good to talk!
Too many students 'get by' and seek tactics that lead to good marks not good learning.
'Never praise a child, praise what they did' says Professor Black, and by this he meant praise the work of the learner and not the learner.
To praise the student encourages two ideas that are powerfully corrosive in learning; a) the idea that it's all down to ability b) the idea that the 'teacher' likes me.
To counter this, teachers must praise the work and effort, not ability of the student. Nor should teachers compare students with other students.
Praising the person also stops students from trying harder. Learners must believe they can change for the better.
This section highlights some of the major KM events taking place around the world in the coming months and ones in which I am actively involved. You will find a full list on my website where you can also subscribe to both regional e-mail alerts and RSS feeds which will keep you informed of new and upcoming events.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for March 2011 - April 2012.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Women in Science: Einstein's Advice to a Little Girl Who Wants to Be a Scientist http://bit.ly/HQOKxE
Workshop: Implementing Knowledge Cafes, 2 May 2012, London - Comments
My next Knowledge Cafe workshop is in London on 2 May 2012.
As many of you know, I started running my public Knowledge Cafes in London 10 years ago out of my frustration with death-by-powerpoint type lectures.
Very soon I found myself facilitating them privately for clients and discovering they had far greater power than I could ever have imagined.
They can be applied in a wide variety of ways, including:
transform traditional management training courses where younger managers learn from more experienced ones
as a powerful sales tool to engage with customers and thus better understand their needs and for them to better understand your product or service
surface hidden problems and opportunities that exist in the organisation or in a department or project - especially ones caused by lack of communication
help break down organizational silos and build internal relationships
give people a voice so that they feel heard and are thus less cynical and more engaged in their work
bring managers and technologists together after a merger to build relationships, surface new opportunities and address cultural issues
solicit input and obtain buy-in for a new project or initiative
In the workshop you will learn the fundamental principals and benefits of the Knowledge Café process and how to apply it to different business issues.
You will also participate in a Knowledge Cafe on the role of conversastion in business; experience the benefits first hand and get to reflect on and discuss the experience.
You will find more information here: (watch the first little video and you get an idea of the energy and passion KCafe conversations can generate).
Any theory of adult learning which does not place care at its centre is simply wrong. - Comments
When I first came across this article on Learning as Care I jumped to the conclusion that this was about teachers not caring.
Over the last few years it has become clear to me that whilst people certainly derive much of their learning from the mechanisms that we share with animals - classical and operant conditioning, observational learning - that there is a large area of human learning that works differently, and which we will never understand until we appreciate that learning is characterised by care. To put it another way: any theory of adult learning which does not place care at its centre is simply wrong.
But as I started to read, I realised that the post was all about the need for the learner to care not the teacher as I had first assumed. Some highlights from the post:
if people really cared about something we would have no work to do. And if we can't make people care, then we have usually done no work
we disseminate information without giving people a reason to care
we fail to provide learning resources to people who do care
don't tell people what is important, tell them why, tell the story
care is the central mechanism at the heart of all human learning - it governs both how we store information and how we subsequently use it
I love the way that people have taken my Knowledge Cafe or the World Cafe and adapted it in various ways for a specific business purpose. Then on the other hand, many people have quite independently developed their own conversational processes that work well for them in their own environment.
I recently received this email from an old friend Paul Hearn who works for the European Commission in Brussels and thought I would share with you his story.
Hi David,
I saw your blog post about "holding conversations rather than meetings" and it inspired this email.
I've held more than 80 Tuesday Conversation meetings in the European Commission over the past 4 years.
These are informal gatherings of staff (from the lowly secretary to the Director General) held over lunchtimes on Tuesdays.
I have listed some of the topics below - it is amazing what you can talk about in and around work! We've had around 2.000 attendees in total.
I invented the TC because there was nothing like it, and it was sorely needed.
I developed a methodology for this event based on the principles of Open Space
whoever come are the right people (we have had 1 person and up to 54, but the show still goes on)
must leave if you are not getting what you want (law of 2 feet)
I also developed some "guidelines for speakers", called TC spirit, which you might find amusing see below.
It is all work in progress and hangs together on a shoestring as I have no budget and no administrative support and I do it alongside my normal work ... but hey, who every got anything good for free? I certainly never got any recognition, but that is not why I did it :-)
A selection of recent topics
Science in Society: Ethics and new and emerging fields of science and technology
Supercomputing meets the cloud and the checkbook: The future of distributed computing infrastructures for Science in Europe?
Social innovation: Revolution or just spin?
The Save the Whale Project: Walking my Talk as a Sea Shepherd Antarctic Communications Officer
Strategy and Operations at the US National Science Foundation
Managing Innovation in the Health Sector: Challenges and opportunities
Decarbonisation of the Power Sector - The Role of Smart Grids
No Silver Bullet: Creative Commons and the Future of Open Licensing
Reshaping Scientific Knowledge - Dissemination and Evaluation in the Age of the Web
Discussion with Center for Research and Development Strategy Japan
Market Economy, Democracy and Human Nature: On the Societal Systems and their Governance
Cross-disciplinary Research Leading culture change and getting the message across
How European SMEs Use ICT to Engage in Global Virtual Collaboration
What's wrong with the EU ... Dr Hix's prescription
Confidence in the Digital Economy - Data Protection & privacy in Europe
Energy - Future Emerging Technologies
Measuring success of research policy: Setting milestones on a very long highway
Grid Activities and e-Infrastructures in China
Grid Computing in Peking University
Research Communication Costs, Emerging Opportunities & Benefits: Approaches and methods
Opportunities for Public Technology Procurement in the ICT-related sectors in Europe
20/20 Vision Lessons from 20 years in the Commission, and the challenges for the next 20 years
The Open Innovation Paradigm - What is it? And how important is it?
Open innovation strategies: Examples from two large-scale projects in Sweden
Cheers Paul
Credit: Paul Hearn, European Commission, Brussels
And here are Paul's guidelines:
Spirit of our Tuesday Conversation Meetings
preliminaries:
Powerpoint presentation only if absolutely necessary and in any case limited to 30 mins or so, so we can have a good conversation after for 60 mins
Generally we ask a lot of questions, and there is quite a lively debate. We also commonly interrupt speakers if we are not getting what we want.
As it is the lunch hour, people will be going in and out, sometimes arriving late and leaving early. Speakers should not see this as reflecting anyway on themselves or the presentation (participants are instructed to feel free to move around :-).
we try to capture the spirit of urgency:
we try to find out why we need to be discussing this topic? what is urgent? what has changed recently?
what is the opportunity? what are others doing around the world? what should we be doing?
would anyone be against such a strategy? if so, why?
we try to shoot from the hip:
Getting "off the record" with our speaker. It is very nice to know, for example, what our speaker really thinks, beyond any protocol or institutional viewpoint.
we look for personal views and anecdotes, not institutional views. We are more interested in "one (wo)man's dream" than in the official view of institution X or Y. We like to see personal passion.
we cut to the point
we are not particularly interested in introducing ideas at length, being exhaustive, crediting everyone involved, etc.
we are OK with slightly politically incorrect. We like to do some preliminaries like briefly introducing the speaker, context, but then we like to get to the meat of the discussion - what is this, and why does it matter, what is the vision here and do we share it?
we try to look forward, not back
we are interested in knowing what the opportunity is, what might change in Europe on in the world if we can realise a futuristic vision?
we like to be stimulated
- we like presentations that pose more questions than they answer, and we like speakers who can be provocative, polemical and lead a debate.
Based on these thoughts, speakers are asked not to see this as a "normal meeting" (whatever that is), but as an informal meeting of staff from across the institution that are taking time out over lunch to learn something which is perhaps new and may help them in their work...
Credit: Paul Hearn, European Commission, Brussels
None of this is difficult. Why not start some "Tuesday Conversations" in your own organisation.
Paul says "I have no budget and no administrative support and I do it alongside my normal work" but that did not stop him.
Offering free places to students at conferences - Comments
Spatial is a Kuwaiti Conference organiser who are organising a KM conference in Kuwait at the end of April.
This is what they say on their home page.
Spatial's Social Responsibility
In Spatial we believe that students are the country's future; therefore, we actively seek to involve them in our events. We dedicate free-of-charge at least 15 seats to students at our events. We also make available a corner for students to display their projects.
KM mini-interviews with Edward Rogers (CKO Of NASA) - Comments
Ankur Makhija of eClerx Services informs me that they have recently uploaded a few more KM mini-interviews to their YouTube channel.
The latest are with Edward Rogers (CKO Of NASA) and include:
Most Common KM Mistakes
Difference Between Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management
Inspiring action is more important than gaining insight - Comments
In the early days of Anecdote we believed the key purpose of story-listening was to gain insight.
Shawn wrote in a 2005 blog; "Listening to stories is one of the best ways to understand what is happening in a complex and dynamic situation ... Stories clarify the emerging patterns upon which effective interventions can be formulated."
What we have now come to realise is that, although stories do provide huge amounts of insight, the more important outcome of undertaking story-listening is that working with stories inspires action.
We see it time and time again. The energy changes in the room when people are immersed in stories from their own organisation.
The move from being spectators on the terraces to players on the pitch.
Our biggest challenge is sometimes stopping them leaving the workshop there and then to go and make some changes back in the office!
This was how Anecdote opened their February 2012 newsletter. It resonated with me as I find the same with my Knowledge Cafes.
After all, the KCafe is as mcuh a platform for telling stories as it is anything else.
Yes insight and improved understanding is important but being inspired to action more so.
Its all keeps coming back to that favourite quotation of mine
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for Feb 2011 - Mar 2012.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Knowledge is the ability to make effective decisions and take effective action.
Credit: Adapted from Peter Senge
This tallies nicely with my view and that held by many that knowledge only resides in our heads, everything captured or written down is just information.
For me, one of the clearest examples of IM verses KM, is my recent story about the work at the ING Bank Academy.
There a small team of people gather articles and reports about relevant trends in management, banking and finance that may impact the bank. They then broadcast “Research Alerts” to interested parties by e-mail.
This sort of activity ifs often seen as a KM activity but it is not - it is IM. What's more, in most organisations such activity stops there. Getting information to people is seen as enough.
But at ING Bank, they go one critical step further - they help people make sense of the information. If the Alert deserves attention they host a Knowledge Café to discuss it's implications, impact, risks and opportunities and if need be to take action.
This is clearly Knowledge Management. in fact, it's a conversation.
The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: they're unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they're interested in. The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don't have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the organization chart at least for a little while.
If you think about the aim of Knowledge Management as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that's not what Knowledge Management is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway.
More and more, I see KM as being about enabling conversations: "Business really is a conversation".
And this brings me to my Knowledge Cafe workshops.
I am running another one on 02 May 2012 in London. The workshop is not just about the Knowledge Cafe as a conversation or KM tool but explores the broader role of conversation in business; its relevance and importance.
Do come along if you are interested and join the conversation. You'll find more information here.
As I first watched the film and the complexity of the game started to dawn on me, I was highly sceptical that these 4th graders could possibly cope with it.
I was wrong, so damned wrong!
Watching the kids handle with the complexities and ambiguities of the game is absolutely delightful. I'd have little problem with putting them in charge of the world tomorrow!
Take a look at the trailer below - it gives a fair insight into the game and kids.
This is what education should be like and be about. I am so impressed with John Hunter. Jamie - a big thanks for sharing this with me.
World Peace...and other 4th-grade achievements interweaves the story of John Hunter, a teacher in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his students' participation in an exercise called the World Peace Game.
The game triggers an eight-week transformation of the children from students of a neighborhood public school to citizens of the world.
The film reveals how a wise, loving teacher can unleash students' full potential.
The film traces how Hunter's unique teaching career emerges from his own diverse background.
An African-American educated in the segregated schools of rural Virginia, where his mother was his 4th grade teacher, he was selected by his community to be one of seven students to integrate a previously all-white middle school.
After graduation, he traveled extensively to China, Japan, and India, and his exposure to the Ghandian principles of non-violence led him to ask what he could do as a teacher to work toward a more peaceful world.
Hunter teaches the concept of peace not as a utopian dream but as an attainable goal to strive for, and he provides his students with the tools for this effort.
The children learn to collaborate and communicate with each other as they work to resolve the Game's conflicts.
They learn how to compromise while accommodating different perspectives and interests. Most importantly, the students discover that they share a deep and abiding interest in taking care of each other. World Peace ... and other 4th-grade achievements will inspire others by documenting the unheralded work of a true peacemaker.
The flipped classroom: turning traditional teaching on its head - Comments
I have been talking more and more recently about the concept of flip teaching. Its one of the most exciting developments have come across in quite a while and I am convinced it is going to transform traditional education.
I am interested in education and its effectiveness but what really interests me is that the philosophy behind flip teaching is the same as my Knowledge Cafes and the work at the ING Bank Academy.
We don't learn well from being lectured at but we do learn well from engaging conversations.
Bookwormery: fuelling your children's desire to know more - Comments
I have two amazing daughters, Lauren and Sally, who both blog. And I have one amazing son, Jonathan, who doesn't blog.
Both my daughters love cats and so the names of their blogs will come as no surprise.
Neither of the blogs have anything to do with KM - thank goodness. More insights into their lives.
One of the things I am so pleased I took the time to do when they were little was to read to them at bedtime. It was never a chore, part of the enjoyment of being a dad
And so this post on Bookwormery by Sally is a lovely kind of thank you from her.
From a very early age, our father would always read to us. He would take us to the bookshop at the weekend and we would buy books to read in the week. We would listen to his warm voice and fall asleep to it. As a result of this, while the other children at school were reading books recommended for their age, I was given the privilege of reading whatever I liked and I often chose older, more challenging material, which only fuelled my desire to know more!
How do we tackle the complex, interrelated challenges of the 21st century in a coherent and effective way? - Comments
It is perhaps the defining question of our time: How to tackle the complex, interrelated challenges of the 21st century in a coherent and effective way?
The answer, I am convinced, lies in what I call the diplomacy of knowledge, defined as our ability and willingness to work together and share our learning across disciplines and borders.
When people achieve the right mixture of creativity, communication and co-operation, remarkable things can happen.
I was pleased to come across this article by David Johnston, the Governor-General of Canada.
It's a question I ask myself almost every day. What David Johnston refers to as the "diplomacy of knowledge" is to me what KM should be all about.
David makes some excellent points in his article though I must admit I have sympathies with one of the commenters who says "A nice Pollyanna, apple pie, motherhood essay."
Working together and sharing together across disciplines and borders as David advocates is good but I don't think sufficient. There is something fundamental missing.
I believe Peter Block is thinking along the right lines when he says we need to change our thinking about what constitutes action.
My belief is that the way we create conversations that overcome the fragmented nature of our communities is what creates an alternative future.
This can be a difficult stance to take for we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs.
We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list.
We want measurable outcomes and we want them now.
What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing.
We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.
This is not an argument against problem solving; it is an intention to shift the context and language within which problem solving takes place.
Authentic transformation is about a shift in context and a shift in language and conversation. It is about changing our idea of what constitutes action.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: February 2012 - Comments
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for Jan 2011 - Feb 2012.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
DeskTime, a firm that automates time sheets, posted an absurd infographic yesterday http://bit.ly/y5V4MV
Perplexing that so much of society and culture is expressed in commercial terms @Downes http://bit.ly/zzoEH4 /agreed
Announcing a Virtual Knowledge Cafe on Social Artistry - Comments
Michele Martin and Brent MacKinnon are organizing a 9-week Knowledge Cafe that they plan to run online, starting February 20, 2012.
It's open to anyone who's interested in learning with them about the skills and talents of social artists and who want to explore how social artistry might fit into their professional practice.
I am delighted to learn that they will be adapting my Gurteen Knowledge Cafe model and Bo Gyllenpalm,s Virtual Knowledge Cafe as a learning framework. If you do nothing else take a look at Bo,s Virtual Knowledge Cafe concept. It's a very powerful adaptation of the Cafe model to an online environment.
If the term social artistry is new to you then here is a simple definition but click through to Micheles blog post to understand the term better. Its one of those concepts that's hard to pin down and define in one or two sentences.
Social artistry is about creating space for change and transformation, which is what learning is really all about. How do we create the space for people to be together, to learn from their experiences and connections and to move them to make a difference in their part of the world? How do we help people grow into their possibilities?
The role of Creative Commons Licences in a KM environment - Comments
Paul Corney sent me this email recently:
Dear All,
In a couple of week's time I am going to be in Sudan at a KM event for Africa and one of the discussions is going to focus on the role of Creative Commons Licences in a KM environment.
In the development arena some organisations publish under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licences and I was wondering how successful the use of these licences are in other industries in fostering collaboration.
I considered whether to post this on various km lists but thought some people might not want to respond in public so could I therefore ask you to respond to a few simple questions (I will not attribute your response unless you ask me to):
Have you published works under a creative commons licence and if so which one?
What was the work about and why did you publish via a creative commons licence?
Can you give a personal example that illustrates the benefit from publishing in this way?
Thank you for taking the trouble to look at this.
And finally every best wish for a healthy, peaceful and prosperous 2012.
I have been publishing almost all of my work under a creative commons license for five years or more.
For example. here is the slide that I have at end the end of all of my presentations.
This license says you are free:
to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
to make derivative works
to make commercial use of the work
Also:
Attribution: you must give the original author credit.
Share Alike: If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.
I do this for several reasons:
I am building on the shoulders of others, I have no legitimate claim over most of my material
If they really want to, people are going to take and use my material whatever I say (and am I really going to take them to court over it!)
My business strategy is to give most of my written material away as marketing material and to charge for me in person
I want to encourage people to take my material and remix it and attribute me where appropriate
But more than anything I do it to encourage others to do the same and to share freely.
Do I have a personal example of the benefit of using the licence? No nothing specific, other than people do take my material, reuse it and remix it and thus help spread some of the messages I am keen to spread.
best wishes David
You will find more thoughts on this subject in an article of mine: Raising all the ships on the sea where I talk about the tangible and intangible "commons".
Imagine my delight when I learnt that the ING Business School in the Netherlands had adapted my Knowledge Cafe process and were using it as part of their Challenging Minds programme.
I immediately contacted Mireille Jansma and Jurgen Egges to congratulate them on their work and the article.
This instigated a conversation with Mireille where I discovered that she had learnt about my Knowledge Cafe over four years ago through my website and then experienced one that I ran at an ECKM conference in Barcelona in 2007.
In fact, I recall sitting outside the conference in the courtyard having a long conversation with her.
Mireille and Jurgen have adapted the Cafe format and are using it in two ways.
The first way is described in the Forbes article that I summarise here:
They gather articles and reports about relevant trends in management, banking, and finance
They then broadcast "Research Alerts"
When an Alert deserves serious attention, they host a Knowledge Café
The KCafes are targeted at specific groups or open to anyone
Sometimes the KCafe is triggered by a video
They follow through with online discussion groups
These types of initiatives focus on topics that are highly relevant and in-the-moment for managers and workers, and where the sharing of ideas and exchange of opinions lead to creativity and innovation.
They are also using the Knowledge Cafes in a second way as part of their Challenging Minds programme as described in the document below. Unfortunately they did not win the EFMD award but its an innovative approach to teaching nevertheless.
It shares a lot in common with Flip Teaching that I blogged about recently.
Connect, Connect, Connect
Creating a New Approach to Leverage Social, Collaborative, and Emergent Organizational Learning
Application for the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) Excellence in Practice Award 2011
Executive Summary
This case study describes an ongoing partnership between ING Business School (IBS) recently renamed the ING Bank Academy and CoachingOurselves (CO) that began in January 2010.
It focuses not on a single learning intervention but rather on the evolution of a continually and broadly expanding application of CO learning philosophies and materials to a wide range of IBS development programs that serve all of ING's leaders, managers, and employees.
CoachingOurselves provides a library of topics intended for 6 to 8 managers to read and discuss in group sessions.
IBS partnered with CO initially to use a few topics, but the success of CO as a tool that fosters social, collaborative, and emergent learning that leads to meaningful improvements in management performance and engagement, along with its low-cost, modular topics, and immediate relevance, has led IBS to broadly incorporate CO into many of its learning initiatives.
Video: Interview with Mireille Jansma and Jurgen Egges of the ING Business Academy in Amsterdam
This is a short video interview with Mireille Jansma and Jurgen Egges of the ING Business Academy in Amsterdam in November 2011 where David Gurteen asks them how they learnt about his Knowledge Cafe concept and how it has played a role in their "Challenging Minds" programme.
Media Information:
Video: Interview with David Gurteen at the ING Business Academy
This is a short video interview with David Gurteen by Mireille Jansma of the ING Business Academy in Amsterdam in November 2011 where she asks him what he thinks of their "Challenging Minds" programme having just experienced one of the sessions
Is Knowledge Management Losing Sight of the Bigger Picture? - Comments
In this recent article by Waltraut Ritter she says:
Knowledge management practices are often narrowly focusing on internal operations
and not addressing larger questions about the nature and sustainability of the
knowledge driving the organization. There seems to be a separation of KM from the
overall business strategy, a general neglect of addressing the larger questions about an
organization's knowledge and how such knowledge may create societal value beyond a
company's financial gains.
How can we, as knowledge management professionals, engage in a deeper conversation
and exchange about value creation through knowledge, allow more critical questions
about existing practices which only touch the surface of real knowledge challenges, in
organizations and society?
To my mind, Waltraut is spot on here. This is what KM should be about.
And of course, its one of the aims of my Knowledge Cafes "to engage in that deeper conversation".
Henley KM Forum Conference and Positive Deviance - Comments
Those of you in the UK may be interested in attending the Annual Henley KM Forum Conference on
Wednesday 29 February and Thursday 1 March 2012 at the Henley Business School in Henley on Thames. There is a great line up of speakers, including Hubert Saint-Onge, Chris Collison, David Griffiths, Victor Newman, Elizabeth Lank and Nick Milton.
I have attended this conference almost every year for the last 12 years and I highly recommend it.
The Henley KM Forum brings together business practitioners, industry thought-leaders, experts and academics to help organisations tackle the challenges presented by the knowledge economy.
It's this rich blend of people and the interactive, engaging style of their events that I enjoy.
I love to spark conversations and at the conference dinner, I will be speaking for 10 minutes before we eat on one of my favourite topics Positive Deviance
Positive Deviance is an approach to
behavioural and social change based
on the observation that in every
community there are individuals or
groups of people (so called Positive
Deviants) whose behaviours and
strategies enable them to find better
solutions to problems than their
peers even though they have access
to the same resources and face similar
challenges. In this talk, David will take
a look at some of the principals that
underlie Positive Deviance and what
he thinks KM practitioners and leaders
can learn from the approach
I will then ask everyone to spend a little time during conversation over their meal to discuss my talk. We will then spend 20 mins or so at the end of the evening sharing our thoughts with each other.
Visionary knowledge management: Trends and Strategies - Comments
It's not very often I get called a KM visionary and I am not so sure that I am one but its good to be included in this German article on Visionary Knowledge Management: Trends and Strategies
The authors of this article go to the question of how organizations in 2020 to deal with knowledge. For this they have analyzed in a first step, national and international knowledge management conferences, publications and Internet publications to locate knowledge management visionaries. There are four visionaries are noticed because of your keynotes and their publications on knowledge management trends: David Griffiths, Dave Snowden, David Gurteen and Norbert Gronau. They are presented here together with their theories and visions for dealing with knowledge. At the end of these theories are compared and discussed.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for Dec 2011 - Jan 2012.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Virtual Knowledge Cafe on Social Artistry http://bit.ly/wn5acM #KCafe #TheWorldCafe #WorldCafe
You can see the language banners on the tables and the three translation booths overlooking the room.
In November last year, I spent an interesting two days in Turin with the European Training Foundation (ETF).
The ETF is an EU agency that helps transition and developing countries to harness the potential of their human capital through the reform of education, training and labour market systems in the context of the EU's external relations policy.
During my time there, I ran two knowledge cafes.
The first was part of a two day workshop for around 90 participants from ETF member countries where they discussed the role of evidence in "governance and effective Vocational Education and Training (VET) policies".
Member countries included Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Croatia, Egypt, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Kosovo.
So quite an ethnic mix.
This was the more challenging of the two knowledge cafes given the large number of people and the fact that three languages were being spoken: English, French and Russian.
This meant that each table needed to be labelled with the language intended to be spoken at that table and when people changed tables they needed to move to a table where their language was spoken. My introduction to the KCafe and explanation of the process was simultaneously translated into French and Russian.
Then where as normal, I would have brought everyone together in a circle at the end of the KCafe, I simply asked for a few people to share with the rest of the group what they had learnt from their conversations. This was done by handing around a couple of stick mikes. Not the perfect way to run one of my KCafes but a reasonable adaptation in the circumstances.
Several people, found me after the event to say how much they enjoyed the KCafe and I was pleased that two of them told me they were already using the process in their own organisations
I even had a woman from Kazakhstan ask through an interpreter if I had a description of the KCafe process In Russian.
I don't but it has prompted me to think about writing a short document that could be translated into multiple languages to explain the process. I may be asking for help on this at a later date :-)
The conversation menu.
And then on the second day I ran a Knowledge Cafe for a much smaller group (about 20) of KM managers. This was a more regular KCafe.
What was interesting though was the meal the evening before.
Ian Cumming who had attended one of my Knowledge Cafe workshops in London a few weeks before had heard me talk about Theordore Zeldins conversation dinners.
Inspired by this he had created a conversational menu for the evening. Not quite along Theodore's lines but interesting nevertheless. My first reaction was that no one would select a conversation from the menu as the questions were far too work related.
I was proven wrong in part. There were three tables in the dining room, each seating about 6 people. My table was the only one that drew some of our conversation from the menu (and that was not my doing).
What surprised me was how well it worked. Given it was a social evening, we did not stick too closely to the questions and there was a lot of laughter and banter but the conversation was to my mind interesting and valuable nevertheless.
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