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.
There’s kids in here who don’t learn like that, they need to learn face-to-face. - Comments
You may well have seen this video as it has gone viral.
In it, Jeff Bliss, a High School Student in Duncanville, Texas rants at his history teacher about her teaching methods after being kicked out of class.
Here are a few things he says in the rant:
"If you would just get up and teach them instead of handing them a freaking packet, yo. There's kids in here who don't learn like that, they need to learn face-to-face."
”You want kids to come to class? You want them to get excited? You gotta come in here, you gotta make ‘em excited, to change him and make him better, you gotta touch his freakin' heart.”
And later in an interview he says this: "I want to see a teacher stand up and interact with the students, get involved, discuss, talk, question and dig deep into the subject.”
I was educated at a traditional boy's grammar school - most of the teaching was by "chalk and talk" delivered by crusty, aging, male school masters.
Strangely, it was considered a good education at the time but one would have hoped that the world had moved on in 50 years since I was a boy.
If this teacher was really "teaching" her class by "handing them freaking packets" then surely that's a retrograde step.
If we are to stand any chance of saving our civilisation education must be transformed.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for March to April 2013.
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.
Why We Work: A Look at What Motivates in the Knowledge Economy http://bit.ly/11nesBh #KM
The Knowledge Management Association announces the launch of the KMA web site http://linkd.in/11g84dw #kma #km
2013 Top 100 Twitter Influencers in Knowledge Management - Comments
MindTouch has recently analysed Knowledge Management influencers and produced a top 100 list.
They add the caveat that they know there are several profoundly influential people not represented on the list and that it should be clear that the list constitutes a core group of influencers in the KM space on Twitter.
I am honoured to be number two on the list but take it with "a big pinch of salt" - ignore the order and it's not too difficult to spot anomalies but if you are looking for KM people to follow its a good resource.
Interactive Dialogue or Serial Monologue: The Influence of Group Size on conversation - Comments
Over the years, in running my Knowledge Cafes, I have discovered through trial and error and careful observation that the ideal size of a group for interactive conversation is four people.
If not four, then five is OK but three is better.
Anything more than five and the conversation does not work so well: one or two people tend to dominate; the conversation breaks into two, even three; frequently one person is totally cut out of the interaction and there is little energy in the group.
This research paper (via Keith de la Rue) confirms my observations.
Current communication models draw a broad distinction between communication as dialogue and communication as monologue.
The two kinds of models have different implications for who influences whom in a group discussion.
The experiments reported in this paper show that in small, 5-person groups, the communication is like dialogue and members are influenced most by those with whom they interact in the discussion.
However, in large, 10-person groups, the communication is like monologue and members are influenced most by the dominant speaker.
The difference in mode of communication is explained in terms of how speakers in the two sizes of groups design their utterances for different audiences.
"Lectorial" rooms: shifting the emphasis to active student-centred learning - Comments
Stuart French emailed me a while back to tell me that they had held their last KMLF meeting in Melbourne at the new RMIT Swanston Academic building
and that he thought you might like to know about the custom designed “Lectorial” rooms that have been especially designed for the teach-discuss-share model to encourage the students to participate in a collaborative and constructivist style of learning.
"Literature indicates that shifting the emphasis to active student-centred learning has
significant outcomes in terms of increasing student engagement, problem solving ability and
positive learning outcomes."
Do not pursue life sitting upon another man's shoulders - Comments
Quotations are extremely effective at capturing and concisely communicating thoughts and ideas.
They can be inspirational but more importantly quotations can help us reveal and assess the assumptions, values and beliefs that underlie the ways in which we perceive the world.
I have compiled nearly 1,000 quotations and short excerpts on my website. It is an eclectic mix but most of them are inspirational or insightful in nature and relate to knowledge, learning or personal development in some form.
If you love quotations then you may like to subscribe to receive a quote once a week or more frequently by e-mail.
Here is one that popped up in my in-box the other day from one of my favourite human beings of all times - Henry David Thoreau.
It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.
Here are 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.
Free Access to Knowledge Management Research & Practice (KMRP) until May 10th - Comments
Knowledge Management Research & Practice has been included in Palgrave Macmillan's ACCESS ALL AREAS campaign throughout this April - enabling free online access to Palgrave's complete portfolio of journals spanning Business, the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
Palgrave have kindly extended free access to KMRP for an extra few days to the Gurteen Knowledge Community - so if you haven't had time to browse the journal so far, then you have a little more time to do so!
The bottom line is that I am in almost total agreement with Dave and Johnnie.
I would love to see richer, more engaging conferences with a variety of presentation and interactive sessions as they suggest.
The problem is that is that most commercial conference organisers are not ready for this. And its not just KM conferences :-)
My idea is a simple one.
It is to add a short conversational element to the traditional lecture style talk which form the majority of sessions at any conference.
To move FROM
presentation + no time for q&A TO
presentation + reflection + conversation + q&a
This is only meant to be a baby step in the direction of better learning events. My hope is that once conference organisers realise how effective this format can be it will give them the courage to go further. Time will tell.
Interestingly, in Googling for other people's views on conferences, I found this post by Nancy Dixon from 2009.
A Rant on Are There Any Questions?
This is how she starts
Every good speaker knows that at the end of a presentation, you have to leave time for questions.
Hogwash! Leaving time for questions is the worse learning process we could have invented.
We've all been brainwashed into the pseudo learning theory that asking for questions at the end of a presentation makes it a better learning experience for the audience. Wrong!
In each case, the submission is held in a queue until I have checked it out and categorised it. This normally only takes a day or two. If the item is off topic or I feel it is inappropriate for any other reason I reserve the right to delete it. The service is free.
Looking for partners to help promote and run my Knowledge Cafes - Comments
I am looking for business partners in various countries around the world who will work with me to deliver my public and in-house Knowledge Cafe masterclasses and other related Cafes and workshops.
Ideally, I am looking for organisations whose business is organising events though societies, networks and occasionally individuals who may have the capability to work with me.
If you are interested or can help then please get in touch and I will send you more information.
Conversations are spontaneous and emergent, not planned and structured - Comments
I often ask during my Knowledge Cafe's if people think that it is possible to have online conversations or are they really just an exchange of messages. Is face to face conversation so different from online conversations that is warrants being given a different name?
Usually only a handful of people see any real difference and many get quite passionate about the fact that they can have great conversations with people online or by email and even texting.
I am not so sure. To me face to face conversation is so different to computer mediated conversation that I always say that "real conversation" can only take place face to face.
Yes, am aware I am playing with the definition and accepted use of words here. Conversation is always going to be the everyday term for conversation however mediated.
As part of the resources I am pulling together for a future book on conversation I have bookmarked this blog post from Chris Rodgers whether he says that Theres no such thing as on-line conversation that "Conversation is an ongoing, 'real-time' exchange" and that "Conversations are spontaneous and emergent, not planned and structured".
I could not agree more.
And, oh yes, when people ask me if you can run Knowledge Cafes online. I say "Yes, but it is so different you can no longer call it a Knowledge Cafe!"
It implies that if I am stating an argument to convince someone else of the reasonableness of my position, I would be wise to pause periodically to give the other person an opportunity to articulate his or her thinking on what I've said.
Even if the other's response is only to offer a counter argument, that person will learn something new about their own position by “the way they have organized information differently ... to present it.”
It implies that if I deliver a presentation or a lecture it would be helpful to make time for those listening to have a conversation with each other -- a way for them to make mental connections that otherwise might never be made.
It implies that if I want another team to learn from the lessons my team or project has garnered, the transfer would work better if I arrange a conversation between the two groups than as a document.
The conversation would provide the opportunity for the recipient to think out loud about how the lessons relate to their own work.
It implies that I read an great article I will incorporate the ideas more fully into my own cognitive map, if I tell a colleague what I have just read (or write a blog about it).
It implies that in the debrief of that great project my team just accomplished, the team is more likely to be able to understand how they achieved that success, if I gather the group to talk to about what they learned. They will learn what they learned in the talking.
Sharing Tacit Knowledge - Nancy Dixon tells the story about Xerox Copy Repair Technicians
Xerox thought it taught its copy repair technicians everything they needed to know. But they discovered that technicians still had a need to learn from each other through conversation.
I was at first pretty upset to hear the demise (or the "retiring" as Google put it) of Google Reader.
Over the years I have come to depend on it.
I am subscribed to over 180 feeds and I keep up with most of my professional news through both the Windows and iPhone versions that nicely sync with each other so that an item marked as read on my iPhone syncs with Windows.
Its no exaggeration to say that Google Reader is was my information life blood. At first I could not imagine how I could live without it.
Until, I discovered Feedly.
It has almost identical functionality and it is beautifully implemented. So much so, I prefer it the old Goggle Reader.
What's more it literally took me minutes to switch.
If you are in the same boat as me and have not found an alternative yet - then take a look at Feedly. It seems they have acquired more than 500,000 Google Reader users in recent days.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for February to March 2013.
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.
Resilience, the future of Knowledge Management? @kmskunkworks http://bit.ly/104b13x #KM
Learning before, during and after - how to embed KM http://bit.ly/Y1K4cZ #KM #learning
Kill Your Meeting Room - The Future's in Walking and Talking http://bit.ly/Zqrper
People need to learn how to connect to new people on a regular basis http://bit.ly/Z0usKi
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: February 2013 - Comments
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for Januay to February 2013.
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.
Short animated video on 70:20:10 Learning by Charles Jennings http://bit.ly/XtwnU4 #learning
Rather shockingly, it seems that much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong
and that doctors are still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice.
Dr. Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.
He analyzed 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years.
And of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions.
Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated.
A couple of highlights from the article:
Simply put, if you're attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you're motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you'll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right.
This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was.
"The studies were biased," he says. "Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there."
Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results -- and, lo and behold, they were getting them.
We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it's easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously.
"At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded," says Ioannidis. "There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded."
This problem is not unique to the medical or scientific world, I suspect it is far more prevalent in the business world.
We make up our mind and then select the evidence to support it!
To me, this is the sort of issue that Knowledge Management should be addressing - how do we avoid or at the very least minimise such cognitive biases?
And, its not the only one, the list of our cognitive biases is endless.
Footnote: In searching the web for information on how to overcome cognitive bias I came across this gem of a website:
This is a group blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
Personal Knowledge Management and Harold Jarche - Comments
Looking at my records, I first ran a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) workshop in Singapore in 2002.
Yikes that's over 10 years ago now!
Over the years I have stopped using the term as to me PKM is actually what KM is really all about.
It is social, it is about people and deeply personal.
Most of the technical stuff has little to do with KM and is more about information management.
Important and essential, I always say you need to do good IM, before you do KM but its IM nevertheless.
In fact the term does not seem to be greatly used these days though there is Wikipedia entry for PKM.
But there is a place where the term PKM dominates
and that is in the blog of Harold Jarche.
You will find his blog here and the PKM section here.
He tweets at @hjarche.
And, if like me you get your news through your RSS reader you can subscribe to his main RSS feed here
[Note if you use Google Chrome as your browser then install the RSS Subscription Extension to make it easy to view and to subscribe to RSS feeds embedded in websites. Why on earth, this is not a standard feature of Google Chrome I do not know!]
Harold really understands what KM and PKM are all about and he is a prolific blogger with lots of good graphics to illustrate his points.
PKM: A set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world & work more effectively.
I think the last KM Europe conference I attended was held in 2004 and it was a sad day when the conference came to an end as each year it helped pull the European KM community together.
So I am delighted to see that the Ark Group is relaunching the event.
The conference will be chaired by Mireille Jansma and run to a conversational format.
Dave Snowden is giving the keynote on the first day and I will be keynoting on the second.
Along with some great talks and case studies it will provide a wonderful opportunity to connect and network with KM practitioners from all over Europe.
I really look forward to seeing as many of you there who can make it..
And note if you quote my name when you book you will receive a 20% discount..
It's so good to see that KM Australia is adopting the conversational style of conference that I have been advocating for the last few years.
This is the third year in which they have done so since I chaired the conference to this format for the first time in 2011. This is how they describe the event on the conference website.
What is a conversational event?
This congress will follow an interactive conversational format. Each speaker will present a case study for 25 minutes and conclude their presentation with a question to the audience.
The remaining 15-20 minutes of each session will be given to the audience to discuss the speakers talk and the question at their tables before going into a traditional Q&A.
This conversational format is intended to create an informal, relaxed atmosphere in which you, the conference participants, can get to know each other, learn from each other and build relationships.
The Ark Group have been running other conferences to this format for the past couple of years such as KM UK and KM Legal Europe.
Karuna Ramanathan and I also chaired KM Asia in Singapore to this format last year.
And this year both KM UK and the relaunched KM Europe will be chaired in this manner.
For many traditional conference organisers, barcamps, unconferences and open space sessions are a step too far. These formats feel risky.
But making time for conversation as part of each presentation carries very little risk. Its a great first step to more open, participatory conferences.
If you have anything to do with organising conferences could I suggest you try this format.
I am writing some documentation on how to run them. Get in touch and I will send you a copy when complete.
Death Cafes: increasing the awareness of death and making the most of our lives - Comments
I have all sorts of ideas for Knowledge Cafes.
I have always thought they would make good vehicles to discuss taboo subjects though I have never had or made the opportunity to experiment with this idea.
I am sure though that such Cafes have been run - probably to the World Cafe format.
Talking about Death is one of our biggest taboos.
So I was delighted although a little surprised when someone recently told me about Death Cafes and pointed me to this article:
Death Cafes Grow As Places To Discuss
There is even a
Death Cafe
website.
I rather like their mission statement:
At Death Cafes people come together in a relaxed and safe setting to discuss death, drink tea and eat delicious cake.
The objective of Death Cafe is "To increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives".
Introduction to the February 2013 Knowledge Letter - Comments
Organizations are starting to wake up to the power of open conversation and my Knowledge Cafes are proving to be more and more popular.
In the coming year I plan to document the process more fully.
To start with, I have created a short Knowledge Cafe Tip Sheet as a two page PDF.
If you thinking of running a Knowledge Cafe for the first time then it is a good little guide.
I recently distributed it to over 5,000 people who have attended one of my Knowledge Cafes or Knowledge Cafe workshops over the past 10 years or have expressed an interest in the Knowledge Cafe concept.
Surprisingly, I thought at first it was only 2,000 people but after a more careful processing of my database I realised the figure was much higher!
If you did not receive it and would like a copy then drop me an email and I will send it to you.
Also, if you are interested in my public or in-house Knowledge Cafe training workshops or my tailored in-house Knowledge Cafes
then I can send you a document that describes the various ways in which I teach and run the Knowledge Cafe.
A participant on one of my Knowledge Cafe workshops in London last year was Andrew Armour.
Andrew has since taken my Knowledge Cafe process, adapted it for a Marketing context and dubbed it the "MarketingCafe".
Here is what he says about in his blog.
A MarketingCafe works by continually re-mixing small group conversations (ideally only three to a table) focused on carefully constructed open questions.
It's a structured way to generate the kind of great conversations you may have with good colleagues in the pub, hotel lounge or café, rather than those found more often in the boardroom -- or brainstorm.
Participants are encouraged to ask more questions rather than jump in to solve the question as more curiosity not instant solutions is the aim.
The loose, small group format helps the more confident to take a step back and therefore allows the space for the often introverted, technical and creative specialists to contribute more.
The Café is deceptively simple and yet highly effective.
You may recall I wrote about Proactive Reviews back in June 2011.
Proactive Reviews are a variant of After Action Reviews (AARs) that were first used by the US army as a method for debriefing miliary actions during the Vietnam War.
The Proactive Review was developed much later by Ditte Kolbaek while she worked at Oracle and are a more business focused form of AAR that have been well documented in her book Proactive Reviews - how to make your organisation learn from experience.
It's an excellent book with a detailed description of the process and is packed with case studies.
I have recently been reading her book again more deeply, to help sharpen up my Knowledge Cafes as both are conversational tools and have much in common.
If you are already familiar with AARs then this is the heart of the difference between AARS and PRs.
While an After Action Review consists of 4 questions:
What was the goal/what did we set out to do?
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What should we do next time?
Proactive reviews add four more questions:
What is the Purpose of this Proactive Review?
What was the goal/what did we set out to do?
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What should we do next time?
What are we going to report, to whom, when and how?
Which of our topics are important for the organisation?
What was your personal highlight from this Proactive Review?
I don't think I need explain the importance of the additional questions and why Ditte has added them but what I observe is that the first and last questions correspond well with my Knowledge Cafe process.
In recent years, my ideas around the Knowledge Cafe have developed beyond it being solely a tool to "seek a deeper understanding" of a topic.
Today, every Kcafe I run is customised. In designing a Kcafe, I start with several questions.
The first of which is "What is the purpose of this Knowledge Cafe?" This is later shared in the Kcafe itself.
It reminds me - in every thing we do, we should start with Steven Covey's second habit "Begin with the end in mind".
And finally that last question in the Proactive Review corresponds to the end of my Kcafe where I go around the Kcafe circle and ask each participant in turn "What is your one actionable insight you would like to share with everyone?"
This final question is frequently the most revealing and what often surprises me is that people take away from very different learnings from a Kcafe - even conflicting ones.
And there is no harm in that. Knowledge is very personal stuff.
Humans are "designed" for conversation. - Comments
Many people find it difficult to give a speech and it is not always easy to listen to one but we are all pretty good at holding a conversation.
Why is this?
Surely, delivering a monologue or listening to one should be easier than dialogue?
Think about it for a moment.
We face all sorts of difficulties when we have a conversation. Here are just a few:
We tend to talk in short, obscure, fragmentary utterances and so listeners need to fill-in the missing information and interpret what we are saying.
This means a listener must often wait a while for something to become clear or must interrupt to clarify a point.
We cannot plan a conversation ahead of time as we never know what our conversational partners may say or ask.
A conversation has a habit of going where it wants to go and not where any of the participants wish to take it.
When speaking we need to consider our listeners and modify our use of language on the fly so it is appropriate to the context, our listners evel of understanding or in a way that does not offend them.
We need to decide when it socially acceptable to interrupt the person speaking - to come in at just the right moment.
We need to plan how we are going to respond, if at all, while at the same time listening and in a multi-party conversation decide who to address.
It shouldn't be easy should it?
But like me, I suspect you have never given it a second thought.
If you are interested in a scientific answer then take a look at the paper Why is conversation so easy? by Simon Garrod and Martin Pickering.
They say its because the interactive nature of dialogue supports the interactive alignment of linguistic representations but I will leave you to make sense of that :-)
But the simple answer is that evolution has "wired" our brains for dialogue rather than monologue.
If we are "designed" for conversation - not for monologue then why do we inflict lectures on each other?
Credit: Thanks to Stephen Mugford. for pointing me to this paper
David Weinberger at KMWorld 2012: facilitating knowledge sharing - Comments
A little while back I blogged about David Weinberger Education as a public act has tremendous power where he says "In the knowledge network ... the idea is ... that all learning should be in public and be something that makes the public better".
I love his work and as you can see from this web page I have been blogging about him since 2002.
As ever, its a deeply insightful talk but what I particularly like is where he talks about the power of conversation, how it works and how we make rooms smarter.
He sums up by saying:
We're going from a time of thinking that the smartest person in the room is the one at the front, or that the loudest, most obnoxious person, the person who dominates is almost always a male, [to a time] where we have the next level of intelligence, which is from the network of people who are in the room physically or virtually.
This of course is what my Knowledge Cafes are all about - "making rooms (of people) smarter".
David also talks a lot about the importance of differences in conversations. Many people think my knowledge cafes are about people being nice to each other and not disagreeing. But this could not be further from the truth. Yes, my cafes are not about debate as debates, especially amongst people who do not know each other well, can quickly become emotional and slide into argument.
My Cafes are about dialogue, engaging with each other respectfully. As soon as you start to show any form of disrespect in a conversation then the conversation is effectively ended.
It becomes a debate or an argument where each person tries to impose their view on the other or where they simply walk away from the engagement.
You can deeply disagree with someone and still show them respect and thus keep the conversation alive. The longer you can so this the more likelihood that interesting things will emerge.
On the other hand, if you don't value the other person or the relationship or the opportunity to explore an issue or why someone should have such a profoundly different perspective to you then you can chose to put them down or wind them up and get some perverted pleasure out of the conversation that way.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for December 2012 - January 2013
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.
A reductionist eye cannot see emergence or play enough to see novelty http://bit.ly/VHl6lQ #KM
Productivity revolutions and the most misunderstood man in history http://bit.ly/VWRVIB
Why we need more conversation and less brainstorming http://bit.ly/VKEKdF #KM #KCafe
Introduction to the January 2013 Knowledge Letter - Comments
To kick off 2013, I'd like to remind you of some of the services available to you as a member of the Gurteen Knowledge Community.
If you would like to be an active member of the community and not just receive stuff then you should join the Gurteen Knowledge Community Group on LinkedIn.
It has over 3,500 members and is a great place to meet and have discussions with like-minded people.
You can join here: http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=1539
Here are my main engagements over the next six months or so.
Its prime purpose is to allow you to know where I will be so you can attend my public events if you wish or to meet or hire me.
You can see a list of my immediate activities below or you can find a full list here.
Two great newsletters worth taking a look at - Comments
If you have the time and the passion for reading newsletters then here are two that you may like to subscribe to.
Both are from people working broadly in my field and whom I greatly respect.
He reminds me a lot of the late Stephen Covey.
He looks a little like him, he sounds a lot like him and his presentation style is similar. At times, I even get the impression he was influenced by Stephen, especially when he talks about empathic listening.
In Googling him I was sad to discover that he died in 2011 not long after the this video was recorded.
He was one of the leading experts in verbal self-defence tactics and trained law-enforcement agencies around the world.
This is what Wikipedia says about Verbal Judo:
Verbal self-defense, also known as verbal judo,is defined as using one's words to prevent, de-escalate, or end an attempted assault.
It is a way of using words as a way to maintain your mental and emotional safety.
This kind of "conflict management" involves using posture and body language, tone of voice, and choice of words as a means for calming a potentially volatile situation before it can manifest into physical violence.
This often involves techniques such as taking a time-out, deflecting the conversation to less argumentative topics, and/or redirecting the conversation to other individuals in the group who are less passionately involved.
The benefit of Verbal Judo is clear when it comes to law enforcement but I think there is much we can all learn from the concept when we get into "arguments" with people whether in the workplace or in the family.
Too often when someone gets emotionally upset and angry with us, we pour fuel on the flames and not water.
If you have any interest in education then this is well worth the read. Here are a few excerpts that resonated with me and might wet your appetite.:
School, he thinks, has turned into a funnelling process for Universities. This is a big mistake. His solution is to have lots of curricula and allow people to follow their curiosity and interests, as this is what drives real, meaningful and useful learning, as opposed to memorisation and hoop jumping
Schank ... wants to abandon lectures, memorisation and tests. Start to learn by doing and practice, not theory. Stop lecturing and delivering dollops of theory. Stop building and sitting in classrooms. We need to teach cognitive processes and acquire skills through the application of these processes, not fearing failure.
I always like it when someone gives a name or a label to a concept that has taken a sentance to describe in the past.
Often its a simple metaphor that makes it easy to remember.
In this case, I like the concept of "working out loud".
In other words, doing your work transparently in such a way that other people can "see it" or as John Stepper says narrating your work and making it observable.
Yes, I realise we are mixing metaphors here LOL
Harold Jarche has some thoughts on how to get started.
It's really quite easy.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: December 2012 - Comments
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for November 2012 - December 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.
Euan Semple @euan rants about IT and losing our grip on reality http://bit.ly/S99HLK /we are in big trouble
Why conversational skills are needed to create a high-performance, engaged, networked organization http://bit.ly/U2t1JH #kcafe
Earlier this month Google+ rolled out a new feature called Google+ Communities, which is similar to Facebook Groups.
Google+ allows you to create public or private communities.
Up until now I have not been a big user of Google+ but the communities might just make all the difference
and so I have created a
Google+ Gurteen Knowledge Community.
I am not too sure how this will develop given the active LinkedIn forum but let's see.
I much prefer the implementation of the Google+ communities to the LinkedIn Groups as they are easier to use and more functional.
There is also not the annoying Linkedin limit where you can not be a member of more than 50 groups.
Incidentally, there seem to be a number of interesting communities emerging on Google+. This one on
Conversation I particularly like.
You may recall that I am getting married on 27 December to Leni so this Christmas is going to be a very special one for me and my family.
Here's wishing you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year too :-)
"There is no way I share my ideas" : how to modify this behaviour in a corporate culture?
3 days ago, I had a conversation with a friend who told me ironically: "Why should I share my ideas? Ideas are valuable, they give power. If I have a good idea, it will help me in my career, but if I share it someone else could steal it".
Even though it was a joke, I believe this is the kind of attitude we may find in some organisations. And I don't have any answer to this type of barrier!
Some differences between the knowledge cafe and the world cafe - Comments
I always say when I describe my knowledge cafe process that anything that gets in the way of the free flow of the conversation is a bad thing.
I took part in a world cafe recently and it reminded me what I don't like about the world cafe process (as it is often run) and why I do things differently in my knowledge cafe.
First: No hosts. I do not have any table leaders in my knowledge cafes unlike the world cafe that has table hosts.
One of the principles of my knowledge cafes is that everyone is equal.
At the table I was sitting, like all other tables, we were asked to appoint a host.
Immediately, one of the men in my group decided he was going to drive the selection process; he stated why he would not make a good host and why others at the table were not appropriate and told one specific member that he would make the best host as he was an academic.
The person in question accepted the nomination. I don't know if he was happy or unhappy but he was put in a position where he had little say in the matter and now as host he would effectively not be part of the conversation as he needed to take notes (mental or otherwise) to pass on the gist of the conversation in the next round. Sure enough he took little part in the conversation.
Second: No flip charts. Flip charts seriously get in the way of the conversation.
In this case, another member of my group stood up, took a felt-tipped-pen and asked for ideas to list on the flip chart.
We started to call them out and he started to list them until I expressed a difference of opinion about one the points he was about to write down and a conversation started.
The process was in danger of falling into a list making session and not an open conversation.
And then third, in this world cafe, we moved as groups between tables, we did not mix - something else I do not like but is not a usual element of a world cafe.
When our group got to the third table, the table host took us though what the last group had discussed and had captured on a flip chart.
We were immediately drawn in to comment and build on the previous group's work and were struggling as there seemed to be so little value in it until a member of my group suddenly pointed out that the previous group had totally misunderstood the question.
There was some value in this but we had fallen into the trap of being too greatly influenced by the previous group's work and were not approaching the question afresh and thinking for ourselves.
I came away reminded of why I designed my knowledge cafe differently to the world cafe.
That's not to say that the one process is better or worse than the other. Which format to chose should rest on the purpose of the cafe. And both cafe formats should always be adapted and blended to suit their purpose.
I need to give this a little more thought but my knowledge cafe tends to be divergent with less focus on capture where the world cafe tends to be more convergent with a greater emphasis on capture.
The Al Jazeera Cafe: not quite a conversation - Comments
The Al Jazeera Cafe is about bringing people together around a table, from all backgrounds, all walks of life, in different corners of the world.
Crucially, the show is always set, as the name suggests, in a cafe - whether in Amman, Jordan, Bradford England, or Mexico City, Mexico. There are no television studios, no invited audiences. Just a relaxed yet robust discussion on the key issues of the day in an intimate, everyday setting.
I travel across the globe, to talk with people on the ground about economic inequality, democratic reform, sectarian conflict and national identity.
The show is a democratic forum for ideas; the perfect platform for discussing global themes. And my guests range from ministers to bloggers, Islamists to secularists, Democrats to Republicans.
You will see passionate people arguing over controversial issues.
Whether it is the war on terror or the war on drugs, the death of multiculturalism or the rise of Islamophobia, The Cafe cuts through the spin and gets right to the heart of the subject.
This is a great idea but to my mind it is flawed. Watch this so called "conversation" The Cafe - One state or any of the conversations.
They are not conversations in a true sense.
Notice how Mehdi Hasan is really in charge. He is driving and controlling the conversation.
Often it is not even a conversation. He asks questions of an individual participant and they reply. It is a series of monologues.
Such a shame, its so close to being a unique piece of journalism but there is that need to control the conversation all the time.
Maybe I am expecting too much, maybe the control is necessary to keep the focus and extract the intellectual entertainment value out of the conversation.
I just wish, that at least once they would relax the controls and let it become a real conversation. One of equals.
Some of the Cafes' are a little better - this one on Kenyas unwinnable war for example.
For me it gets particularly interesting at 06.25 where Ken starts to talk about the top three HR priorities (engagement, talent retention and leadership development) and then ties them in to the role of conversation.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: November 2012 - Comments
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for October 2012 - November 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.
I just bought: "Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril" by Margaret Heffernan via @KindleUK http://amzn.to/UHXEC0 #KM
Blogs are potent teaching and learning tools - Comments
Donald Clark is a prolific and insightful blogger on all aspects of education, teaching and learning but I love him most for his recent talk Dont lecture me where he criticises the lecture as a form of teaching.
It was of course my exasperation with the lecture format that prompted me to design my knowledge cafes.
But coming back to blogs, when I first learnt about them and started blogging myself way back in March 2002, I immediately saw their potential as teaching and learning tools. Ten years later, to my mind, they have still not reached their full potential in this area.
Blogs are a potent and vastly underused teaching and learning tool. The habit of regular writing as a method of reflection, synthesis, argument and reinforcement is suited to the learning process. Blogs encourage bolder, independent, critical thinking, as opposed to mere note taking. For teachers they crystallise and amplify what you have to teach. For learners, they force you to really learn.
Introduction to the October 2012 Knowledge Letter - Comments
I came across this cartoon posted on Facebook recently. This was the conversation:
So ... what do you do?
I'm a cashier.
Oh I didn't mean what do you do for money?
... I mean what do you do for the world?
Credit: A visual image posted on Facebook - source unknown
It's an interesting question to ask yourself. I am not looking to judge. I am not too sure that I do a great deal. But is little or nothing an acceptable answer? And is bringing up a well balanced healthy family a sufficient answer. I don't know but as I say - worth reflecting on.
BNM KM Conference Knowledge Cafe Visuals Oct 2012 - Comments
A few weeks back at a KM conference run by Bank Negara Malaysia Knowledge Management Centre in Kuala Lumpur, I gave a talk on the Knowledge Cafe and the relationship of conversation to organisational performance.
They had a visual artist at hand to capture the talk that can be seen here as a slide show but maybe the best visual image that captured my talk in a single slide was drawn by Masitah Babjan.
Thanks everyone - its great to have the kcafe captured visually.
Introduction to the November 2012 Knowledge Letter - Comments
Its been a busy few months with trips to Rotterdam for a knowledge cafe workshop; Johannesburg for ICKM 2012 and an assortment of knowledge cafe engagements; the Central Bank of Malaysia KM Conference in Kuala Lumpur and the annual KM Asia Conference in Singapore where I ran knowledge cafe workshops and more recently to Dubai where I run a series of knowledge cafes for the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA).
My knowledge cafes and knowledge cafes workshops where I teach people the principles behind my kcafe process and how to facilitate them have taken over my life these last ten years since I first started to run them in London in September 2012.
I feel I have only just started to scratch the surface of what is possible with the knowledge cafes and similar face-to-face conversational tools and slowly I am better understanding the critical role of conversation in business.
There has been a recent book published Talk, Inc.:How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations where the authors
Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind show how effective leaders are adapting the principles of face-to-face conversation to pursue new forms of organizational conversation. Unfortunately the book only focuses on how senior management in many large organisations are starting to communicate with their employees through conversation and says little about how employees themselves can use conversation to communicate among themselves but it is a start.
In 2013, expect to see a lot more about "organizational conversation" from me.
Why, when an individual or maybe a small scattered group of people see the error of our ways - is it so hard to get others to see it too?
To me, this is a big part of what Knowledge Management should be about but sadly it is too often about a technology system such as SharePoint. Dave Snowden sumed this up very well recently with this witty quote:
SharePoint is to Knowledge Management, what Sick Stigma is to Innovation
David Pottinger in his post highlights this quote from the The Journal of Radiological Protection about Alice Stewart.
Had she been able to discuss her ideas more openly, accepting the criticism that is an inevitable part of the scientific life, she might have changed thinking in key areas - especially the risk of obstetric irradiation and the ante-natal origin of childhood tumours - more effectively and sooner than she did.
It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with someone who told me that whenever he hears someone say something that he thinks is wrong - he just has to "put them right" even if it means an end to the relationship.
To his mind attempting to putting things right is more important than the relationship. But if you forfeit the relationship you lose the opportunity to continue the conversation and get your point across or possibly see that you are the one who is in fact wrong or that the answer is context dependent or that there is an alternative view on which you can both agree.
We need to stop debating and arguing with each other and learn to converse more openly if we wish to understand the world better.
Dialogue is an opportunity to proceed as climbers do - Comments
I love Johnnie Moores blog - so many great little posts - so many wonderful insights.
But given my interest in conversation and dialogue I must point you to this recent post Climbing and dialogue. In it he quotes Antonio Dias:
Dialogue is an opportunity to proceed as climbers do.
We are tied together and are able to alternately anchor each other as we move into precarious territory.
We can rely on each other to warn us of dangers beyond our own views.
Within dialogue we can go where it is impossible to go any other way.
When I teach my Knowledge Cafe process many people have a problem that there are no traditional hard outcomes. This is what I say about the Knowledge Cafe:
A Knowledge Café is not about group decision making or reaching a consensus or a documented proposal. A Knowledge Café is about individual learning and insights; the surfacing of assumptions, issues, problems, and opportunities; seeing things that have not been seen before or seen only dimly.
Credit: David Gurteen
These are still outcomes - soft ones - not traditional hard ones. But there are few or no conclusions. Not that they are not needed in life at times - just that they are not the purpose of the KCafe.
Can being connected make us more successful and can social tools help? - Comments
Last week I held an open Knowledge Cafe at Capco in London where the theme/question of the evening was "Can being connected make us more successful and can social tools help?".
It was a good evening and I have posted a few photos on Facebook.
Several people told me it was one of the best they had been too for a long time. Now I am not too sure what ingredients go to make an exceptional knowledge cafe but maybe the wine had a lot to do with it
To my mind there is no doubt that being well connected can help contribute to one's professional success.
As you will be aware, I am a prolific networker as I have learnt over the years that this is where I not only get my best ideas and insights but also where pretty much all of my work comes from. I connect with people through the web and social media but more importantly at conferences and my open knowledge cafes face to face.
This recent article Never Say No to Networking by Kathryn Minshew sums it all up for me and in particular this passage:
I can't tell you the number of times I've gone to an event and exchanged a few warm sentences with someone I haven't connected with in a while only to hear from them a few days later: "This opportunity to speak / present / fundraise / partner / win an award crossed my desk, and I thought of you." Why did they think of me? Because I'm a good fit for the opportunity, and they saw me yesterday.
What do you think? Can being connected make us more successful and can social tools help?
You can join the conversation at my on-line LinkedIn Gurteen Knowledge Cafe Forum.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for September 2012 - October 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.
But the upshot of it all is that I now have my Introductory Knowledge Cafe down to a fine art having ran so many over the years.
Each one is customised and typically lasts 3 hours including a short coffee break and runs for between 20 to 30 people.
It's a great way for a small, often cross-functional group, within an organisation to learn what the knowledge cafe is all about in a very practical sense and to pick up on the concept and run them for themselves.
If you are interested in my running one for your organisation get in touch.
Gurteen Knowledge Cafe: SMARTlab at the University of East London
Knowledge Cafés as KM Tools. KM India 2010
Gurteen Knowledge Cafe at KMPAP 2006 in Hong Kong
Introduction to the Knowledge Cafe, Greenwich 2006
Friends With Cognitive Benefits: How friendly conversation can boost your cognitive abilities - Comments
Talking with other people in a friendly way can make it easier to solve common problems, a new University of Michigan study shows. But conversations that are competitive in tone, rather than cooperative, have no cognitive benefits.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan tested 192 undergraduates to determine which types of social interaction helped and which didn't.
The researchers concluded that engaging in short conversations where participants were instructed to get to know one another person boosted their performance on a variety of cognitive tasks.
When participants engaged in conversations that were competitive in nature, their performance on cognitive tasks showed no improvement.
"This study shows that simply talking to other people, the way you do when you're making friends, can provide mental benefits," says University of Michigan psychologist Oscar Ybarra, lead author and researcher of the study reported inSocial Psychological and Personality Science.
Explore the range of possibilities then experimentally evolve - Comments
I love the work of Dave Snowden as he questions so many things we take for granted.
One such thing he questions, is the idealistic approach we take to achieving things in this world.
I think these two quotes of Dave's sum up his view quite nicely.
In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it.
This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the "learning organization".
Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system.
Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted.
The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.
This of course would not be the right approach in the "simple domain" or "complicated domain" of his Cynefyn Framework such as putting a rover on the surface of Mars but would be a more realistic and innovative approach in the "complex domain" for the real challenging complex problems we face in the world such as hunger, poverty, terrorism, global warming, environmental destruction and more.
Dave has posted several other blog entries on Sidecasting if you are interested further.
A wonderful combination of a Knowledge Cafe and a Drum Cafe - Comments
As part of the opening ceremony at ICKM 2012 (the International Conference on Knowledge Management) in Johannesburg on 5 Sept 2012, I ran a Knowledge Cafe combined with a Drum Cafe facilitated by Warren Liebermann.
Knowledge Cafes bring people together to connect and to have conversations while Drum Cafes connect and energise people through Interactive Drumming. A wonderful combination.
In both cases the focus is not on the facilitator, but on the participants.
We broke the one hour session into 6 ten minute segments. Three for drumming and three for conversation.
A big thanks to Prof. Adeline du Toit who came up with the idea of a "joint cafe" and connected me and Warren.
This video playlist captures the energy and engagement in the room. It was a great way to connect people and to start the 2 day conference.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: September 2012 - Comments
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for August 2012 - September 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.
What is it like to be fully alive, right now, engaged with what you are doing? That's the psychology of flow http://bit.ly/OscOrq
A lesson about the benefits of an open society + the costs of excessive concentration of political + economic power http://read.bi/RZHoss
80% of companies in a recent survey said that they had KM initiatives under way.
Of those companies, 85% had no clear stated objectives for their KM initiative.
I am not too sure of the accuracy of this statistic but it certainly stacks up with all my experience
and gives added weight to my "Don't do KM" mantra and the KM talks that I give:
You don't do KM! You respond to business problems and develop business opportunities using KM tools.
This is what he says in conclusion, starting at 3:43 :
In the knowledge network ... the idea is ... that all learning should be in public and be something that makes the public better.
It improves the public. The act of learning, the act of education or teaching are done in public so that others will learn from.
And this idea of education as a public act has tremendous power, tremendous benefits, because it makes the entire network, the entire ecosystem smarter.
If we can apply this within our businesses, our educational system and beyond then our own knowledge network will become much smarter, much faster.
I agree with David. The potential to transform the world through open, public learning is huge and I beleive there is no stopping it.
If you don't know of him, David is a very interesting guy with some very deep knowledge and insights as to the nature of knowledge and learning. He has had a huge influence on my thinking on organizational conversation and my knowledge cafes.
Introduction to the September 2012 Knowledge Letter - Comments
Some people keep their private and professional lives apart. Facebook is reserved for family and close friends and Linkedin for professional contacts. Bloggers blog about their personal lives or their professional lives but never mix them.
Others, like myself, make little distinction between their professional and personal lives. In fact, I rarely think of a client as a client or a customer, I consider them friends.
And I use Facebook and Linkedin to connect with everyone I know though I do keep Facebook a little more personal.
I can think of one blogger who never ever blogs about his personal life and never strays off the topic of his profession
and I can think of others who largely stay on focus but will on occasions blog about their personal lives, often relating it to their work, and who will blog off topic on issues they are passionate about.
I find these bloggers who reveal something of themselves more authentic and more human and consequently more interesting. To me blogging is an innately personal experience.
It's also so much easier when you don't view your life as a series of different compartments, each with different rules, as then life gets pretty complicated.
But there is no right or wrong - you go with what you feel most comfortable with.
Those of you who know me, know that I often go way off topic and on rare occasions blog about my family.
Which leads me to a piece of very personal news that I would like to share with you.
My fiancee Leny joined me in the UK last Friday (Sept 14th 2012) from Jakarta. We are both so happy together and plan to get married at Christmas. I am so looking forward to our life together.
Introduction to the August 2012 Knowledge Letter - Comments
Every month, I receive a half-a-dozen or so emails from people asking me all sorts of questions about knowledge management.
If I have the time and feel sufficiently knowledgeable in the area of their question then I do my best to reply but whether I can reply at length or not I always point them to the Gurteen Knowledge Community forum on LinkedIn.
Let me give you an example. Anita Malik recently emailed me to ask whether I thought the number of Communities of Practice in an organisation should be limited or unlimited.
I shared with her my view on the topic that they should not be too tightly controlled but I was well aware that many other people had different perspectives and experiences who could answer her question and help her far more than i ever could and so I pointed her to the forum
where you can see the lengthy discussion that emerged.
Clearly, Anita got far more out of this discussion than any answer I could ever have givne but the value is far, far greater.
By posing the question publically everyone who took part in that discussion got to learn and of course also those who on only read the thread benefited too.
And this discussion is now there as a record. If anyone asks me the same question again - then I can point them to the discussion and so can others.
This open or public form of learning is very powerful indeed and I believe over time will have a transformative impact on the world.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for July 2012 - August 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.
4 Ways to Avoid Paying for Hotel Wi-Fi http://on.mash.to/OTdJBh /I take my airport express with me - has saved a fortune
HR has a vital role to play in the management of knowledge resources, so why is it not generally happening? http://linkd.in/OW06Bp #KM #HR
Three Eras of Knowledge Management by Nancy Dixon @nancymdixon - YouTube http://bit.ly/OTetXd #KM
From Learning Management to Personal Knowledge Management http://bit.ly/MMybrS #KM
The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises. MGI's estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers -- high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals -- by 20 to 25 percent.
They hardly mention the term Knowledge Management never mind Social Knowledge Management in their report but this is what they are really talking about.
Death by degrees, certification and accreditation - Comments
If you are wrestling in your mind with the problems faced by education today or maybe more narrowly the issue of knowledge management certification and accreditation then I think you will find this article Death by Degrees a very provocative and stimulating read with a great deal to think about and reflect on.
Here is a taste:
The original universities in the Western world organized themselves as guilds, either of students, as in Bologna, or of masters, as in Paris.
From the first, their chief mission was to produce not learning but graduates, with teaching subordinated to the process of certification -- much as artisans would impose long and wasteful periods of apprenticeship, under the guise of "training," to keep their numbers scarce and their services expensive.
For the contemporary bachelor or master or doctor of this or that, as for the Ming-era scholar-bureaucrat or the medieval European guildsman, income and social position are acquired through affiliation with a cartel.
Those who want to join have to pay to play, and many never recover from the entry fee.
I have always been attracted to the idea of doing away with certificates, exams and all forms of testing and accreditation as I believe the downdside is too great -
see what Alfie Kohn has to say on the matter.
Having read the article, I am close to being convinced - imagine the joy of learning if it were untainted by tests, certificates and exams.
People are untrustworthy or is it just our bad judgement? - Comments
I love the perspective of Anthony de Mello when he says that its is not that people are untrustworthy but it is more about our lack of understanding of human nature and our own bad judgement.
In other words it is as much our fault as theirs when they let us down. In fact, he is putting it stronger than that - it is totally our fault.
You may not agree. It's hard to swallow but worth reflecting on :-)
A young man came to complain that his girlfriend had let him down, that she had played false. What are you complaining about? Did you expect any better?
Expect the worst, you're dealing with selfish people. You're the idiot -- you glorified her, didn't you? You thought she was a princess, you thought people were nice.
They're not! They're not nice. They're as bad as you are -- bad, you understand? They're asleep like you. And what do you think they are going to seek? Their own self-interest, exactly like you. No difference.
Can you imagine how liberating it is that you'll never be disillusioned again, never be disappointed again? You'll never feel let down again. Never feel rejected.
Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom?
Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them.
Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.
Stimulating conversation with the Marketing Cafe - Comments
Every so often I meet someone who comes along to one of my Knowledge Cafes or Knowledge Cafe workshops who immediately gets the concept and goes away and applies it their own domain.
Andrew Armour is one of those people and has become a good friend and a regular participant in my open London Knowledge Cafes.
But in a recent blog post on Stimulating Conversation And The Marketing Cafe
he talks about how he has adapted the knowledge cafe to create what he calls a Marketing Cafe - in other words a knowledge cafe that focuses the questions on marketing issues.
Naturally, I love it as the KCafe process can be taken and applied in so many different ways - something I teach in my workshops
Here are a couple of quotes from Andrew's blog post.
A lack of important conversation between the right people prevents many businesses from becoming truly innovative . Too often the important questions, the ones that may challenge the status quo and help paint a picture of the future – are left unasked or dominated by the usual suspects.
Most meetings, workshops and conferences are not viewed as an opportunity to converse, listen, build dialogue and explore solutions, but a means to present, report, control, persuade -- to control your own plan, to get buy-in, to approve or deny.
No wonder then, that when the time does arise for focused, innovative, open and progressive conversation that most of the time --we fail.
As many of you know Stephen Covey died recently.
I first discovered Stephen in 1990 when I bought his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
This book has gone on to sell over 25m copies and at one time I made my own little contribution to that number by giving copies to friends.
In 1993, I attended one of his Principle Centered Leadership courses at the Covey Leadership Centre in Utah. Interestingly, a good friend of mine at the time managed to get us a free invite. We only had to pay for our airfares.
It's no exaggeration to say that the book, the leadership course and Stephen's work changed my life.
It wasn't just what Stephen had to say but he introduced me to many other "mentors" such as Scott Peck, Henry David Thoreau and Viktor Frankl.
I use a number of quotations from Stephen in my presentations and workshops,
My favourite of his seven habits and the one I most teach is Habit 5.
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.
There are no solutions to anything. We don't solve problems we respond to them. - Comments
When I run my knowledge management workshops, one of the points I make strongly is that there are no solutions to complex problems.
There are always unforeseen and/or unintended consequences. Side-effects in other words.
I suggest to people that they never talk about solutions to problems, that they avoid the word "solution", so loved by IT vendors, and replace it with the word "response".
We don't solve problems we respond to them! We are walking on a trampoline.
Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it.
Problems morph and "solutions" often point to deeper problems.
In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline.
Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on.
Given this view, I warmed to this podcast interview with
James Howard Kunstler: Its Too Late for Solutions: Consequences are coming & we better start facing them soon.
As he points out, we are always looking for solutions to things - we want a quick fix so that we can carry on the way we are working now without realising that it is impossible.
We are discovering more and more is that the world is comprehensively broke in every sphere, and in every dimension and in every way.
There are no quick-fix solutions in this world, only responses.
Why are we suckers for fictional stories? - Comments
Every so often, I come across a little story that someone has shared or re-shared on Facebook, or Twitter or by email.
There is always something either touching or outrageous about it.
And for a moment, I am suckered in. But then I read the story again carefully and it just does not ring true or seems too good to be true.
So I Google it. Never takes long and find the true story.
These are just three I have spotted but I have been taken-in myself at times. Why are we suckers for such stories and worse still why do we pass them on without any due diligence?
I don't know. But please, next time you read a story that seems just a little too good to be true - check it out first before sharing it.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for June 2012 - July 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.
You will flourish by concentrating on aspects of life that you can control rather than by reacting to external forces http://on.wsj.com/Lugb3v
Whenever I am in the shower, walking, driving or sitting relaxing my mind wanders in thought and often I try to catch myself doing this and observe the nature of those thoughts.
What I have learnt is that my mid flits around at times quite aimlessly. I suspect that's the nature of all minds.
When I do this and observe my mind (I still find it amazing we have the ability to do this) I think of Emerson's quote and try to pull my thoughts back to the important things in my life.
Which reminds me of another quote from Henry David Thoreau who was mentored by Emerson.
Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, Simplify.
It's an interesting discussion on knowledge with over 200 comments.
What is amazing is the wide variety of definitions. Everyone has a different perspective.
For now, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions from that but you might like to take a look and see how your view stacks up against all the others and ponder whether this lack of a common understanding of knowledge is a problem for a knowledge management.
I recently ran a knowledge cafe workshop in Kuwait hosted by Bibi Alajmi and sponsored by VIVA - a Kuwaiti mobile telecommunications service provider.
As with all my workshops, it went well and reinforced for me that the Knowledge Cafe works in any culture - given the right environment people love to talk.
It also introduced me to the Kuwaiti dewaniya which was a lovely cultural surprise.
While there I also ran a Knowledge Cafe organised by VIVA for about 20 senior executives and CEOs from leading companies in Kuwait, including Zain, Wataniya Telecom, Gulf net, Fast-telco, Zajil Telecom, Mada Communications, Samsung Dealership, Hayat Communications, Future Communications Company, Quality Net, UPS, KNET and Kuwait Concierge.
The topic of the Cafe was "What are the future possibilities for the Kuwaiti MobileTelecoms Industry?
There was some interesting conversation, followed by even more conversation over lunch. You can find the
Viva press release if you are interested.
I wish I could say more about it but clearly the conversations were confidential.
What I did learn though is that using a Knowledge Cafe to bring senior executives together from different companies to have conversations over common interests with no predetermined outcomes is a very powerful tool indeed. There is a story here that I hope I may be able to share at some point.
The Dewaniya - a form of Kuwaiti Knowledge Cafe? - Comments
During my recent trip to Kuwait, I discovered a feature unique to Kuwaiti culture - a dewaniya.
While running a knowledge cafe workshop someone commented "So the Knowledge Cafe is a little like a dewaniya." - to which of course I replied "What's a dewaniya?"
It was explained to me at the time but since then I have done a bit of Googling and in addition to the Wikipedia definition I have constructed one of my own.
A dewaniya is a reception area where a man receives his business colleagues and male guests. The term refers both to a reception hall and the gathering held in it.
It takes place in the evening in a special room or annex which is usually separate from the rest of a man’s house.
Only men are present and they sit around on soft benches or cushions, conversing casually, smoking, nibbling snacks and relaxing over beverages such as tea, coffee or the like.
Relatives and friends come and go throughout the evening. The host's job is to be hospitable and entertain his guests.
What topped off my visit on the last evening was to be taken to a dewaniya by Dahem Alqahtani (a friend of my host Bibi Alajmi).
And I had a wonderful evening joining the other men in conversation. I was surprised how many had studied in England or were Manchester United fans :-)
It is a quite a fascinating idea and although not really a knowledge cafe - a great way to socialise and has got me thinking even more about the role of conversation in society. We need more opportunities and places to bring people together in conversation both in our business lives and our personal ones.
At school, did you ever question the class schedules? - Comments
I love it when people question things that are so deeply rooted that we take them for granted and never think of questioning them.
At school, did you ever question class schedules? In my day, every 40 minutes, a bell would ring and everyone in the school would shuttle from one class room to another for a different subject.
But why? Why was that considered a good way to learn? I've no idea!
What if we removed the passive course-to-course drudgery of the school day? What if there was no schedule?
What if students were left with a list of coyly worded benchmarks targeted at creating quality humans, and we just waited to see what they could do?
What if teachers were seen as mentors for projects designed to help students meet those benchmarks?
What if the students initiated these projects and the teachers spent their time recording TED-style talks that would serve as inspiration and help students generate benchmark-related ideas?
Another inspiring commencement speech, this time from David McCullough from Wellesley High School near Boston ( I almost lived there at one time, when I worked for Lotus Development in Cambridge back in 1989 ... so long ago now).
Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It’s what happens when you’re thinking about more important things.
Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view.
Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. Go to Paris to be in Paris, not to cross it off your list and congratulate yourself for being worldly.
Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion -- and those who will follow them.
And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself.
The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special.
Why Crowded Coffee Shops Fire Up Your Creativity - Comments
The next time you're stumped on a creative challenge, head to a bustling coffee shop, not the library.
Instead of burying oneself in a quiet room trying to figure out a solution, walking out of one's comfort zone and getting into a relatively noisy environment may trigger the brain to think abstractly, and thus generate creative ideas.
This works for me. Once or twice a week I head out to a local Starbuck's towards the end of the day and quote deliberately think about the things I am doing and am planning. It's where I get some of my best ideas.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for April 2012 - May 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.
Creating participatory conferences - challenging the assumptions http://bit.ly/pTR4um
Introduction to the June 2012 Knowledge Letter - Comments
I am still a little surprised when I talk, for example, to teachers and I ask "What do you think of flip teaching?" or "Do you like the work of Sal Kahn?" and I get the reply "What's flip teaching?" or "Who is Sal Kahn?".
Or, when I ask "Have you watched the TED talk by Dan Pink?" And they have not even heard of TED.
But its not just education, its in all spheres. It's not easy to keep up with the latest ideas and developments - the world is moving fast.
I keep up with things in my realm of interests through RSS and Twitter feeds and many of the other social media tools. But even then I miss stuff.
One of the things I try to do in this knowledge letter is to help disseminate emerging ideas and the work of leading thinkers.
If you read one item in this knowledge letter every third month then I think it worth my time, especially as I now have over 20,000 readers.
But coming back to some of those ideas and people with ideas. Here are five for you. If you haven't heard of them - they are worth a click through. All are YouTube playlists that I have curated.
I met with Karl-Erik Sveiby for a few beers while I was in Helsinki recently and was delighted to hear that he has just published a new book
Challenging the Innovation Paradigm
At one point early in our conversation, I agreed with Karl-Erik that it was mainly innovation that had got the world into the mess its in today. To which he replied "Well if innovation got us into this mess what makes us think that more innovation will get us out of it?"
An interesting point. Sounds like a potential great knowledge cafe conversation.
The problem with innovation is that there are often long term unintended and unforeseen consequences of that innovation. I am sure, for example, that the early technological pioneers of the industrial revolution did not think for one moment about the possibility of global warming.
What is really interesting is what inspired Karl-Erik to think about this in the first place.
It was his research into Aboriginal culture when he lived in Australia that resulted in an earlier book of his Travelling Lightly.
He learnt that the Australian Aborigines knew very well the risks and advantages of innovation and that there was a darker side - the environmental and society; consequences of new products.
Partly as a result of this awareness and taking responsibility for their community and those of other their civilisation lasted 40,000 years or more.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for April 2012 - May 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.
Formal education is bricks and mortar, social learning is clouds and streams http://bit.ly/Kn3QYm
RT @coachourselves: A must read on 70:20:10 development model from Charles Jennings http://bit.ly/JTORbL
Leading Issues in Social Knowledge Management - Comments
I am delighted that I'm the editor of a new book "Leading Issues in Social Knowledge Management" that has just been published by Academic Publishing International.
The book is a collection of ten academic papers that I have carefully selected to create the volume and I have also written a short editorial comment on each paper.
So I did the relatively easy bit, all the hard work was done by the contributors in this important emerging field. There are 19 contributors so a few too many to mention.
I have agreed with the publishers that members of my community may obtain GBP5.00 off the price of the book by entering "Gurteen5" in the discount code field when you place your order.
We sacrifice conversation for mere connection. Or do we? - Comments
If you are interested in the impact of the Internet and social media such as Facebook on interpersonal relationships and conversation then take a look at this article
Friends Without a Personal Touch or this one The Flight From Conversation by Sherry Turkle.
I am more in the Dave Cormier camp than that of Sheryl Turkle even though she is a Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Her observations just do not stack up with my own. For example, she says:
Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It's hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.
This in my experience is simply not true. How does the number of "friends" I have on Facebook (2,151 at the last count - yes I know many of them are not friends in the true sense - they are just connections - but that's not a problem) have any affect on the much smaller number of close friends that I have, that I do trust and can and do have real conversations with? It doesn't. In fact many of those friends I first met through the web.
Maybe some people do confuse mere connections with friends but I know many people who don't and who can enjoy and make the most of both type of relationships: close friends and loosely connected "friends".
But its far worse than this, as typified in Seth's example of someone cheating on a work-out by making the measure look good but avoiding doing the real exercise required to get fit.
It's a major problem and one that I am increasingly hearing about in the educational system. Students want the grade or the exam certificate (the metric) and will lie, cheat, plagiarise and even pay people to write their dissertations for them to obtain the metric.
The measure has replaced the objective of a good education. The goal has become achieving the metric at any cost.
What is as bad, are teachers and others in the educational system who also cheat to make their targets and are thus complicit with the students in totally undermining the worth and credibility of an exam result.
Interestingly, Seth has a large part of the answer in another blog post care more.
Its not about meeting the metric. Its about caring about what you are doing.
We are not human resources or human capital. We are human beings. - Comments
I think you know how much I dislike the term "human Resources" - its only marginally better than that awful term "human capital".
I have written about it before.
I do hope you realise that it was Catbert, Dilbert's evil feline Human Resources director, who invented the term human capital back in 2002 :-)
Video: A Gurteen Knowledge Cafe in Singapore, Feb 2012 - Comments
Earlier this year in February 2012, I ran an open Knowledge Cafe in Singapore.
The KCafe was very kindly hosted by William Chua, CEO of eLC, a training and learning organization in Singapore at the Brewerkz Riverside Point alongside the Singapore River.
This was not the first time I have held a knowledge cafe in a pub/bar though it was a first for Singapore. William and his staff did an excellent job organising the event with free food and beer to help along the conversation. A big thanks to you all.
If you have ever run knowledge cafes yourself or plan to run them then watch the start of the fourth video where I ask for someone to start the conversation. It takes 1 minute 15 seconds or so before someone takes the mike.
Believe me, standing at the front, that seemed more like for ever! And although I encourage people to start the conversation, I did not start it myself. I never have and I never will. If I am patient and wait long enough someone will always start.
Note also how the conversation got off to a slow start but once people get engaged and realise there is nothing to fear, the conversation gathers pace.
Also keep in mind, that a knowledge cafe works best with a smaller number of people where microphones are not needed and a circle can be formed at the end for the whole group conversation. In this situation, I encourage people to talk more to each other rather than report back to me or ask questions of me.
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.
Here are what I consider some of my more interesting Tweets for March 2012 - 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 2012 - 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.
Introduction to the March 2012 Knowledge Letter - Comments
I find it hard to believe that I have been blogging for ten years. My first blog post was on 26 March 2002. It wasn't much a post but it was a start.
Back then I was often laughed at for blogging. Few people in the business world saw their power. So much has changed in 10 years and more and more people are using blogs as powerful knowledge sharing tools but we still have a long way to go.
Here is a slightly modified version of an article I wrote for Inside Knowledge Magazine in 2006 on blogging and RSS feeds. I was using Bloglines as my RSS Reader then but it died a death a few years later and today I use Google Reader.
It is interesting to note how I called blogs by their full name "weblogs" - a form of the word that is rarely used today. And in the early days there was the concept of a knowledge-log or k-log - a term that never did catch on. My blog is still called the "Gurteen Knowledge Log"
I discovered weblogs back in 2002 when a colleague suggested I take a look at them. At first I stumbled across the mass of personal weblogs that held little interest for me but then I found a single weblog that changed my life.
It was unusual for a weblog in that it was co-authored by three people: Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston and Dave Reed. I knew all three of these gentlemen from my days with Lotus Development in Cambridge Mass. Dan Bricklin was the inventor of the spreadsheet VisiCalc back in 1982; Bob Frankston was his co-developer and Dave Reed was the Chief Architect for 1-2-3 in the late 80s.
Here were three exceptionally bright, talented people blogging about the development of the Internet - they were sharing their thoughts, musings and ideas out loud. Instantly I saw the value of weblogs as knowledge sharing tools and by the end of the evening I had developed and integrated a weblog into my own website!
Back then I used to tell people about weblogs and their potential whenever I had the opportunity but few took the time to listen or understand. After one talk I gave on weblogs at a conference, a member of the audience was overheard to say "We have been blogged and klogged to death by David Gurteen." To which his friend replied "Yes he really ought to get a life." I still chuckle about this today.
But in the intervening four years more and more people have come to see the power of weblogs as powerful social tools - tools that allow people to share, learn and collaborate. But I am still shocked at people's head-in-the-sand mentality at times. Recently when I mentioned weblogs to a senior manager he replied "Oh you mean the ramblings of the ill-informed". When I explained their power I was greeted with the response "But how do people find the time to read them; never mind write them. They need to get a life".
But it's not about lack of time - we are already overloaded. It's about a lack of understanding of their benefits and prioritising our time accordingly. I subscribe to thirty or so RSS feeds - news channels that get pushed to my own personal "newspaper" each day. Some of these feeds are from the BBC and other mainstream media but many of the feeds come from weblogs and websites.
My RSS reader keeps me informed of all the things that are important to my professional development. The information obtained in them I could find no where else - not in books, magazines, newspapers or TV. I keep abreast of new products; new technologies and new ideas. I simply could not do my job without them!
So I still find it surprising when I come across against such resistance to weblogs and RSS readers. Too many people, to my mind, are prejudiced against them without ever taking the time to really understand what they are really about and their benefits.
You don't have to write a blog to benefit. Find an RSS reader such as Google Reader and start to subscribe to just a few of the millions RSS feeds on the web. Very soon you will wonder how you ever survived without it
Credit: Inside Knowledge Magazine 2006, David - Get a Life! by David Gurteen
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 2012 - 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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