Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 305 - November 2025

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 305 – November 2025

Earlier this month, while preparing a presentation on ‘Innovation Through Conversation’ for a learning and sharing network for legal sector knowledge managers (KMers) run by Helene Russell here in the UK, I revisited a similar talk I gave in 2022 for Dubai Municipality.

In that talk, I explored the coffeehouses of Enlightenment London, the salons of Paris and Vienna, and how both contributed to shaping the modern world. I then looked at Benjamin Franklin’s Junto Club in the American colonies and the innovations it inspired, before returning to the UK to reflect on my own Knowledge Café.

The message was simple: create spaces for meaningful conversation. Whether it’s a coffee shop, a salon, a café, or a Junto Club, what matters is bringing people together to think, talk, and learn.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to watch the video. It’s about 20 minutes before the Q&A, and I hope it may inspire you to create your own conversational space.

I’ve given variations of this talk several times. If you’d like me to provide one for your organisation, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. If you’re interested, I offer several other cafés and talks. You can find details here.

All these talks can be delivered face-to-face or online and can take the form of a presentation or a Café-Style Discussion.

1. Expanding the Great Conversation
   How Substack helps keep humanity’s oldest dialogue alive
   
2. The Courage to Think in Public
   Speaking before your thoughts are fully formed
   
3. The One Truth That Makes Life Simpler
   How accepting life’s difficulty leads to inner peace
   
4. The Biggest Mistake in Knowledge Management
   Managing documents is not the same as managing knowledge
   
5. Why Chatgpt Can’t Make You a Better Writer
   Meaning comes from intent not from smarter prompts
   
6. Help Keep My Work Alive
7. Coaching
8. Unsubscribe
9. Gurteen Knowledge Letter

I find myself increasingly drawn to Substack. I love the range of voices there. Some are well-known thinkers, but many are simply ordinary people writing with passion, depth, and insight that often surprise and delight me.

These days, I try to publish one post a week on Substack. That feels about right—enough to stay part of the conversation without overdoing it. I’m still maintaining my blook, blog and newsletter, expanding and refining both, so I’m doing a fair amount of writing altogether.

Perhaps that’s what I enjoy most. It feels like taking part in the Great Conversation—adding my voice to a long, unfolding dialogue that connects us across time and place. The Great Conversation is the ongoing exchange of ideas through which humanity explores what it means to live, to think, and to understand. From ancient philosophers to modern writers, each generation listens, responds, and adds something new. Substack, in its own way, is simply the latest fire around which we gather to keep that conversation alive.

I’ve been reflecting on what it means to think in public, to speak before my thoughts are fully formed, to risk being wrong, to let others see the process rather than the conclusion. It’s uncomfortable. Most of us prefer the safety of private certainty, shaping our ideas quietly until they feel solid enough to share.

Real thinking doesn’t happen in isolation. It occurs in the space between people, in conversation, where ideas are tested, stretched, and sometimes undone. That’s what makes it both risky and alive.

To think aloud is to reveal your mind before it’s made up, to open yourself to being changed. It takes confidence.

Maybe intelligence isn’t about having the best argument, but about daring to think together.

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.

It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.

Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult.

Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Credit: Scott Peck

These are the opening words of The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck and one of my favorite quotations. Peck calls it a “great truth” because once we truly see it, we transcend it. When we accept that life is difficult, its difficulty no longer controls us.

Many of us live under the assumption that life should be easy, and when it isn’t, we feel that something has gone wrong. Yet problems are not signs of failure; they are the fabric of life itself.

The paradox, as Peck suggests, is that life becomes easier once we stop expecting it to be easy. Acceptance changes our relationship with difficulty. It replaces frustration with understanding and struggle with purpose.

A few years ago, I was speaking at a Knowledge Management event in Saudi Arabia when the opening keynote began with the familiar phrase:

“Knowledge management is about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that, even then, people were still conflating information with knowledge. Yet it happens all the time. Many organizations that claim to practise Knowledge Management are, in reality, doing little more than managing documents, reports, and repositories. In other words, information,

Even today, I still see people referring to SharePoint as a “Knowledge Management System” or, worse, a “Knowledge Management Solution.” Let me be clear: SharePoint has little, if anything, to do with Knowledge Management.

If that statement surprises you, I’ve explained the distinction in my blook. I also have a more colorful post on my Substack, titled 'Where Knowledge Goes to Die', which gained several supporting comments on LinkedIn.

If you spend a lot of time writing with GenAI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, this Substack post, The Vending Machine Mistake, is well worth a read. It offers a clear reflection on how these tools shape the writing process.

The author argues that the real difference between generic AI output and meaningful writing isn’t prompt technique but whether we already have something to say. AI can help us test ideas, clarify meaning, and strengthen our voice, but it cannot provide the substance or intent behind our words.

For almost 25 years, I've been sharing the Gurteen Knowledge Letter each month, and many of you have been reading it for five years or more. My Knowledge Café also reached a milestone, celebrating its 20th anniversary in September 2022.

If my work has made a difference to you, I'd be grateful if you could consider supporting it. A small monthly donation or any one-off contribution would greatly help cover some of my website hosting costs.

Thank you to the 50+ patrons who have already supported me - your generosity means a great deal.

If you're curious about how a more conversational approach might shift the way you work with others, whether in leading, learning, or collaborating, I offer one-to-one coaching tailored to your context.

We explore real challenges and possibilities through dialogue, helping you develop your own way of practicing Conversational Leadership in daily work.

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The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a free monthly email newsletter designed to inspire thinking around Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management. You can explore the archive of past issues here.

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David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom