Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 317 - November 2026

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 317 – November 2026

I ran my first Knowledge Café in London on 5 September 2002. It’s hard to believe that next year will mark 25 years since that first event!

Over the years, I’ve run Knowledge Cafés in many countries, met some wonderful people, and learned a great deal about conversation, culture and how people think together. These days, I mainly run them online, where they work remarkably well.

About once a year, I run a workshop to share what I’ve learned about hosting them. My next one is on Tuesday 8 December.

One thing I love about Knowledge Cafés is their simplicity. You don’t need to be a professional facilitator to run one. In fact, I prefer to think of the role as that of a dinner party host. You create the conditions for good conversation and let people do the rest.

They’re also wonderfully adaptable. You can run them face-to-face or online, with small groups or large ones, for all sorts of purposes. In the workshop, I’ll share examples of how I’ve used and adapted them over the years, and how others have made them their own.

After nearly 25 years, I remain as enthusiastic about Knowledge Cafés as ever. If you’d like to learn how to host one yourself, I’d love you to join me.

Find out more about the workshop

1. Why I've Been Exploring Consciousness
   Why understanding consciousness matters when we talk to AI
   
2. Who Are We Talking to When We Talk to an AI?
   The illusion of someone on the other side of the conversation
   
3. Empathy: A Skill or a Disposition?
   Why empathy is more about who we are becoming than what we learn to do
   
4. Quote of the Month
   November 2026
   
5. Reading Worth Your Time
   Curated links, November 2026
   
6. Upcoming Events
   Talks, Knowledge Cafés and Workshops
   
7. Keep My Work Alive
Sustaining 25 Years of shared learning and conversation
8. Coaching
Bringing Conversational Leadership into your daily practice
9. Unsubscribe
Unsubscribe to the Knowledge-Letter
10. Gurteen Knowledge Letter
A monthly reflection on Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management

My work on Conversational Leadership has increasingly led me to explore how we think and converse with AI. As AI becomes more capable, conversations with it are becoming remarkably human-like. We are approaching a point where, unless we are told, we may find it difficult to distinguish a conversation with an AI from one with another human being.

But there is an important difference. However human an AI may appear, it works in ways that are fundamentally different from the human mind. It can reason, respond, ask questions and appear to understand us, but does it actually experience anything? Is there anything it feels? Could it ever be conscious?

These questions matter because how we understand the nature of AI shapes how we relate to it, how much we trust it, and how we engage with it in conversation. We can easily treat AI as though it were human, without stopping to consider what that might mean.

This has prompted me to explore the nature of consciousness, not because I expect to settle whether AI is conscious, but because I want to understand what consciousness is and why it matters.

The result is a new chapter in my blook, simply titled Consciousness. It begins with a straightforward explanation of what we mean by consciousness, then explores subjective experience, the hard problem of consciousness, consciousness in other animals, its relationship with intelligence and, inevitably, the question of whether AI could ever be conscious.

I've learned a great deal in writing it, and it has certainly challenged some of my own assumptions. We still don't understand much, and I suspect some of the most interesting questions are the ones we have no clear answers to.

But one thing seems increasingly important to me. As AI becomes more human-like in conversation, we need to become more thoughtful about what makes us human and what makes AI different. Understanding consciousness may help us do that.

When we interact with an AI, it's remarkably easy to feel we're engaging with another human being. Not just through text or voice, but increasingly through facial expressions, gestures and body language. As AI can see and respond to us in real time, that feeling will only grow stronger.

Even when we know we're not talking to a human, we can still feel there's some coherent entity on the other side, perhaps even a conscious one.

But look behind the scenes, and it's largely smoke and mirrors. There's no single, unified entity there. Just an extraordinarily complex system of computations creating the impression of one.

So why does it feel like there's someone there? That's the question I explore in Who Are We Talking to When We Talk to an AI?

While reflecting on conversational awareness recently, I thought about empathy. I knew I had written a short piece about it some time ago, so I went back to look at it again.

What struck me was that I had placed empathy among conversational skills and described ways of developing it as a series of techniques. I had suggested things like active listening, putting ourselves in another person's shoes, and engaging with people from different backgrounds.

None of these suggestions was wrong, but something about how I framed empathy no longer felt quite right.

It seemed to suggest that empathy was something we could learn to perform by following a set of techniques. We could listen attentively, ask thoughtful questions, and express concern, giving every appearance of empathy, without genuinely caring about or understanding the other person.

There is a difference between performing empathy and genuinely feeling it.

I began to think of empathy less as a skill and more as a disposition, a way of being. It grows from genuine curiosity about others, care for their experiences and a willingness to see the world from their point of view.

Of course, conversational skills matter. But developing empathy is not simply about becoming more skilful in conversation. It is also about who we are becoming: more curious, more open, more attentive to others and more willing to be changed by what we hear.

So I decided to rewrite my short piece on empathy.

It's still a relatively brief exploration, and there's undoubtedly more to say. But I think I've made an important shift in how I understand it.

And perhaps the same question applies more broadly to Conversational Leadership. Is becoming a better conversationalist primarily about learning new skills, or is it also about becoming a different kind of person?

Each month, I feature a quotation that I have found particularly thought-provoking. If you enjoy it, you might also like my Quote of the Day service, which delivers a carefully selected quotation by email at a frequency you choose. You can browse the collection and subscribe here:

Free group discussion is to thinking (ideas and abstractions) as handling things is to perception.

Credit: Melanie Abercrombie

Comment: Just as handling objects enhances perception, free group discussion sharpens thinking by making abstract ideas tangible through shared exploration—a core principle in Conversational Leadership.

Each month, I share three articles that made me stop, think, and sometimes rethink my own assumptions. I hope they stimulate your thinking as much as they did mine.

How the Best Leaders Shape Conversations

Alison Wood Brooks and Andy Atkins argue that team effectiveness depends less on how often they meet than on the quality of their conversations. They introduce the idea of *conversational stewardship*, the deliberate shaping of conversations to help people think, collaborate and make decisions together. I was particularly struck by their description of conversation as the operating system of collaboration. It comes very close to the heart of what I mean by Conversational Leadership. Read the article

Nobody Is a Good Listener

Rod Naquin challenges the familiar idea that listening is an individual skill. Drawing on his research into everyday leadership conversations, he suggests that people create listening together, often without fully realising how they respond to and adapt to one another. I particularly like this shift in perspective. It reminds us that conversation is not simply an exchange between two independent minds, but something that emerges through their interaction. Read the article

Most of Your Intelligence Isn't Yours

Carlo Iacono questions how much of our intelligence really belongs to us as individuals. Our brains have changed relatively little over thousands of years, yet our knowledge and capabilities have grown enormously through language, culture, tools and the accumulated discoveries of others. His argument resonates with my recent thinking about distributed cognition and our growing dependence on AI. Perhaps intelligence has always been less about what we know individually and more about what we can accomplish together. Read the article

I host regular Knowledge Cafés, both in person in London and online via Zoom. Open to all, they provide an opportunity for shared learning, reflection, and conversation.

My next Zoom Café, “Are we offloading our thinking to AI?”, takes place on Tuesday 3 November 2026, 14:00 to 15:30 GMT (London time). We will explore cognitive offloading: when AI helps us think more deeply, and when it may spare us the thinking through which we learn. Details and registration.

On Tuesday 8 December 2026, 14:00 to 18:00 GMT (London time), I will run an online Gurteen Knowledge Café Workshop, teaching you how to design and host your own Cafés, both face-to-face and online. The workshop is practical and conversational, with opportunities to experience the Café process for yourself. Details and registration.

I also run tailored Knowledge Cafés for organisations, networks, and professional societies. For more information, see here.

For 26 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.

If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please reply to this email with "no newsletter" in the subject line. I'll be sorry to see you go.

The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a free monthly email newsletter, in its 25th year, designed to inspire thinking on Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management. You can explore the archive of past issues and subscribe here.

Feel free to share, copy, or reprint any part of this newsletter with friends, colleagues, or clients, as long as it's not for resale or profit and includes proper attribution. If you have any questions, please contact me.

David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom