Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 306 - December 2025

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 306 – December 2025

This year marked a personal milestone. Since the Knowledge Summit in Dubai began 10 years ago, I have hoped to include Knowledge Cafés in the programme. Thanks to Muna Madadha from the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, it finally happened.

Muna and her team created a dedicated space for the Cafés that worked remarkably well. Over the two days, several of the Knowtalks were followed by Knowledge Cafés, giving participants the chance to move from listening to talking and to explore the ideas in a more conversational setting.

You can learn more about the event here.

I would love to see conferences become more interactive and conversational, and this Knowledge Summit, with its dedicated room, felt like a genuine step toward that. If you would like me to host one or more customized Knowledge Cafés for you, please get in touch.

1. Think KM Started in the 90s? Wrong! It Started in the Stone Age.
   How language and conversation became our first knowledge tools
   
2. All Are Responsible
   While some hold guilt, we all share responsibility
   
3. Where Knowledge Goes to Die
   Most reports look like knowledge, but they’re really memorials to it
   
4. The Folded Vs. the Braided
   Understanding the difference between complicated and complex
   
5. Discovering Pol.is Through the Lens of Dialogic Education
   The pol.is experiment in Taiwan is shaping digital democracy
   
6. Help Keep My Work Alive
7. Coaching
8. Unsubscribe
9. Gurteen Knowledge Letter

We tend to think that Knowledge Management was born in the 1990s. That it arrived with databases, intranets, and strategy decks promising to “leverage intellectual capital.” But that is a fiction. Knowledge Management began much earlier, 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, not in offices or labs, but around a fire.

Anthropologists call it the Cultural Big Bang or the Great Leap Forward. Yuval Harari, in Sapiens, called it the Cognitive Revolution. Whatever name you choose, something remarkable happened. After millions of years of slow biological evolution, we began to evolve culturally.

In a short burst of time, we began painting on cave walls, crafting tools with purpose, and burying our dead with ritual. What changed was not our anatomy but our capacity to share meaning.

Three abilities emerged that transformed us:

• Language: the power to communicate complex ideas and intentions.
• Gossip: the social glue that allowed larger groups to cooperate and build trust.
• Abstraction: the capacity to talk about things that don’t physically exist: love, justice, gods, and dreams.

This was the original knowledge revolution. For the first time, we could preserve knowledge outside our own minds and pass it on through stories, songs, and shared practices. We stopped being creatures of instinct and started becoming custodians of memory.

Knowledge Management, in this sense, is as old as humanity itself. It began when we learned to remember together, when information stopped dying with the individual and began living in the collective.

What we call Knowledge Management today is simply the latest version of this ancient practice. The tools have changed, from fireside tales to IT systems, but the purpose remains the same. We are still struggling with the same challenge our ancestors faced: how to keep what we’ve learned alive, how to pass it on, and how to make sense of it together.

So perhaps it’s time to admit the truth. Knowledge Management didn’t begin with consultants or technology. It started with conversation, as people talked, taught, and wondered aloud. It began the moment we became human.

In a free society, all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty; all are responsible.

Credit: Abraham Joshua Heschel

I love quotations, and given my interest in responsibility (I have written a lot about it in my blook), I had to include this quote. Heschel’s point is that guilt rests with individuals, but responsibility is shared.

Even when only one person commits a wrongful act, the wider community has shaped the conditions that made it possible.

In a free society, we all have a duty to create norms and institutions that prevent injustice from taking root.

A report is a place where knowledge goes to die. So is a book. Once knowledge is written down, it stops moving. It loses its life.

Think of a butterfly. A living butterfly is alive in motion, sensing, responding, adapting. It belongs to the world around it. Its life is inseparable from its flight.

Now think of a butterfly pinned in a display case. It still looks like a butterfly, but it isn’t one. It can’t fly, it can’t feed, it can’t feel the air. What’s left is only the form, the idea of a butterfly, not the living thing itself.

That’s what happens when knowledge is turned into information. Knowledge lives in people, in conversation, in action, in shared understanding. It changes as we change.

Information, on the other hand, is static. It has the shape of knowledge, but not its life.

We need our reports, our books, our databases, but we shouldn’t confuse them with living knowledge.

If we want knowledge to stay alive, we have to keep it in motion. Talk about it. Question it. Share it. Let it evolve.

Otherwise, all we’ll have are beautifully pinned butterflies, perfectly preserved, and quite dead.

Reports and books are where knowledge goes to die.

A few days ago, I was watching a video of Dave Snowden and Nora Bateson in conversation, and as usual, Dave offered some fascinating insights. One that particularly resonated was his suggestion that the difference between “complicated” and “complex” can be clearly understood through their etymology.

Both words share the prefix com- (together), but their root verbs are different:

• Complicated comes from the Latin plicare (to fold). A complicated system has many folded parts that can be unfolded and analyzed by an expert to find a solution. Think of a very intricate piece of origami.
• Complex comes from the Latin plectere (to braid or twine). A complex system’s parts are braided together, and their interwoven nature creates unpredictable, emergent behavior that you can only truly understand in retrospect.

This distinction perfectly mirrors the Cynefin Framework: Complicated systems can be solved, while Complex systems must be navigated.

I have grown increasingly fond of etymology, although the interest is relatively recent. It began when I stumbled upon the origins of the word conversation, which opened up an entirely new way of seeing the practice. Since then, the roots of words like curiosity and faith have proved equally fascinating. It is often worth taking a moment to trace the history of terms that matter in our work, since their lineage offers a richer and more enjoyable sense of what they mean.

I'm following the work of Professor Rupert Wegerif at the University of Cambridge. His focus on dialogic learning resonates strongly with my work on Conversational Leadership. We also share a belief that better dialogue and better conversation can help shape a better world and strengthen democracy.

In a recent paper of his, A dialogic theoretical foundation for integrating generative AI into pedagogical design, he highlights a democracy experiment in Taiwan called pol.is.

It is well worth exploring. The experiment offers a thoughtful glimpse into what large-scale digital dialogue can become when it is designed to highlight areas of agreement rather than amplify conflict. It shows that when people are given tools that surface patterns in what they value, rather than tools that reward argument, a different kind of public conversation begins to emerge.

It also suggests that collective understanding is not as elusive as we sometimes assume. With the right structures, people with very different views can still recognize shared priorities and articulate them clearly. The approach hints at a future in which governments, communities, and civic groups might draw on similar methods to build more inclusive and constructive forms of participation.

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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David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom