I love his work and as you can see from this web page I have been blogging about him since 2002.
I have now just discovered a video of his talk at KM World last year on facilitating knowledge sharing.
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.
I know which approach I choose.
