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.
