First, my apologies for an exceptionally short Knowledge Letter this month - what with moving house and a recent trip to Hong Kong for KM Asia (a great conference by the way given its first time in Hong Kong after 14 years in Singapore) I am way behind on everything.
I also had a trip to Cork in Ireland (happened to be there the same day as Tim Cook) to run a special Knowledge Café. Let me explain.
In my experience the Knowledge Cafe works best for between 12 to 24 people though I often run Cafes for 50 people or more
but I never feel they work well at that size even though I know the World Cafe community seem to run them quite happily with a hundred or more participants.
So when I was asked to run a Café for Johnson & Johnson Ireland for 100 managers at a networking event in Cork, I was a little unsure of how well it would work.
But in our discussions, what I thought to be a viable design emerged - to run four Cafes concurrently and synchronously in the same room.
That's 25 people in each Cafe - an ideal number. Each Cafe was quite separate and each on a different topic under an overarching theme and a different trigger question.
I was just a little nervous having not tried this before but it worked amazingly well.
Give me a few weeks and I will have it all written up along with some photos and video to share with you.
And a big thanks to Johnson & Johnson for giving me permission to share the outline of the event and the photos with you.
