Welcome to the Gurteen Knowledge Log for 2017-2018. See the side panel for other years.
In this blog I write about items of interest that I have found on the web, experiences or insights that I think you will find useful mainly but not strictly limited to the area of Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning.
Like the rest of my site - it an eclectic mix.
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Talk to strangers: As a child, we are taught not to talk with strangers, and as a 4-year-old with little experience of the world, this probably sound advice. But as an adult, talking with strangers may be remarkably rewarding.
If we are to encourage engagement and ownership not buy-in then we must stop trying to do things to each other.
So many of the problems that we face in our organizations and society revolve around the fact that we are always trying to do things to each other - to change or manipulate them.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: November 2020 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Intelligence is suitable for solving well-defined problems, such as mathematical, physical, or technical problems. However, social issues are often much less definable & do not have an unambiguous answer. They require not only intelligence but wisdom. https://buff.ly/3m8MGIE
“Powerful questions are those that, in the answering, evoke a choice for accountability and commitment." -- Peter Block https://buff.ly/3fntQeh #ConversationalLeadership /I really love this insight by Peter Block
'To Fika' is a Swedish word meaning to ‘meet up, have a coffee and a chit-chat'. Scandinavians love to meet up for a Fika. This can be done at any time – and a Fika can take anything from 10 minutes to several hours https://buff.ly/32XaNCn #ConversationalLeadership /love it!
Myths that Prevent Real Conversations | Jeff St. John https://buff.ly/2HHsNth #ConversationalLeadership
Polarization: The Power of Dialogue and the Problem of Implicit Bias by @nancymdixon https://buff.ly/3mS6JuL #dialogue #polarization #bias #ConversationalLeadership
It's impossible to see the world as it is, argues a cognitive neuroscientist | Aeon Videos https://buff.ly/2JT5iLx #reality #neuroscience
Daniel's central interest is civilization design: developing new capacities for sense-making and choice-making, individually and collectively, to support conscious, sustainable evolution.
The fifth video in the series was recently released and like the first in the series it is quite a blockbuster. I cannot recommend these talks more highly. Do take the time do watch them, if only a little, I don't think you will be disappointed. I have indexed the first, second and fifth in the series to make it easier for you to dip in at various points depending on your interests.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Facing each other, looking into the eyes, confiding—all those behaviors reflect and build trust. “There is no substitute for face-to-face interaction to build up this trust.” https://buff.ly/35gMKjX #ConversationalLeadership #trust
Don't Assume; Empathize First https://buff.ly/3dJ1nP8 /Misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions are behind most conflicts - great advice here when engaging in difficult conversations #ConversationalLeadership
A baker's dozen of knowledgeable KM practitioners at this year's KM World Knowledge Café: Mentoring Mixer. The event is virtual so you can join from anywhere in the world. https://lnkd.in/ddA2ipN #KMWorld #KM #KMers #KnowledgeCafé #ConversationalLeadership
“Critical thinking begins with the assumption that our beliefs could be in error, and if they are, that we will revise them accordingly. This is what it means to be humble.” @peterboghossian https://buff.ly/2MligjF
Given my interest in how we form and how we might change our beliefs through conversation I have been excited to discover the work of Anthony Magnabosco and Street Epistemology.
Street Epistemology is a conversational tool that helps people reflect on the quality of their reasons and the reliability of their methods used to derive their confidence level in their deeply-held beliefs.
Watch the videos here (especially the tutorial) to see how Anthony gently, thoughtfully and respectfully questions people about their beliefs with a view not to changing them but to help reflect on the evidence that underpins them.
He has drawn his method from the work of Peter Boghossian. You will find more information about the techniques he uses in Peter's book on Impossible Conversations.
Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World - Comments
I received an email from Cognitive Edge a day or two ago to announce a new book: "Cynefin – Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World" and I have clipped this description from the email:
This weekend, we unveiled the first Cynefin book formally published by Cognitive Edge. It is a beautiful publication that chronicles the origin story and historical evolution of the framework, personal vignettes where network members share how it has impacted their lives, and reflections by practitioners on how they have applied it across many diverse contexts. More than anything though, it is a testament to the passion and goodwill that exists in the global Cynefin network.
The journey started in June 2020 when we realised that Cynefin would be coming of age in October. Sonja Blignaut came up with this hare-brained scheme, and pinged Zhen Goh on a Zoom call. Let's crowdsource a book as a surprise for Dave. Over the next four months, we were humbled by the generosity of the people in our network. With one or two exceptions, all the people we invited to be part of this adventure agreed. Marion Kiely for the co-ordination with 46 authors, Boudewijn Bertch and Riva Greenberg for the editing, and Sue Borchardt for the illustrations. All of them volunteered their time, as did every author.
This book is a labour of love. The story of the book, where a global village of complexity practitioners came together to pull off a seemingly impossible task, each contributing diverse but coherent perspectives, is also such a poetic parallel to the way Cynefin grew up. Of course, we could not have a book on Cynefin without including Dave, and in the end he worked with us to produce a wonderful narrative retelling of the origin story of Cynefin without fully knowing what he was ultimately contributing to.
If you are not familiar with the Cynefin Framework, you will find an introduction in my blook on Conversational Leadership. It is an immensly powerful tool to help you make better decisions by understanding the situation/context you are in and using an appropriate decision-making method.
Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenk, Mike Adams and Paul Ichilcik of Anecdote have just published their definitive guide to Corporate Storytelling - The Essential Guide.
What is corporate storytelling?
Corporate storytelling, also called business storytelling, is the purposeful and systematic application of story techniques in an organisation to deliver business outcomes.
Here is one short clip from the guide that resonated with me:
Most business presentations are dry and boring, and as a result totally forgettable. The mistaken assumption is that clear points organised in a rational way and spoken out loud or placed into a fancy PowerPoint template can pass as an effective business presentation. Left-brain efficiency may rule the way we operate in business processes, but it shouldn't rule the way we communicate.
I am exploring and writing about how we form our beliefs in my blook on Conversational Leadership and one aspect I am now delving into is our "moral beliefs.
This fascinating site YourMorals.org popped up in a Google search.
Go take a look and explore your own morality, ethics, and/or values, while also contributing to scientific research.
Interestingly, this has a much in common with what I have written about the need for conversation covenants when engaging on conversations across divides and forms the basis of my upcoming Knowledge Café We are not enemies but friends.
It is imperative that we reflect more on our beliefs and one of the best ways of doing this is through conversation.
"The focus of this book is Change. It is also Organisation and Society Health. These two notions are so intricately intertwined that they are inseparable in the context of living communities.
Change is possibly the most broadly misunderstood concept in society at large, and particularly in organisational life.
Misunderstandings about the nature of change frequently lead to corporate and organisational initiatives that not only fail to meet their intentions, they may well actually cause more harm than good.
If you are a leader in any kind of organisation, I imagine this is something you would like to change. … You can.
The book will be available from 30th September and can be ordered here"
Why do we believe things that aren’t true? - Comments
I think Philip Fernback makes an important point aboout what it means to be human in this talk.:
"Consider how common it is for groups of people to believe things that just aren't true.
Right now, in this moment, it feels like we're in the midst of an epidemic.
The explosion of fake news shows how easy it is to dupe people on the left and the right, and science denial has gone mainstream.
Simplistic explanations ... aren't getting us anywhere.
If we really want to improve the way we grapple with these challenges, we have to go deeper, we have to understand what it is about the way we think that makes us so susceptible to believing things that aren't true.
And that explanation actually begins with a kind of shocking observation.
As individuals, we do not know enough to justify almost anything we believe."
World Values Day Knowledge Cafe Oct 15th 2020 - Comments
World Values Day is an annual campaign to increase the awareness and practice of values around the world.
For the last four years, in partnership with Charles Fowler, I have held a free Knowledge Café as part of the event, so this year's Café will be the fifth since our first one in 2016.
It is being held online on Zoom on 15th October 2020, 17:00 - 19:00 BST London time.
Whenever we engage in conversation, whether one-to-one or in a group, face-to-face or online, we have the opportunity to put our values into action.
There are many values that can be expressed in conversation, such as honesty, respect, trust, integrity, listening, constructive disagreement, speaking the truth, and the search for truth.
Most of us hold these values or similar ones but do we regularly live them in our everyday conversations? And could it be that we lose track of these values when we are talking to others, and that's why our conversations don't go so well?
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: September 2020 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Facing each other, looking into the eyes, confiding—all those behaviors reflect and build trust. “There is no substitute for face-to-face interaction to build up this trust.” https://buff.ly/35gMKjX #ConversationalLeadership #trust
Ten Big Ideas of Knowledge Management | Nancy Dixon https://buff.ly/3m3X7NL #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership /as much about Conversational Leadership as it is KM :-)
You can adapt the Knowledge Café process in a variety of ways and put the Café to a multiplicity of different purposes. This series of Knowledge Cafés ran by NASA was used to identify risk issues and how to mitigate those risks. https://buff.ly/3jUwSrl #ConversationalLeadership
We've built an economy focused on inspiring/motivating the self-interest of individuals, rather than one where we co-create one another in deeper conversations. https://buff.ly/2PkDWOI #ConversationalLeadership
Trust is an essential ingredient of belief formation | Conversational Leadership https://buff.ly/3lqtwxX #ConversationalLeadership
This World #History Timeline shows the main superpowers and dynasties over the last 5000 years. Gorgeous piece of work. These type of charts really help to understand who ruled at the same time on the other side of the globe. Love it! Source: https://buff.ly/2qiP1Wo
“Critical thinking begins with the assumption that our beliefs could be in error, and if they are, that we will revise them accordingly. This is what it means to be humble.” @peterboghossian https://buff.ly/2MligjF
World Values Day is an annual campaign to increase the awareness and practice of values around the world.
For the last four years, in partnership with Charles Fowler, I have held a Knowledge Café as part of the event, so this year's Café will be the fifth since our first one in 2016.
Whenever we engage in conversation, whether one-to-one or in a group, face-to-face or online, we have the opportunity to put our values into action.
There are many values that can be expressed in conversation, such as honesty, respect, trust, integrity, listening, constructive disagreement, speaking the truth, and the search for truth.
Most of us hold these values or similar ones but do we regularly live them in our everyday conversations? And could it be that we lose track of these values when we are talking to others, and that's why our conversations don't go so well?
Have more face-to-face conversations with people you may disagree with. - Comments
I recently came across this wonderful Harvard Commencement speech given by Oprah Winfrey in 2013. Close to the end of her talk she says this:
And even though this is the college where Facebook was born, my hope is that you would try to go out and have more face-to-face conversations with people you may disagree with.
That you'll have the courage to look them in the eye and hear their point of view.
And help make sure that the speed and distance and anonymity of our world doesn't cause us to lose our ability to stand in somebody else's shoes and recognize all that we share as a people.
This is imperative for you as an individual and for our success as a nation.
There has to be some way that this darkness can be banished with light.
Thank you Oprah, we really must have more face-to-face conversations with people whom we disagree and we must get better at engaing in such conversations without fighting.
David Creelman and I have put together what we call a conversation covenant - an agreement between two or more persons to abide by a set of rules when engaging in conversation. The rules are intended to help people work in harmony to create a psychologically safer space for seemingly impossible conversations.
What's an impossible conversation? It's one that feels futile because it takes place between people who hold radically different ideas, beliefs, morals, politics, or worldviews. But see here for a fuller description.
Take a look, we hope you find it useful and can customise for your own use.
My good friend David Creelman gave me a great tip recently for proof-reading my writing. I am now using it in writing my blook.
I have installed the Google Chrome extension Read Aloud - text to speech voice reader. Having past any post through Grammarly to catch spelling and grammatical errors I now use "Read Aloud" to read my posts out loud. It not only catches many typos but helps me improve the flow of my text.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
The concept of a “change agent” is arrogant - change the narrative, not the people | Peter Block https://buff.ly/3kARVR2
Rebel Wisdom: "In the middle of the 19th century, the Nordic Countries were some of the poorest in Europe, with the lowest quality of life. By the end of the century, they were some of the wealthiest and best places to live in the world.” https://buff.ly/3koLBMc
“Critical thinking begins with the assumption that our beliefs could be in error, and if they are, that we will revise them accordingly. This is what it means to be humble.” @peterboghossian https://buff.ly/2MligjF
According to Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay in their book How to Have Impossible Conversations, an impossible conversation is one that feels futile because it takes place between people who hold radically different ideas, beliefs, morals, politics, or worldviews.
Peter explains 10 of the principles, strategies, and techniques that can be used to engage in impossible conversations (taken from his book) in this video The Way Forward. I have indexed each principle for ease of access.
Helping people question their deepest beliefs, even changing them is not easy and I find Peter's work exciting. I'll be writing much more about it in my blook over the coming weeks.
A big thank you to David Creelman for bringing this book to my attention.
If you are a reader of my blook or have an interest in Conversational Leadership, you may like to know that I have created a group on LinkedIn to discuss both my blook and the subject of Conversational Leadership more generally.
198 people have signed-up so far but there has not ben much activity as yet though I hope to get some "interesting conversations" going soon.
Knowledge Management for Development (KM4DEV) is a global community of practice of primarily international development practitioners interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing theory, practice and related matters.
On 2 - 3 July 2020, they celebrated their 20 Years Anniversary with 10 online sessions over a 24 hr period. The sessions involved a large number of KM4Dev members around the globe.
John Hovell, Donita Volkwijn and I talked at one of these sessions on Conversational Leadership. You can watch the session on YouTube.
If you are interested in all of the sessions you will find them on the KM4DEV YouTube channel.
The Henley Forum's Advancing your Change & OD Practice returns for the 5th time 22 - 24 September - having been fully adapted for virtual participation. It's delivered by two leading OD practitioners: Dr Sharon Varney & John Hovell.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Why Conservatives and Liberals Are Not Experiencing the Same Pandemic - Heterodox Academy https://buff.ly/3bPWIsN /interesting
A scientific study has found that “who one is” is largely defined by one's moral behavior, and not by one's memory capacity or other cognitive abilities. https://buff.ly/2CLKd5f
This research raises the intriguing possibility that profound conversation might actually be used to boost feelings of well-being. https://buff.ly/2WKF980 #ConversationalLeadership
“Disagreement is an inevitable part of life. We mostly do it badly. Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy provides a structure for not only doing it respectfully but doing it more effectively.” https://buff.ly/33DDX73 #ConversationalLeadership
“Critical thinking begins with the assumption that our beliefs could be in error, and if they are, that we will revise them accordingly. This is what it means to be humble.” @peterboghossian https://buff.ly/2MligjF #ConversationalLeadership
Should Universities Teach Conspiracy Theories as Knowledge? https://buff.ly/38Yde9D /absolutely fascinating article
How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently https://buff.ly/1RuKJAh #ConversationalLeadership
Make Your Meetings a Safe Space for Honest Conversation https://buff.ly/2GizVHR #ConversationalLeadership
DILBERT: That's not how any of this works https://buff.ly/2Nil4RU #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement / unfortunately, he is right
I recently spoke on innovation and the role of conversation at the KIN Quarterly Workshop: "Summer 2020 – Innovation during Adversity" facilitated by Nancy Kinder.
I was in good company with Claire Hartnell, Serena Snoad and Rosemary Nunn.
You can watch recordings of all the sessions below.
If you wish to explore Conversational Leadership in some depth, John Hovell and Donita Volkwijn are running a 5-day online workshop on Conversational Leadership August 3 - 5.
I am not directly involved in this workshop but am looking forward to making a guest appearance and facilitating a Knowledge Café.
When we think about humankind's evolution, starting some 200,000 years ago, particular inventions were a significant step forward for our species.
The invention or should I say the evolution of language, the development of writing, the invention of the printing press, and then more recently the Internet and the World Wide Web were major information/knowledge revolutions.
But have you ever thought that some of these inventions might have been a bad thing, well maybe not bad but that they came with unintended consequences to which we have bene mostly blind?
We are well aware of some of the unintended consequences of the World Wide Web, such as fake news propagated by social media. What about writing? What about the invention of writing itself? And of course reading - the two go hand in hand.
Socrates questioned the wisdom of the invention of writing over 2000 years ago and made up a little story, the Myth of Thamus and Theuth that he told to Plato in the Phaedrus.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will, therefore, seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
Interestingly, some of the writing/reading issues are at the heart of our educational problems today.
We all learn by reading books, but do we learn, or is the learning to some extent an illusion?
Students learn to churn out answers in exams, but how many of them really understand the subject matter.
Watch the two short videos in my blook by Prof. Eric Mazur at Harvard, where he demonstrates the problem and a better dialogic approach, as suggested by Socrates.
We don't best learn through reading or being lectured; we the best learn through dialogue.
Socrates: Yes, Phaedrus, so it is; but, in my opinion, serious discourse about them is far nobler, when one employs the dialectic method and plants and sows in a fitting soul intelligent words which are able to help themselves and him [277a] who planted them, which are not fruitless, but yield seed from which there spring up in other minds other words capable of continuing the process for ever, and which make their possessor happy, to the farthest possible limit of human happines
Zoom Knowledge Café An Introduction to Conversational Leadership - Comments
My recent Zoom Knowledge Café "An Introduction to Conversational Leadership" had 28 participants from 13 countries and I have had some great feedback.
In light of this, I have decided to run an identical event on Friday 10 July.
I know little about Jewish history or culture, so when I came across the concept of lashon hara recently I was amazed.
Lashon hara, in Jewish religious law, means any form of speech or communication that may harm someone emotionally, financially, physically, or damage their reputation. It is forbidden to speak lashon hara, and it is considered to be a serious sin.
What makes the law of not speaking lashon hara so compelling is that it is forbidden to speak lashon hara even if it is true. Furthermore, it is forbidden to listen to lashon hara. If you hear lashon hara, you should reprimand the speaker or exit the conversation. Listening to lashon hara is seen as an even greater sin than speaking it. And, if you do hear lashon hara, you are forbidden to believe it.
It seems an almost impossible ideal to live up to fully. For example, It is difficult not to speak lashon hara when discussing politics.
I've long struggled with the self-imposed rules of who I should or should not respect and have written about it in my blook. In the light of lashon hara, I may need to revisit it.
Lashon hara represents the gold standard in "showing respect" - a set of rules that I feel we should all be striving for if we are to create a better world though I suspect a large number of people would not agree with me.
Having read and thought deeply about the subject, I've committed myself to do my damnedest not to speak lashon hara. I am more aware of my speech now and in trying not to speak it, I've realized just how difficult it is. But I will continue to strive to do so and see what I learn along the way.
I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of lashan hara, so if anyone out there is of the Jewish faith and can help educate me a little more, I'd appreciate it.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
What Actually is a Belief? And Why Is It So Hard to Change? https://buff.ly/2OOdNLL #ConversationalLeadership
“Science literacy is important, but without the parallel trait of "sciencecuriosity," it can lead us astray” https://buff.ly/2AMuhuJ #ConversationalLeadership
Sense-Making in our Post AlphaGo World | John Seely Brown https://buff.ly/3e4t98e #ConversationalLeadership #sensemaking
DILBERT: That's not how any of this works https://buff.ly/2Nil4RU #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement / unfortunately, he is right
There is more to viruses than you might think. There are 10 million times more viruses in the ocean than stars in the entire known universe. They are not all bad. They profoundly shape our lives and the living world around us. https://buff.ly/2yM95rO
AllSides exposes people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world — and each other. https://buff.ly/3hkcAar /check it out #ConversationalLeadership
The War on Sensemaking I | Conversational Leadership https://buff.ly/2Nil4RU #ConversationalLeadership #sensemaking
The book medium is a stronger message than its content - Comments
I recently came across these words from Mel Alexenberg, where he reports on a lecture some years ago by Marshall McLuhan - the Canadian philosopher.
Interestingly, it relates in a way to the story of The Myth of Thamus and Treuth by Socrates where he questions the wisdom of the invention of writing. Here Marshall McLuhan talks about the limitations of the book.
When I was teaching at Columbia University, techno-prophet Marshall McLuhan came down from Toronto to lecture there.
He talked about how the linear pattern of information resulting from print technology limited the thought patterns of people who learned from printed books.
Word follows word, line follows line, paragraph follows paragraph, page follows page, chapter follows chapter, in a single necessary order from the first page to the last.
Learning through a medium that is a one-way street prevented creative, flexible, associative, open-ended, multi-directional and multi-dimensional thought.
Instead of just being authoritative, books became authoritarian, demanding thinking in straight lines from a fixed point of view.
The book medium became a stronger message than its content.
Designed to be read in privacy, in seclusion from others, the book ended dialogue.
It conferred the values of isolation, detachment, passivity, and non-involvement.
So, although we could not have build our modern knowledge culture without the invention of writing and the book,they do have their limitations and unintended consequences to which we should not be blind.
I came across her again the other day in a TEDx talk talking about what she called Scout Mindset - an alternative term for Science Curiosity.
And then I found a blog post explaining why she engages in online arguments with people, even if there's no real hope of changing their minds:
To change the minds of less committed onlookers.
To give relief and comfort to onlookers who share your view and wish someone would stick up for it.
To set an example of "sharing one's opinion even if it's controversial", a valuable norm to reinforce even if you don't exchange anyone's mind on that particular issue.
To set an example of "polite and reasonable argumentation" again a valuable norm in its own right.
She tweeted this originally and was challenged on these points and asked: "You didn't mention the motivation of changing your own mind. Shouldn't you always be approaching arguments with open-minded curiosity, motivated by a desire to learn?"
And this was her fascinating response:
I think that "trying to change your mind" is a great goal we should be striving for, but that most debates have a pretty low probability of succeeding at that, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. Here are some examples to illustrate the difference:
1) Arguments I engage with in hopes of changing my own mind
Arguments that sound wrong, but the person making them seems smart and intellectually honest, so maybe I'm missing something
Arguments that sound wrong but were shared approvingly by people whose judgment I respect
Novel arguments I haven't heard before, that sound wrong on first pass but are interesting and worth considering more
2) Arguments I probably just wouldn't bother with, if my main goal was changing my own mind
Arguments I've already heard a bunch of times
Arguments that seem obviously fallacious, and there's nothing promising about the source to suggest I might be missing something
Arguments by someone who gives signs of being a bad thinker. For example, if they're being rude and twisting other people's words uncharitably, that's not an encouraging sign that I can learn from them
Arguments by people who don't share some of my core premises (like, I'm secular and they're making a religious argument about ethics)
A podcast conversation with Edwin Morris - Comments
Edwin Morris of Pioneer Knowledge Services recently conducted a short interview with me: "The new way we toil and labor; how knowledge management is changing the interplay between society and the on ramp to work life. David Gurteen shares his view from the UK."
To qualify as a member of his club, each person was asked to stand up and lay his hand on his breast, and answer the following questions as indicated.
Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? Answer. I have not.
Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of what profession or religion soever? Answer. I do.
Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship? Answer. No.
Do you love truth's sake, and will you endeavor impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate it to others? Answer. Yes.
I rather like these questions, and they could quite easily form the backbone for a modern-day conversation or conversational club.
I plan at some point to re-write them in modern-day English. I may even change them or add to them a little.
One candidate question, suggested by Andrew Gaines is:
Do you agree to have your ideas challenged without rancour?
I would go further and say:
Do you love to have your ideas challenged?
Andrew's response to this though was that "without rancour' would be a pretty good start!
I have started a thread on this topic in my Conversational Leadership Forum on LinkedIn - join the conversation and leave some suggestions there.
In past months, John and I have spent many hours talking about this framework and neither of us is happy with it. It's a starting point for discussion. Here are a few thoughts of mine.
To shape up this framework, we need to first define the purpose. What is it meant to depict? How is it intended to help? What is the question it answers? Does a framework even make sense?
I feel we have put a lot of things in boxes and are trying to connect them in some sort of linear/logical manner but as John points out above, is it even possible to "map" such a complex topic in such a structured way. My answer is "No, we can't but then what can we do, if anything?." So my key question for anyone reading this. Do we need a Conversational Leadership framework and if so, what should be the purpose?
Conversational Leadership Blook Update May 2020 - Comments
My blook continues to grow and develop by the day.
If you have not checked it out for a while, you will find the latest changes here.
I tend to jump around and develop different parts of the blook as my mood and energy takes me. One chapter under development right now is on what I am calling The Knowledge Delusion.
This is quite a wide ranging chapter and includes posts on beliefs, values, the illusion of knowledge, tribal thinking, distributed cognition, motivated reasoning, science curiosity, the global information ecosystem, sense-making and much more.
One post is a video talk by Daniel Schmachtenberger where he explores The War on Sensemaking. This video is almost 2 hours in length but packed with interesting material and I wished to index it. Given I was a programmer in a former existence has helped me with this - I have now indexed the key sections of the talk and a single click will take you to any one of them. Go take a look and enjoy! It's an amazing talk.
Finally, I have listed a set of what I call gateway pages - alternative starting points to reading my blook. To my mind, technical books are never best read serially
The book has been put together in the last 6 weeks by people who are involved in foresight, and looks at the changes that may emerge in a post Covid-19 world – there are about 27 short chapters, under four separate headings:
Critical shifts
Society and Social Policy
Government and Economy
Business and Technology
The aim is to raise questions, indicate new directions, opportunities and issues as we emerge into a new normal.
On the 1st June launch date, authors will present their chapters throughout the day, and answer questions. Both of these are free. If you are interested visit the Fast Future website.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Collective Sensemaking - The Democratization of Organizations @nancymdixon https://buff.ly/3cebwRs #sensemaking #ConversationalLeadership
The War on Sensemaking I | Conversational Leadership https://buff.ly/2Nil4RU #ConversationalLeadership #sensemaking
“The practice of questioning and objectively evaluating evidence that might disprove your beliefs or expose your flawed decisions — self-skepticism” https://buff.ly/2TqZNbx #ConversationalLeadership
“What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?” @juliagalef https://buff.ly/36qoGth #MotvatedReasoning #ScienceCuriosity #ConversationalLeadership
“Don't think about why you question, simply don't stop questioning. Don't worry about what you can't answer, and don't try to explain what you can't know. Curiosity is its own reason…” https://buff.ly/35h0Uzy #Curiosity #ScienceCuriosity
Overall, you must assume that the past you believed you understood will not return. ANTONIO GUTERRES, UN SECRETARY-GENERAL https://buff.ly/3bu8SXh
What gets in the way of open honest conversations in the Board Room and elsewhere? @judywalker5 https://buff.ly/3aZTmCs #ConversationalLeadership
Conversation Cafe for thinking together aloud online https://buff.ly/2X8N4vb #ConversationalLeadership #KM #KMers
Fake News? Learn to recognize common indicators of fake news, understand the consequences of careless sharing, and learn to become a fact-checker. https://buff.ly/3eoAYWN /a really useful guide, should become part of the school curriciuum
Disaster Information Seeking Behaviour via Social Media - Comments
Bibi Alajmi, an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the College of Social Sciences, Kuwait University, is conducting research into "Disaster Information Seeking Behaviour via Social Media". She has asked me if I can help find people who would be willing to complete a short survey on the subject. Here is what she has to say:
We are conducting a research aiming to investigate factors that are believed to influence individuals' reliance on social media networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) for information that could be helpful in coping with disasters such as the Coronavirus pandemic.
I would like to invite you to participate in the following survey which takes approximately 10 minutes to complete.
Your participation is highly appreciated. Collected data will be anonymously and collectively used only for research purposes. No individual cases will be reported.
Bibi Alajmi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Information Studies
College of Social Sciences, Kuwait University
P.O. Box.68168 Kaifan - 71962. Kuwait
The first one was mainly for the European time zone and the last two for Asia Pacific.
I have a fourth Café scheduled, for the 7th May, mainly for the Americas, but the time works well for Europe and MENA too. There are still a few places remaining if you get in quickly.
All three of the Cafés so far have been heavily oversubscribed, and I plan to keep running them on the same theme until I have satisfied the demand.
If you have missed out on one so far, your time will come.
The Cafés have gone remarkably well - they always do - but don't take my word for it - take a look at the two blog posts below.
A huge thanks to Dave and Carlin for these blog posts and capturing the essence of the two Cafés.
One of the many things I enjoy about running the Cafés on Zoom is the fact that I get a rich mix of people from different countries and cultures. For example, in my third Café for Asia/Pacific, I had people registered (not all showed up) from 14 countries: UK, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Netherlands and Tajikistan. Some of them old friends who I had not seen for years.
The Cafés are relatively easy to run, and I have helped several people/organizations start their own.
Take a look here for some ideas on how to get started and how to run them on Zoom.
My wife works for a bank in the City of London, and I frequently meet her there. Well, I used to before lockdown.
Although large swathes of the City were destroyed in the blitz of the second world war, much remains, and when I visit, if I observe carefully, I get to step back into almost 2,000 years of history.
Under the ground of the Guildhall, just yards from my wife's office in King Street is a Roman Amphitheater, and under the new Bloomberg building behind Bank Station is the Roman Temple of Mithras, now some 20 feet below ground.
But what I love more than anything are the old coffee houses of the 17th & 18th centuries - no, they are no longer there, but if you search carefully, you can find where they once stood.
In 1652, Pasqua Rosée, a Greek, opened the first coffee stall in the churchyard of St Michael's Cornhill, a few minutes walk from the present-day location of the Bank of England.
Ten years later, in 1663, there were over 80 coffeehouses within the City, and by the start of the eighteenth century, this number had grown to over 500.
These old London coffeehouses were the engines of creation that helped drive the Enlightenment – the European intellectual movement of the time that emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition. Their history is a fascinating one.
We are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. - Comments
We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion.
We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else.
Perhaps once in a thousand times, when the explanation is extraordinary good, and the listener extraordinary experienced and skillful at turning word strings into non-verbal reality, and when the explainer and listener share in common many of the experiences being talked about, the process may work, and some real meaning may be communicated.
Most of the time, explaining does not increase understanding, and may even lessen it.
Too often, in a conversation when you are exploring an issue, you find yourself saying something that you immediately realize is ill-conceived, worse still, utter rubbish.
Your conversational partner picks up on it a little more quickly than you and starts to attack you, and you cannot help but go on the defense, and the dynamic of the conversation is killed.
More and more, I find myself using these words in such a conversation.
"I'm thinking out loud here, so what I might say could well be a pile of rubbish, please bear with me."
Then when I'm told, I am talking rubbish, I can quickly reply, "I told you so." and laugh.
The conversation can then move on and is even energized by the exchange.
Catalysing commitment to transformative change - Comments
I have been having long Zoom conversations with Andrew Gaines in Australia for some months now.
Andrew is the convener of Inspiring Transition, an educational movement to inspire mainstream commitment to transitioning to what he calls a "life-sustaining society".
In May, we are hosting two Zoom meetings to explore how we can catalyse commitment to transformative change.
This is what Andrew has to say about the first event:
You may be concerned about current disastrous environmental trends. Always the question arises: But what can I do?
As individuals on our own we have little influence on the great course of things. However, aligned towards a common overarching goal we can be hugely influential.
In this conversation we will explore how to stimulate on a mass scale the thinking that will get us on track to evolve a society that operates within planetary boundaries, and promotes the well-being of humans and other life forms.
We are not starting from scratch, in this first event I will introduce a simple model for enabling ordinary people to think usefully about systemic change.
The problem to be solved – how to evolve a healthy culture – is massive. There is enormous scope for innovation, and I am interested in your ideas. At the same time, hearteningly, there are a multitude of positive initiatives already underway, and we have huge resources.
This is part of a larger movement to catalyse mainstream commitment to doing everything required turn things around and transition to a life-affirming culture.
The events are stand-alone. You can take part in one, without necessarily taking part in the other but ideally you should register and participate in both.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Learning Not Blame -- “Inquiry” Not “Inquisition.” We Can Work With This in Getting Back to Some Form of Normal. @billkaplankm https://buff.ly/2S6wrP2
The real task of leadership is to confront people with their freedom. - Peter Block https://buff.ly/3eHKJ2A #ConversationalLeadership
How does After Action Review build emotional resilience? by @JudyWalker5 https://buff.ly/2KpaAy1 #aars #aar /after action reviews are so undervalued
Fake News? Learn to recognize common indicators of fake news, understand the consequences of careless sharing, and learn to become a fact-checker. https://buff.ly/3eoAYWN /a really useful guide, should become part of the school curriciuum
How can we humanise online meetings to be more human and social, with less pressure to absorb data and instruction? Can we take more risks, show more feeling and be less focussed on instructing, explaining and teaching? @johnniemoore https://buff.ly/2xWmNra
Three webinars/recordings on Leadership from Ron Heifetz, Jennifer Garvey Berger & Amy Edmondson https://buff.ly/2JuCfNN /each one of these speakers is a thought leader in their own field, Ron/leadership, Jennifer/complexity & Amy/psychological safety #ConversationalLeadership
In the Digital Fray, Don't Just Converse. Collaborate. | Katrina Pugh @katrinapugh https://buff.ly/3dHpFc0 #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeatdership #KnowledgeCafe #ConversationalWisdom /great article from Katrina
Are you open to being wrong? Intellectual humility, Dunning Kruger and foxes and hedgehogs… https://buff.ly/2vfVovW
Leadership as a practice not as a position of authority - Comments
My second Zoom Knowledge Café on the theme of "Leadership as a practice not as a position of authority" is coming up on Friday April 3rd.
The first one on the same theme took place a week or so ago. I had about 20 participants and the Café went extremely well. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and I had some great feedback.
I am running it again, at an earlier time, mainly to allow people in Asia-Pacific to join the session but if the time works for you, wherever you are in the world, you are welcome to join.
If the Café is fully booked by the time you come to register, sign-up for the waiting list. A few people always drop out and when I run future events I will make sure you get informed first. It also helps give me some idea of the level of interest.
I have long made the point that knowledge is not power or maybe more accurately that knowledge alone is not power and I have listed some of the many reasons why people can know something and fail to act.
Chris Collision, in this recent post of his Failure to learn talks about the UK Government's response to Covid-19 and makes the case that the Government failed to learn from experience.
Another way of looking at it is that much of the knowledge was there, but people failed to act.
Either way, it demonstrates that we need Knowledge Management more than ever.
And then, sometimes, people act on the knowledge they have, not for the benefit of the whole but for selfish purposes and fail to share it more widely.
In this case, you may still consider knowledge to be power but knowledge alone, does not guarantee people will do the right thing.
I have written an extensive post in my blook on designing questions and a problem I have with the article are the questions they suggest, such as this one:
"As the coronavirus takes its toll on business as usual, what must we all do to keep our people motivated and connected, to maintain relationships with customers and add value, to maximize existing revenue while finding new revenue opportunities, and to make advances on strategic imperatives that might otherwise languish?"
The question is in fact several questions and is laden with assumptions and possible answers.
When designing a conversation, the very first question that should be asked is, "What is the purpose of this conversation?"
The purpose could be one of many things, for example, to make a better sense of what's going on; to make better meaning (the implications of what is going on); it could be to make decisions or it could be much more specific.
Once you've decided on the purpose of the conversation, you can set about crafting the question.
To my mind, the question should be a single question and should not have any in-built assumptions. It should not lead the participants.
So, I might replace the above question with four questions and four separate conversations.
What's going on?
What does this mean for us? (What are the implications?)
Do we need to do anything? If so, what are our possibilities?
What decisions do we need to make?
Simple, with no built-in assumptions and thus not constraining or channelling the participants in a particular direction.
Which approach do you think is the more powerful or does it depend on the context?
This exponential increase in misinformation, disinformation, and fake news means that as sense-making organisms, we are struggling to actually know what information we can actually trust.
Knowledge Cafe: University on the Future - Comments
I ran what was meant to be the first of a series of Knowledge Cafés, one a month, in London in February but they are all looking highly unlikely now. I will be putting more effort into my online Zoom Cafés to compensate.
The February event was at Regent's University on the "University of the Future". You will find some photos and blog posts here:
Students and professionals aged 18–35 are invited to submit an essay on Leadership and Critical Thinking - how to foster critical thinking skills in critical times.
I love the theme for this year's essay and look forward to reading the winning submission. I wonder to what extent the essayists will recognise that we can all practice leadership.
The due date for submissions is 4:00PM (CET), May 24, 2020
Catalysing commitment to transformative change - Comments
I have been having long Zoom conversations with Andrew Gaines in Australia for some months now.
Andrew is the convener of The Great Transition Initiative, an educational movement to inspire mainstream commitment to transitioning to what he calls a "life-sustaining society".
In May, we plan to host two Zoom meetings to explore how we can catalyse commitment to transformative change.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
A tour around the latest Cynefin iteration by @chriscorrigan https://buff.ly/33N3dJN #complexity #cynefin #KM #KMers
The Future of Work is Conversational @dastillman https://buff.ly/2Ompisi #ConversationalLeadership
Why Sharing Stories Brings People Together: Our brains sync up when we tell stories. https://buff.ly/2U8E2Nv #StoryTelling #ConversationalLeadership
The Peter Drucker Challenge: “Leadership and Critical Thinking” https://buff.ly/2wWVagY /what a great idea #ConversationalLeadership
Life has meaning with responsibility. The more responsibility you take on the more meaning your life has. | Jordan B Peterson https://buff.ly/2IxoCgs #responsibility #meaning #ConversationalLeadership
6 Ways To Look Great On A Video Call https://buff.ly/38xzYLD /some more good advice on taking part in a online video meeting or a virtual Knowledge Café.
Why Society 5.0 | Yuko Harayama | TEDxRoma https://buff.ly/38lQYEU #Society5 / Society is not just about technology. Technology alone is going to save us.
University of the future – A Knowledge Café at Regent's University: Yesterday I had the exquisite pleasure of attending the first of David Gurteen's new series of open Knowledge Cafés. https://buff.ly/39a2gNo #KnowledgeCafe
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.
In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life, he can only respond by being responsible.
I hope you have read about the Conversational Leadership workshop that John Hovell and I are running in the UK again this summer. If not, you will find full details here.
You will spend much of your time in conversation during the workshop.
First, to make sense of the Conversational Leadership concept and its principles.
Second, to practice and improve your conversational skills.
Third, to build strong relationships with the other participants and create a sense of community.
Over the week, you will learn about and experience two powerful conversational methods, the Knowledge Café and the C-group.
We have chosen the same amazing venue as last year - the Elevetham - a Victorian Gothic Mansion set in an estate of 4,000 acres in the Hampshire countryside and a history dating back to the 11th century.
Drop me an email or call me if you have any questions.
We, humans, are innately tribal.
We have a strong need to belong to groups and maintain fulfilling relationships with others.
This need to belong, however, warps our reasoning ability. It is known as tribal thinking.
In my blook, I have started to write about tribal thinking, it is still work in progress but has enough substance to make it a worthwhile read. The surprising results of experiments, by Dan Kahan, a Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School make it clear that we are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing ones.
The more factual information we have and the better our science literacy, the more likely we are to double down on our false beliefs.
Frazzled Cafe is a registered charity that operates with the purpose of providing a safe, anonymous and non-judgemental environment where people who are feeling frazzled can meet on a regular basis to talk and share their personal stories.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Why It's a Good Idea to Listen to Opposing Views. https://buff.ly/2RQkr3z #ConversationalLeadership
What can we do to create more open cultures?: Poor behaviour and a culture of avoidance and denial are not necessarily improved by additional regulation @judywalker5 https://buff.ly/2SOA7EQ /everyone needs to take responsibility
“Thanks to virtual reality, this mother can see and speak with her deceased daughter” https://buff.ly/2UOHnDd /this is an emotionally disturbing "experiment" with virtual reality. Beautiful and creepy at the same time. Use Google Translate to translate into English.
“Who are you and what do you stand for?” https://buff.ly/37L3wpN /I think this might make a good Knowledge Café question :-) But for now, read Jo's article, think about it for a moment, and answer the question in your head.
‘Schools are killing curiosity': why we need to stop telling children to shut up and learn | Teaching | The Guardian https://buff.ly/2S1B4t9
"In complexity... you define a direction of travel, not a goal, because if you start on a journey you will discover things you didn't know you could discover which have high utility, if you have an explicit goal you may miss the very things that you need to discover" - D. Snowden
The spread of teams in more and more arenas is one consequence of the growing complexity of our world - and will force us to challenge some of the core assumptions of meritocracy, suggests @Scott_E_Page http://bit.ly/2V2oZag
How do we cultivate curiosity in the workplace - perspective by @DrDianeHamilton In my view, it begins with the recognition that our institutions today are fundamentally hostile to curiosity, except in carefully guarded research labs http://bit.ly/2HilTqf
We live in a world of increasing connectivity and complexity - three scholars affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute explore some of the challenges in shaping that kind of world http://bit.ly/38rSo1r
Mastering the art of speaking up: the importance of trust https://buff.ly/38CBixx #ConversationalLeadership
You will be familiar with TED Talks, where people talk at you, but now you can take part in or host TED Circles. It's about time, we had less "talking at" and more "talking together".
TED Circles is an open platform of small groups that meet for conversations about ideas.
Hosted by volunteers, these weekly or monthly gatherings empower us to dream and debate. Each TED Circle is unique and all are virtually connected through the TED Circles platform - making it possible for local conversations to reach a global scale.
Anyone can host a TED Circle! Volunteers are required to register as a host and list each gathering. Once registered, you receive host resources, gain the ability to list the date and location of your Circles, and join a growing global community of TED Circle hosts.
If you are giving a talk/presentation in an internal meeting or at a conference, it is easy to allow time for the audience to engage in a little conversation.
Almost 10 years ago, I discovered that Mireille Jansma and Jurgen Egges of the then ING Bank Academy in the Netherlands had adapted my Knowledge Café process and were using it as part of their Challenging Minds programme.
I also learned that ING was working with CoachingOurselves (CO) - a Candian company founded by Henry Mintzberg and Phil LeNir - on the evolution and expansion of CO's learning philosophies and materials.
Over the past few years, I had lost contact with Mireille until we reconnected recently and she updated me and Phil on her work since she left ING.
This is what she had to say:
We are developing a program with and for youngsters and young adults (17-27 years) who have lost their way a bit or didn't yet find it. Quit school, do odd jobs, if any, have aspirations but don't know which exactly, nor how to get there. And our format: CoachingOurselves & Knowledge Cafés!
I am so grateful to you both, David and Phil! It is our cross-fertilization of ideas, approaches and passions which has led to this new route.
Our first module is called 'Dreams, Goals, Choices'. I didn't make up this theme, but discovered it by doing some workshops with young people: they set the path.
I'm also now running workshops (6 of them) at a secondary school for pupils who have to do their end-exams, have low grades and are demotivated. And guess what: they love it (their teachers didn't expect this at all).
Their feedback: 'Wonderful to talk and learn about and from each other', 'Love the freedom and space to talk', 'Enjoyed having time to reflect and think'. 'Learned so much about others, while I thought I knew them'. And so on.
Yes, friends! I've always known that CoachingOurselves and Knowledge Cafés are not just for managers and professionals. And now I've stumbled across a wonderful opportunity to take your brilliant ideas, experiences and insights to youngsters to help them grow, reflect, see, and discover their own path to their own future.
And so much more to do and think about. Like Teaching Ourselves. Imagine that: secondary schools with pupils in small groups, going through booklets which explain step by step about biology, talking and reflecting and connecting at the same time.
Thought travels faster than action and may leave less a wake, nevertheless I wanted to share what I was thinking today.
Thank you both, Phil and David, glad to be in touch again, and best regards, Mireille
Credit: Mireille Jansma
I have highlighted a few of Mireille's words. As she says "Imagine". This is the power of peer-learning methods like the Knowledge Café and CoachingOurselves
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Make America talk again: the lab teaching sworn enemies to have decent conversations https://buff.ly/2Ku9O1t #ConversationalLeadership
Why It's a Good Idea to Listen to Opposing Views. https://buff.ly/2RQkr3z #ConversationalLeadership
Mastering the art of speaking up: the importance of trust https://buff.ly/38CBixx #ConversationalLeadership
I like the way Henry Mintzberg @Mintzberg141 sees an organization as a community of human beings, not a collection of human resources.https://buff.ly/2RhugqL #ConversationalLeadership #leadership
How can you build lasting psychological safety in your teams? https://buff.ly/2T2Stnc /More from @JudyWalker5 on AARs #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership
How to Talk to Conservatives About Climate Change https://buff.ly/2zaexAG /insightful article - comments are interesting - surprises me that some people think a "belief" is not based on evidence. You can have both true (evidence based) and false beliefs. #ClimateChange
Academic Conferences and Publishing International (ACPIL) have just launched a new book called the University of the Future.
The University of the Future reviews the current state of the university sector and makes some suggestions as to how universities will develop in the forthcoming years to meet the challenges they now face.
Universities are under considerable pressure to change, perhaps under more pressure than at any time since the modern university was created in the early 1800s.
Universities are being criticised for not producing adequately work-ready graduates.
They have been criticised for their intense focus on research which has sometimes been said to have been at the cost to their mandate to educate.
Universities are being criticised for their bureaucracy which has led to the coining of the expression managerialism.
Universities are being criticised for the current market orientation which is reflected in the fees they charge and the high salaries paid to Vice Chancellors, Deans and others holding high office.
However, what is actually happening within universities and what is likely to happen in the future is much more nuanced than most of the criticism which is levelled at them. Universities are a reflection of society and thus they are always a work-in-progress, continually in need of reinventing themselves.
This book is a compilation of 17 chapters written by 28 authors from 15 different countries over 5 continents.
Every month or so for the last few years, I have been having a Zoom conversation with my good friend Charles Savage in Munich, who never fails to inspire me.
I thought I'd share some words of his after a fascinating conversation with him this morning.
Are we moving from “managing knowledge,” the “known” to exploring the frontier of the “unknown?”
Realizing my “ignorance” has been most humbling – and it is revitalized by intense “curiosity!”
So moving from the SMART to the WISE (Wondering, Inquiring, Searching and Exploring) is a delight!
After all, the “insights” we share with one another light up and enlighten our understanding!
Credit: Charles Savage
After writing about science curiosity recently, I have been wondering about how we might become more curious. After my chat with Charles I am wondering if recognizing our real ignorance is part of the answer.
The dérive as practiced by Clive Holtham is a practical way of developing curiosity.
Charles and I were talking about ignorance as I had shared with him some of the ideas from the book The Knowledge Illusion, which I think might be better dubbed the Knowledge Delusion.
I am writing about the subject myself but early days yet - very much work in progress.
The KM4D Journal offers peer-reviewed practice-based cases, analysis and research concerning the role of knowledge in development processes, and provides a forum for debate and exchange of ideas among practitioners, policy makers academics and activists world-wide.
By challenging current assumptions, it seeks to stimulate new thinking and to shape future ways of working.
The journal is strongly related to the KM4Dev community of practice but aims to promote KM knowledge and approaches in the wider professional development community.
It has been around for around for about 15 years. It is open access and published online on the OJS platform. Some years ago, it was published briefly in hard copy by Routledge.
It is entirely voluntary - the Editor-in-Chief, Sarah Cummings, and a small editorial board keep it going.
Dialogic OD is about "changing the conversations” that shape everyday thinking and behaviour in an organization and there is considerable overlap with Conversational Leadership. The fundamental difference seems to be that while Conversational Leadership is primarily about a set of conversational behaviours adopted by everyone in an organization, Dialogic OD is more about conversational interventions by OD practitioners and consultants. Many of the tools and techniques are the same.
So I am pleased to let you know about a new series of books that Gervase and Bob are publishing together – The BMI Series in Dialogic OD.
They are self publishing books by a variety of authors through Amazon and are interested in publishing short (100 page) books that are highly practical, provide lots of concrete examples, on one aspect of Dialogic OD practice.
Or, if you teach OD courses and would like to consider any of their titles for course adoption, contact Gervase to get an electronic version of the book(s) you are interested in.
Finally, you may like to join their mailing list so you can stay up to date on when new titles are available.
Recently I wrote about science curiosity, and in writing the post, I told a personal story of my own about my father showing me the stars on a dark and wintry night when I was a boy.
The story of myself as a child stuck in my head for several days after, and I recalled I had read something somewhere about a boy and the stars, so I googled it and found what I was looking for - this wonderful quotation from Walter Lippman.
A boy can take you into the open at night and show you the stars; he might tell you no end of things about them, conceivably all that an astronomer could teach.
But until and unless he feels the vast indifference of the universe to his own fate, and has placed himself in the perspective of cold and illimitable space, he has not looked maturely at the heavens.
Until he has felt this, and unless he can endure this, he remains a child, and in his childishness, he will resent the heavens when they are not accommodating.
He will demand sunshine when he wishes to play, and rain when the ground is dry, and he will look upon storms as anger directed at him, and the thunder as a personal threat.
Having found it, I had to add the quote to my block; it was just too good, and so I went to Wikipedia to find out more about the author Walter Lippman.
I read the first page and immediately realized that what Walter was writing about in a book in 1922 and where this quote came from was at the heart of one of my interests.
This is serendipity in action. The original quote had nothing to do with my interest in democracy, I simply liked it, but it led me to a thinker, a writer and a book that was at the heart of my passion.
Do you ever feel the universe is trying to help you?
Explanations of a high-level concept in five different layers of complexity - Comments
This beautiful video demonstrates what it means to explain a high-level concept in five different layers of complexity – first to a child, then a teenager, then an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a grad student, and, finally, an expert.
The video, the conversation about gravity, that the astrophysicist Janna Levein has with the child, is a world apart from the conversation she has with another expert in the field.
To my mind, the Forum conference is the best KM conference by far, both in terms of speakers, content and interactivity. The location on the banks of the river Thames is also hard to beat.
You don't need to be a member of the Forum to attend and you can book online here. Note, if you an ex-member of the Forum there is a particularly attractive discount.
Daniel Schmachtenberger's two War on Sensemaking videos contain some of the most exciting insights and ideas I have come across in 2019.
To a great extent, what he has to say relates strongly to Conversational Leadership - taking responsibility for not polluting the information ecosystem, becoming more aware of our human biases and working hard at improving our own sensemaking and that of others.
The videos are long but start watching the first one and I think you will be quickly hooked.
Paradoxically, providing people with accurate information doesn't necessarily lead to better decisions. It is not how we operate.
People have some crazy opinions. Generally, these are the opinions that we disagree with.
The standard view in both academia and the wider culture is that people have such opinions due to knowledge deficits; they are lacking information.
On this view, providing information and critical reasoning skills is the best way to get opinions to converge, because they'll converge to the truth.
There is already strong reason to doubt this deficit model. I provide more in the form of evidence that knowledge is unrelated to attitudes about issues, including climate change.
In contrast, a person's ideology influences both their attitudes and their sense of understanding. A competitor to the deficit model, the cultural cognition view, explains the effect of ideology on attitudes, but does not address the sense of understanding.
I follow the cultural cognition view in proposing that people outsource much of their reasoning to their communities; I add that it is the resulting sense of understanding that mediates their attitudes.
The relevant reasoning is both causal (based on evidence) and deontic (based on protected values), a distinction people are rarely aware of despite its importance.
You may have heard of the concept of "wisdom of crowds" in which individuals in a crowd are privately asked to give an answer to a question, such as how many jelly beans are in a jar. Then when the answers are averaged together, the response provided by the crowd is generally better than for any given individual.
This method can be improved by dividing the crowd into smaller groups and asking the small groups to discuss the question and come to a consensus. The result when averaged produces a more accurate figure than the average produced by the large crowd.
One of the significant cognitive biases we face in society is motivated reasoning where we tend to find arguments in favor of conclusions we want to believe, to be stronger than arguments for conclusions we do not want to believe.
Research shows that science curious people, however, are more likely to explore data contradicting their world view and are thus less prone to this bias.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: December 2019 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
How does After Action Review increase staff engagement? @JudyWalker5 https://buff.ly/3544ufb #ConversationalLeadership#KM #KMers #AAR
Conversation is the most powerful learning technology ever invented | Jay Cross https://buff.ly/2YexVso #ConversationalLeadership #ConversationalWisdom #conversation #dialogue #KM #KMers
Ritual Dissent, Facilitation that Goes Beyond Comfortable Consensus https://buff.ly/37Xwpj7 #ConversationalLeadership /love this methodology
“Conversational leaders are different. Since we all have the power to speak, anyone can be a conversational leader, no anointment or appointment required. These leaders appear in the moment, when they see a need and meet it.” https://buff.ly/2IrYoMv #ConversationalLeadership
“The Future of Work is Human Conversation” @dastillman https://buff.ly/2IrYoMv #ConversationalLeadership #ConversationalWisdom #conversation #dialogue
“A conversational leader directs and deepens thinking through questions, being mindful of how their questions frame the conversation.” https://buff.ly/2IrYoMv #ConversationalLeadership #conversation #dialogue
We need to use conflict and disagreement as a way to deepen our relationships and expand our possibilities. @jgberger https://buff.ly/32NpoNI #complexity #ConversationalLeadership #KM
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: November 2019 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
The Challenge of Conversations that Really Matter https://buff.ly/34ddxKv #ConversationalLeadership #ConversationalWisdom #conversation #dialogue
Why transferring knowledge through discussion is over 10 times more effective than written documents https://buff.ly/34hAIDG #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe
Humane leadership must be the Fourth Industrial Revolution's real innovation https://buff.ly/2W5VgOC #ConversationaLeadership #4IR
Think twice before giving advice – especially when it is sought. You would do better to listen, engage in conversation but avoid giving advice. https://buff.ly/2Odyyhw #ConversationalLeadership
W.H.O. launches new guidance on After Action Review to increase system learning https://buff.ly/2Oc0fav #KM #KnowledgeManagement #KMers #aar
Capabilities, Knowledge and Skills by Peter Sharp https://buff.ly/2CEnkgC #skills #education #21stCenturyLearning
We need to use conflict and disagreement as a way to deepen our relationships and expand our possibilities. @jgberger https://buff.ly/32NpoNI #complexity #ConversationalLeadership #KM
What should you do if two people you know are arguing in front of you? Should you intervene in some way?
I have a rule (that I often break through lack of discipline), "never argue or try to advise someone when they are emotional." They do not appreciate it and only get more emotional and argumentative. The time to have a conversation, if one is needed, is the next day or later when the emotion has subsided.
Many people naturally engage in arguments and are the best of friends an hour or two later. Likely, by intervening, you will only make things worse, or they will turn on you.
If you feel you must do something then as I suggest above, do it the following day - not with the two of them together but one on one.
And, don't give advice, even if solicited. Just take the time to listen. This post in my blook provides the rationale for "don't give advice." (prompted by Peter Block).
I have attended almost all of the conferences over the last 20 years and will be there again this year. Don't ask me where the time has gone!
It will be particularly good to meet up with Edward Truch and Leif Edvinsson who were heavily involved in the early years and who will be speaking in 2020.
To my mind, the Forum conference is the best KM conference by far, both in terms of speakers, content and interactivity. The location on the banks of the river Thames is also hard to beat.
You don't need to be a member of the Forum to attend and you can book online here. Note, if you an ex-member of the Forum there is a particularly attractive discount.
I just love this law - not just a law of ecology but of any complex system.
In 1963, the UC Santa Barbara ecologist and economist Garrett Hardin proposed his First Law of Ecology: “You can never merely do one thing.”
We operate in a world of multiple, overlapping connections, like a web, with many significant, yet obscure and unpredictable, relationships.
He developed second-order thinking into a tool, showing that if you don't consider “the effects of the effects,” you can't really claim to be doing any thinking at all.
Why transferring knowledge through discussion is more effective than written documents - Comments
Nick Milton recently wrote a blog post recently explaining why transferring knowledge through discussion is 10 times more effective than written documents.
The maths as Nick himself confesses is a little finger in the air but it reminded me of a post in my blook Sharing Knowledge through Face-to-Face Conversation where I explain in a somewhat different way why conversation is so effective at transferring knowledge.
In a face-to-face conversation, you can offer information about the issue; you can probe deeper into the situation; you can gain a sense of what the other already knows and so determine at what level to construct your answer; you can ask about the meaning of a term you are not familiar with; you can seek the reasoning behind a conclusion if it's not evident and you can correct false assumptions.
The speaker and listener repeatedly swap places many times in a short period; the listener frequently interrupting the speaker and the roles changing. Both parties actively try to make sense of what the other is attempting to convey.
Disagreement is an inevitable part of life. We mostly do it badly.
Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy provides a structure for thinking about doing it better. There are seven levels.
Name-calling.
This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common.
Ad Hominem.
An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling.
Responding to Tone.
The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather than the writer.
Contradiction.
In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than how or by whom.
Counterargument.
At this level we reach the first form of convincing disagreement: counterargument.
Refutation.
The most convincing form of disagreement is refutation.
Refuting the Central Point.
The force of a refutation depends on what you refute. The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point.
Only from level four upwards (contradiction) do we reach the first form of a convincing disagreement. Take a look at any difference of opinion on Facebook or other online discussion forums - rarely does a disagreement exceed level three. Far too much name calling and ad hominem attacks.
Don't be fooled by the title of this talk The Art of Being a Couple from Theodore Zeldin - it is not to do with the art of being a couple but the importance of getting to understand each other by listening to each other.
Much like the Industrial Revolution, we can expect a fundamental shift in everything we know - not only in the speed at which all these changes are taking place, but also in our increasing reliance on connectivity.
This is the signature difference of the Transformative Age: being connected, whether it's to data, interfaces, people or experiences.
I think EY have got it spot on - what they call the Transformative Age is about being connected - hyper-connected. Increased connectivity leads to massive complexity and "a fundamental shift in everything we know" - an inherently unpredictable world.
We are entering a new era, one in which we need new ways of making sense of things, decision making, strategizing and working together. To me, this is the challenge. We need to co-create the world we would like to see and not allow technology to blindly shape it for us.
In 100 years, what will history call this new age? We might call it the transformative age, or more likely The Fourth Industrial Revolution as it is being called now by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.
But in the broader sweep of time it will be part of the Anthropocene - a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems.
Various start dates for the start of the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution 12,000–15,000 years ago, to as recent as the 1960s.
As do others, I favor the date of the first detonation of a nuclear device in 1945, code named the Trinity test.
This date corresponds to the end of the second world war, the birth of computers and digital communications and the hyper-interconnected world in which we live today.
What are the flaws in Steven Pinker's thinking in Enlightenment Now? - Comments
I am currently reading Steven Pinkers latest book Enlightenment Now about the many ways in which the world is improving and why we don't believe it.
It is an impressive work, full of statistics. The one that jumps out for me is that before about 1870, the average world life expectancy was about 30 years of age. Today it stands closer to 70. That is quite an achievement.
I have not finished the book, and although his statistics and arguments are persuasive, I feel the gains have been at too high a cost e.g. global warming, plastification of the oceans, species extinction, and more.
What I need to do next is to read a few articles such as these and see what I make of things on balance.
Regardless of how right or wrong Steven is, there is still vast potential for improvement in the human condition but not at the cost of destroying the planet.
Answerer could answer anything provded it was a legitimate question - Comments
If you have an interest in KM, are a bit of philosopher and love science fiction - I think this short audio book will delight you: Ask a Foolish Question by Robert Sheckley
Imagine a machine that could answer anything provided it was a legitimate question. What is life, what is death? And no, the answer is not 42.
"This thing has the answer to the whole universe and it can't tell us unless we ask the rght question!"
The closing message: "In order to ask a question, you must already know most of the answer."
A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented.
It is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules.
A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whatever part of the spectrum they come from.
Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now almost grasps the Cynefin Framework and recognises that in the complex domain we need to perform experiments to make sense of things in order to make good. decisions. In Cynefin-speak: we need to "probe-sense-respond",
But he gets it wrong by saying we need to learn best practices.
There are no best practices in the complex domain. They belong to the obvious domain.
A good friend, Bob Buckman, one of the early pioneers of KM replied to me to make the point that there are places for both descriptors. With his permission, this is the central text of Bob's email:
What struck me was the conflict that exists in some people between the terms Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Management. Personally, I think they describe two different objectives in the organization. I will try and explain:
The label Knowledge Management was created by C. Jackson Grayson who was founder and head of APQC when they put on the first major conference on Knowledge that was held in Houston in the 90's. I got to know Jack through one of my Board members and he attended the second Knowledge conference put on by McKinsey and Brook Manville. There was about 50 people at the conference which we held in the fall. In the following spring APQC put on their conference with about 400 in attendance. The term Knowledge Management was created to describe what we were doing or trying to do. Jack felt it was a good descriptor that they could also build courses around dealing with productivity, etc. (APQC stands for American Productivity and Quality Center) If you were interested in how to manage knowledge for maximum benefit to the corporation, then they could help you do it. They still hold the best KM conferences in the world every spring. I gave one of the keynote addresses at this conference.
We had a problem in our company at the time that needed addressing. We had knowledge on how to apply our products in multiple locations around the world but our people had never met each other. We had been sending experts around the world to each location to bring and get knowledge on how best to use our products, but the process was not fast enough to meet the needs of the customers. We had to figure out how to get them to share knowledge as needed and where needed. To do that we had to put in systems that connected people together. And, when I came back from the conference at APQC, I told everybody we were going to do Knowledge Management. And, I got a lot of blank stares and the usual non-committal response. The more I used the term Knowledge Management, the more I got poor responses and resistance.
I took the problem to Dr. Rueben Harris who was head of Systems Management at the Naval Post Graduate School and also head of Research for the Tom Peters Group at the time. Rueben's response was that he thought it was a cultural perception issue. So, we change the descriptor of what we were trying to do to Knowledge Sharing instead of Knowledge Management and we got immediate acceptance and the rest is history. It turned out that when we used the term Knowledge Management, they thought we were going to manage what was in people's heads. Changing the descriptor was instrumental in achieving success.
Personally, I think there are places for both descriptors. If you are trying to manage knowledge, then Knowledge Management is perfectly fine. If, you are trying to get people to share knowledge, then I think you would be wise to use the term Knowledge Sharing. We need to remember what we are trying to do and not get hung up on trying to put everything under one descriptor.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Being silenced and silencing others : developing the capacity to speak truth to power by Megan Reitz, John Higgins. https://buff.ly/31OuqsS #ConversationalLeadership #ConversationalWisdom #conversation #dialogue
Human nature hasn't changed, but our understanding of human cognition, decision-making, and social systems has grown enormously in the past few decades but has not really made much of a dent in schools of management and the C-suite, yet. https://buff.ly/2BDvZPV
Human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. https://buff.ly/2JhcxMW
What if we can share our ideas on the nature of reality, agree to keep criticising one another's ideas and then keep that conversation going for centuries? https://buff.ly/2Mhz4eE
Oscillators coordinate people physically by regulating how and when their bodies move together. You can see oscillators in action when you watch people about to kiss; their movements look like a dance, one body responding to the other seamlessly. https://buff.ly/2LxtToa
Conversation Day New York Bryant Park, Manhattan on June 8th 2019. https://buff.ly/2AS0Nfr #ConversationalLeadership /short video explaining what this was all about
“It's not what you say, but how you say it. By analyzing online arguments, Cornell researchers have identified how language and interaction with the other party contribute to winning an argument.” https://buff.ly/2oX28Pm #ConversationalLeadership
Many people see politics in it's Machiavellian, manipulative sense, backstabbing and spreading false rumors, but politics need not be dirty.
Politics in reality is the use of power and influence within an organization to achieve changes that benefit the organization or the employees within it. Politics need not be about "backstabbing" or spreading malicious rumors.
If you are going to work effectively in an organization, then you cannot avoid politics, you have to be political. It is through politics that you get things done.
When I explain my Knowledge Café process to people, I make the point that it's okay to go off-topic and that “the question is only a seed.
But I am often asked somthing like this:
“Doesn't that bring the danger of dissipation of the conversation or cause problems after the participants have changed the tables?”
My reply is that the Knowledge Café is not about trying to control people and what they say or talk about. It's about treating them as adults.
Real conversations go off-topic in everyday life – all of the time. That's the intrinsic nature of conversation.
If you try to control conversation – you destroy it. If the topic is meaningful to the participants and the right one – they will quickly return to it.
Going off-topic also allows issues to emerge that were not anticipated. This is at the heart of what the Knowledge Café is all about. You need the space to explore stuff and the freedom for people to relax and tell personal stories and share anecdotes.
Rather than dissipate the conversation – it keeps it natural and animates it.
And there is not a problem when people change tables. Any sidetracking in an earlier table discussion either dies or if it is important, it is built upon.
Fostering human capabilities might be more important than reskilling in the future of work - Comments
In this article Skills change but capabilities endure by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Maggie Wooll of Deloitte's Center for the Edge, they look at why capabilities may be more important than skills in the 21st century workplace.
In their introduction they say this:
At a time when skill needs are changing ever more quickly, and headlines feature looming skills gaps and obsolescence, a focus on cultivating underlying essential human capabilities can give business leaders a sustainable way of finding the talent they need.
Interestingly, they differentiate between innate capabilities - ones that can be amplified, and developed capabilities - ones that can be developed through experience and practice.
Their list of capabilities include imagination, empathy, curiosity, resilience, creativity, emotional intelligence, teaming, social intelligence, sense making, critical thinking and adaptive thinking.
If you had to pick three of them as the most important what would they be?
Mine there would be: curiosity, critical thinking and sense making. Not surprisingly, I would also include oracy though maybe oracy is more a broad foundational skill like literacy than it is a capability.
Dave Snowden is launching a major Cynefin Centre programme to capture people's experiences and stories of what we can all do at a local level to have some impact on climate change.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: September 2019 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Go Virtual Or Bring Them Back to the Office? The Answer: Hybrid Teams @nancymdixon https://buff.ly/2LpCGe3 #KM #Kmers
Facebook has been a giant experiment in understanding humanity. It has proven that we actually don't want to be part of a global community — we are instead a species of small groups and tribes. https://buff.ly/2ZD0l2F
There is a gap between the complicated world we have created and the default ways we think about it. We need greater complexity in our thinking to match the complexity in our world. | Ted Cadsby https://buff.ly/32jWN2W #KM #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe #complexity
The new conversation has a different purpose - it is to discover who other people are ... #Zeldin https://buff.ly/2HEeJNY
The problems in the world stem from the difference between how we think and how the world works. Gregory Bateson https://buff.ly/2ZLsdgM
The most important predictor of success in a group is the amount - not the content - of social interaction https://buff.ly/30SaVQx
Intended learning happens from a place of knowing and against a set of specific goals. Emergent learning happens from a place of reflection and sensemaking. https://buff.ly/2YzDww8 #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership #learning
Adaptive Action is an iterative process that allows you to move forward in uncertainty. When you feel like you cannot move forward because you don't know what to do, you can use Adaptive Action to identify your next step. https://buff.ly/2MfVcay
"In the knowledge age, leadership is a choice." Stephen R.Covey| Conversational Leadership https://buff.ly/2YnlEp8 #ConversationalLeadership #Leadership #LeadershipAsPractice
As I give more and more talks, presentations and webinars about Conversational Leadership, I am receiving some great feedback but encountering a number of misconceptions as to what it is all about. (Thanks to all of you who took part in my recent London Knowledge Café on the subject for all your comments).
I have listed and responded to eight of these myths in my blook. I am sure I will need to add more over the coming months.
It is an excellent book on KM as unlike many books that are theoretical, this one is a very practical "cook book". It is in two parts.
Part I of the book explores knowledge management programmes using the metaphor of the restaurant, introducing the restaurateur (sponsor), customers (organisation), chef (KM leader), staff (KM team and external support), ingredients (tools, methods, processes and strategies) and the restaurant critic (external auditor).
Part II is where you get to meet sixteen chefs from around the world and listen to them tell their stories. The authors have deliberately used a narrative-style for these chapters which comprise the largest part of the 300+ pages.
Knowledge Sharing is only one component of Knowledge Management - Comments
Many people prefer to use the term "Knowledge Sharing" instead of "Knowledge Management". However as a synonym "Knowledge Sharing" is inadequate and misleading
This is an excellent blog post from Nick Milton and a must read for all new KMers.
I have always been a little shocked when people tell me they don't like the term Knowledge Management and so have named their KM activities Knowledge Sharing - there is so much more to KM (or there should be) than merely sharing knowledge. Here is another critical issue to add to Nick's list.:-)
I think "knowledge management" is a bull**** issue.
Let me tell you why. I can give you perfect information, I can give you perfect knowledge and it won't change your behavior one iota.
People choose not to change their behavior because the culture and the imperatives of the organization make it too difficult to act upon the knowledge.
Knowledge is not the power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is power.
Most people in most organizations do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess.
This series of videos and real-life exercises will enable you to connect with people more effectively in a wide range of situations, through understanding, clarity and respect. Whether it's with loved ones, friends, colleagues, neighbours - even strangers - bit by bit, as your communication habits change for the better, so will your human network, your relationships - and your world.
If you would like to learn how your communication habits - good and bad - shape your world and much more, then go take a look, I think you will enjoy it.
I have several profiles of people who are influencing my work on Conversational Leadership in my blook. John Hagel is one you might find particularly interesting,
John Hagel is a management consultant and author who specializes in helping executives to anticipate and address emerging business opportunities and challenges. He is the founder and co-chairman of Deloitte‘s Center for the Edge.
I don't know John but I love his work, especially his blog posts (see this post on spirit set), not only is he extraordinary insightful but each week, he tweets several links to fascinating scientific discoveries or research.
You can find out more about him, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his RSS blog feed here.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
“Intended learning happens from a place of knowing and against a set of specific goals. Emergent learning happens from a place of reflection and sensemaking.” https://buff.ly/2YzDww8 #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership #learning
The Art of Audacious Conversation https://buff.ly/322npVW #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe #ConversationalWisdom
Emergent leadership: When faced with a problem & you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? #Leadership #LeadershipAsPractice https://buff.ly/2KXIET1
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk. We learned to listen. | Stephen Hawking https://buff.ly/2zg5kYc #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership #ConversationalWisdom
One of the ways of thinking about leadership is thinking about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise. Patricia Shaw https://buff.ly/33Fv6Tu #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe #ConversationalWisdom
Nancy White @NancyWhite interviews Chris Corrigan @chriscorrigan on Group Size in Innovation and Open Design https://buff.ly/305UaRx #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe #worldcafe #facilitation /some really good tips
Strategic Questioning: An approach to creating personal and social change by Fran Peavey https://buff.ly/3040PM3 #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #ConversationalWisdom
Adaptive Action is an iterative process that allows you to move forward in uncertainty. When you feel like you cannot move forward because you don't know what to do, you can use Adaptive Action to identify your next step. https://buff.ly/2MfVcay
"In the knowledge age, leadership is a choice." Stephen R.Covey| Conversational Leadership https://buff.ly/2YnlEp8 #ConversationalLeadership #Leadership #LeadershipAsPractice
In two blog posts by Dave Pollard, he lists seven conversational capacities or skills that he considers prerequisites to a good conversation,including things like "the capacity to think critically" or "the capacity to be curious". Recall the frustration of trying to have a conversation with someone who could not argue critically or whose arguments had no coherence.
In each case, the submission is held in a queue until I have checked it out and categorised it. This normally only takes a day or two. If the item is off-topic or I feel it is inappropriate for any other reason I reserve the right to delete it. The service is free.
Updates to my blook on Conversational Leadership July 2019 - Comments
I continue to develop my blook on Conversational Leadership by the day.
I have been slowly adding profiles of people who have influenced and continue to influence my work.
The profiles include a short one or two line description of the person and a brief description of how I know them. They also include links to Linkedin profiles, blogs, websites etc., along with links to the posts in my blook where their work is referenced.
I have also included, where available, a recent video of the person speaking to give some deeper insight into their work and their personality.
These profiles are as much for own benefit as they are for my readers. The resource is exceptionally useful as it allows me to follow their work much more closely.
What is leadership?: "If we understand leadership as a practice, as an activity, then it becomes available to anybody, high or low, any place or position."
What is the work of leadership?: "Leadership is about convening conversations that might not otherwise happen."
Conversational Leadership: We are all leaders. We lead through the conversations we convene and in which we engage.
Thaler Pekar interviews me on Conversational Leadership - Comments
Thaler Pekar recently interviewed me about my work on Conversational Leadership. She summed it up like this:
"What do good leaders do in terms of influencing the world or people around them? They do it fundamentally through conversation.
Hence this term Conversational Leadership."
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Without conversation, work stops https://buff.ly/2lyhk3y #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe #ConversationalWisdom
Adaptive Leadership, What Is It Really? The adaptive leader is one who faces complex challenges for which there are no easy answers. https://buff.ly/2JwCngy #Leadership #ConversationalLeadership #AdaptiveLeadership #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement
"Conversations that Matter" by @DavePollard https://buff.ly/2Xt0W1K /love Dave's writing on conversation #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #knowledgemanagement #ConversationalWisdom #Conversation
The Importance of Intonation in Conversation - italk Telecom https://buff.ly/2FRpOKH #ConversationalLeadership
How to Learn From Experience by @NancyMDixon https://buff.ly/2ld3IKY #KM, #KMers #knowledgemanagement #learning
The Untapped Opportunity: Rethinking Learning in the Work Environment | John Hagel https://buff.ly/2GAJ8MD
Is your team making bad decisions? The culprit is likely your conversations - Work Life by Atlassian https://buff.ly/2lyhk3y #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe #ConversationalWisdom
Be the last to speak. #conversationalleadership #conversationalwisdom https://buff.ly/2PJcjQU
Leadership is a practice not a position of authority - Comments
I have been thinking and reading about leadership for some years now, especially leadership in the context of Conversational Leadership but only recently learned of the work of Ronald Heifetz at Harvard and discovered that his views on leadership were remarkably similar to mine.
In this video he explains that leadership is a practice not a position of authority and gives some excellent examples.
Distinguishing leadership from authority helps us begin to see that if we understand leadership as a practice, as an activity, then it becomes available to anybody high or low, any place or position simply because they passionately care about some problem situation, about the people in that problem situation and then mobilize people with faith in their capacity to step up to the plate and meet that challenge.
We are becoming more connected with each other and less connected with each other at the same time. How do we turn this trend around? This is what John Hagel has to say about the paradox.
We have the ability to connect with more and more people around the world, but our emotions are undermining our ability to make deeper and more fulfilling connections that can help all of us to achieve more of our potential.
There's a vicious cycle under way that continues to erode our ability to make connections that matter – the more fear we feel, the less likely we are to trust others and that leads to a growing sense of isolation which in turn feeds the fear, leading to even less trust and the cycle continues.
While this emotion is understandable, it's preventing us from harnessing the potential that's created by the ability to connect with others more broadly and more deeply.
We need to embrace opportunity-based narratives and the passion of the explorer to turn this around and, for the first time, discover the enormous power that comes from broader and deeper connections.
I am finding this collaborative effort of enormous value, John, Nancy and I are different people, with different skill sets and a different focus on the subject of conversation. This diversity has made for some engaging, creative discussions at times, and slowly, we are shaping our thoughts together.
John has recently published this article on Linkedin: Could “Conversational Leadership” Avert Deeply Troubling Times Ahead? which explains Conversational Leadership in a style that is somewhat different from mine, including thoughts and ideas that I have yet to think or write about myself. I love the post, and it has really provoked my thinking. I hope you enjoy it too.
It is through conversation that each of us can partner and understand each other in a deeper, more meaningful way.
We can try to make sense of the complexity and chaos around us through conversation.
Calling all Oracy advocates in the UK, if you have any evidence as to the impact of oracy in your setting - written or video - please submit it to the Oracy APPG (Oracy All-Party Parliamentary Group). The deadline for written evidence is 9th August 2019.
Numeracy: the ability to understand and work with numbers.
Literacy: the ability to read and write.
Oracy: the ability to express oneself in and understand spoken language.
I am so pleased to see the increase in interest in oracy.
To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human - Comments
I have long been a huge fan of David Weinberger. Read more about him here and watch the video. He is such an amazing thinker. In particular, I love his insights into conversation such as the one below.
To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human - acknowledging you don't have all the answers, being eager to learn from someone else and to build new ideas together.
You can only have a conversation if you're not afraid of being wrong. Otherwise, you're not conversing, you're just declaiming, speechifying, or reading what's on the PowerPoints. To converse, you have to be willing to be wrong in front of another person.
Conversations occur between equals. The time your boss's boss asked you at a meeting about your project's deadline was not a conversation. The time you sat with your boss for an hour in the Polynesian-themed bar while on a business trip and you really talked, got past the corporate bullshit, told each other the truth about the dangers ahead, and ended up talking about your kids - that maybe was a conversation.
The awards recognise those who are advancing organisational practice. The Henley Forum would like to hear from people who are working to develop dynamic capability though knowledge, learning, change and innovation work. For example, by:
enabling knowledge to flow
fostering organisational learning
facilitating organisational change and development
cultivating innovation
and collaborating across boundaries.
These prestigious awards will recognise practitioners who are working to advance knowledge, learning and change practice in their organisations, and the people whose thinking has most influenced them. Awards will be presented at The 20th Annual Henley Forum Conference on 05 - 06 February 2020. You can apply here.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
The 20th World Knowledge Forum in Seoul in September this year has an interesting theme: Knowledge Revolution 5.0: Perspicacity Towards Prosperity for All. @wkforum https://buff.ly/2FuJaF0
Sustainability is not enough: we need regenerative cultures by @DrDCWahl https://buff.ly/2IEQMGQ
The surprising benefits of talking to strangers https://buff.ly/2F4Ac1d #ConversationalLeadership
Collective leadership with power symmetry: Lessons from Aboriginal prehistory Karl-Erik Sveiby https://buff.ly/2ZdjdRH #leadership #Communityship
Here are the top 5 predictions by AI expert, Neil Jacobstein, regarding AI breakthroughs in the next 5 years https://t.co/3vv49vXxXD
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions. Claude Levi-Strauss https://buff.ly/2WDexTK #ConversationalLeadership
Be the last to speak. #conversationalleadership #conversationalwisdom https://buff.ly/2PJcjQU
Conversation Day started in New York City in 2013 as a celebration of the joys and power of great conversation, sponsored by the non-profit volunteer organization Conversations New York (CNY), founded and directed by Ronald Gross, co-chair of the University Seminar on Innovation at Columbia University .
Worldwide, the event is celebrated annually on the second Saturday in June in over 20 cities including New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Lagos, Bangalore, Kuala Lumpur, and Riyadh.
Unfortunately, I only have the details for the New York event. and the London event which I will be joining. I hope to see one or two of you there.
Turn your death by PowerPoint talk into a conversational one. - Comments
Most conferences are a series of PowerPoint talks interspersed by the occasional panel discussion.
The audience gets a little time to ask questions, and they get absolutely no time to reflect or interact with each other besides in the coffee breaks or over lunch.
Not allowing time for conversation is a missed opportunity for conference delegates to engage with the contents of the conference and learn from each other.
It is a missed chance for the delegates to become participants rather than an audience. It need not be this way
If you are a speaker, it so easy to turn a traditional talk into a conversational talk. Here's how.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
We need far more "non-policy people" in the policymaking process - here's why https://buff.ly/2BxlONp #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership
“Sometimes a stranger—not a friend or a loved one—can significantly improve our day, providing comfort or helping to broaden our perspective” https://buff.ly/2Vu6gG3 #ConversationalLeadership
“Why Dialogue is at the heart of Knowledge Management” by @nickknoco https://buff.ly/2LIDWel #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe
Management by talking about by @nickknoco https://buff.ly/TdyYBz #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe /amazed not to see the Knowledge Café on this list of KM conversational processes.
How do you identify valuable #knowledge in your organisation? We know its one of our best resources but it can hard to know what is really valuable. The KIA Research 6 from #henleyforum helps us to fill this gap #knowledgesharing #KM #OD https://t.co/FhZjFSMYf5https://t.co/DeMtSKcLr7
Be the last to speak. #conversationalleadership #conversationalwisdom https://buff.ly/2PJcjQU
Want to take part in Conversation Day on Saturday 8 June? Just sign up. https://t.co/O23qkSj6qK
We humans have long been under the impression that if we can just understand the immutable laws of how things happen, we'll be able to perfectly predict, plan for, and manage the future.
We have, therefore, made it our business to know how things happen by discovering the laws and models that govern our world.
Given how imperfect our knowledge has always been, this assumption has rested upon a deeper one.
Our unstated contract with the universe has been that if we work hard enough and think clearly enough, the universe will yield its secrets, for the universe is knowable, and thus, at least, somewhat pliable to our will.
But now that our new tools, especially machine learning and the internet, are bringing home to us the immensity of the data and information around us, we're beginning to accept that the true complexity of the world far outstrips the laws and models we devise to explain it.
Our newly capacious machines can get closer to understanding it than we can, and they, as machines, don't really understand anything at all.
David goes on to give some good examples, the bottom line, however, us that AI can discover relationships between things in the world that we humans will never be able to, given the size and complexity of the data, even though the AI software has no understanding of the world. In David's words:
"We need to give up our insistence on always understanding our world and how things happen in it."
Jakob took part in one of my London Knowledge Cafés in February and was inspired to adapt the Café format to an educational setting by creating "Co-Creative Conversations".
Jakob ran a trial at the University of Roehampton Business School that I gather was a great success and he now has a free public event coming up in May in Brimingham in the UK: Empowering KS2-5 learners through Participatory Budgeting.
I have long thought that the Knowledge Café has a strong role to play in Education and you can find a few examples I have documented in my blook.
I am hoping Jakob's work and that of others will help inspire more educationalists to take the role of conversation in education more seriously. It's great to see some the work in schools on oracy for example.
The annual Ark Group KM Summit 2019 is coming up on 4 - 5 June, at the Cumberland Hotel in London. They have an excellent agenda with two streams, one for Legal KM and the other for the Corporate/Charity/Public sector.
I am looking forward to giving a talk on the rationale behind Conversational Leadership in the plenary towards the end of the second day. Nick Stone, the conference producer did a short video interview with me a few weeks back where I briefly described what Conversational Leadership was all about. It is only six minutes long and if you see it through to the end, you will get a good idea of what Conversational Leadership is all about and why I think it is so, so important.
If you have yet to watch it - take a look at this debate with IBM's Project Debator.
Experience a live debate between the first AI system to debate humans on complex topics, Project Debater, and a top human debater. During a twenty minute debate on a complex topic, Project Debater will digest massive texts, construct a well-structured speech, deliver it with clarity and purpose, and rebut its opponent.
The human debator is the clear winner but the computer does an amazing job given it doesn't "understand" a thing it is talking about LOL.
Imagine, a few years time, and you are dictating an article/essay or blog post on a topic into your smartphone and you can have a "conversation" with an app based on this technology thats advises and corrects you in real time. Kinda like Grammarly on steroids!
Nancy Dixon, John Hovell and I are running a 3-day residential workshop on Conversational Leadership in the UK this autumn. You will find full details here.
We have an amazing venue - the Elevetham - a Victorian Gothic Mansion set in an estate of 4,000 acres in the Hampshire countryside and a history dating back to the 11th century.
We are also very excited about the content as John, Nancy and I bring diverse perspectives and skills to the 3-days.
We have kept the price exceedingly low to make it easy for you to participate - the early bird price (expires May 1st) only just covers our cost.
Do take a look and get in touch with me, if you have any questions.
Updates to my blook on Conversational Leadership April 2019 - Comments
I continue to develop my blook on Conversational Leadership by the day.
What I like about it compared with a conventional book other than what I have written here is that is evolving to be so much more than a book.
I can add so much in the way of structure and additional resources. In fact, it is starting to look a little more like my gurteen.com site.
This is as much for own benefit as it is for my readers. The people resource is exceptionally useful as it allows me to follow their work more closely.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Sentenced to read - the teens who sprayed racist graffiti https://buff.ly/2GabnAo /What a powerful "punishment"
Powerful questions are those that, in the answering, evoke a choice for accountability and commitment. -- Peter Block https://buff.ly/2IEEjnb #KM #ConversationalLeadership #ConversationalWisdom
Children and the Importance of face-to-face conversation https://buff.ly/2UJ3c8h #ConversationalLeadership #ConversationalWisdom
“The more team members directly interact with each other face-to-face, and the more they trust other team members, the more creative and of higher quality the result of their teamwork is.” https://buff.ly/2GqQHWq #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership
The Creative Power of Meeting Eyeball to Eyeball https://buff.ly/2GqQHWq #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe
We as a society have been conducting a play-deprivation experiment with our children. The results are in. Play deprivation is bad for children - it promotes anxiety, depression, suicide, narcissism, and loss of creativity. It's time to end the experiment https://t.co/EhZ1IqIDP6
Using Intrinsic Motivators to Drive Standards and Innovation in Knowledge Management | LinkedIn https://buff.ly/2K2aGyu #KM #KMers
The Henley Forum 2020 Awards recognise those who are advancing organisational practice. We want to hear from people who are working to develop dynamic capability though knowledge, learning, change and innovation work. For example, by:
enabling knowledge to flow
fostering organisational learning
facilitating organisational change and development
cultivating innovation
and collaborating across boundaries.
These prestigious awards will recognise practitioners who are working to advance knowledge, learning and change practice in their organisations, and the people whose thinking has most influenced them. Awards will be presented at The 20th Annual Henley Forum Conference on 05-06 February 2020. You can apply here.
The annual Ark Group KM Summit 2019 is coming up on 4 - 5 June, at the Cumberland Hotel in London. They have an excellent agenda with two streams, one for Legal KM and the other for the Corporate/Charity/Public sector.
I am looking forward to giving a talk on the rationale behind Conversational Leadership in the plenary towards the end of the second day.
I walked past Lloyd's of London one evening last week on the way to meet my wife for dinner in the CIty and a little later passed where it all started in a coffee house over 300 years ago.
Today Lloyd's is the world's leading market for specialist insurance.
I was talking with a client the other day who was helping to plan an internal conference for employees from all over the world, many of whom would not know each other, and we were brainstorming how she might get them to connect and talk with each other more.
I suggested stammtisch tables at the conference but that was not viable but then the idea came to mind of "stammtisch seats" on the coaches that were going to ferry them from their hotels to dinner in the evenings.
The idea was simple, not everyone on a trip would want to sit next to a stranger and have a conversation - they would rather sit with someone they knew - so why not label some of the pairs of seats on the bus as stammtisch seats: "Sit here, if you wish to talk to a someone you don't know."
We both thought it was a great idea but the powers that be did not agree it did not happen, so I am sharing the idea with you here in the hope that one day soon I hear from one of you that you have tried it out and just how well it worked.
A little while back I came across an online etymology dictionary and was fascinated to learn the roots and the evolution of the word "conversation".
conversation (n.)
mid-14c., "place where one lives or dwells," also "general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the world," both senses now obsolete; from Old French conversacion "behavior, life, way of life, monastic life," and directly from Latin conversationem (nominative conversatio) "frequent use, frequent abode in a place, intercourse, conversation," noun of action from past-participle stem of conversari "to live, dwell, live with, keep company with," passive voice of conversare "to turn about, turn about with."
It seems to me that this obsolete meaning fits well with the concept of Conversational Leadership. You might say that Conversational Leadership is about how "we conduct ourselves in the world" or maybe "how we interact with the world."
Anyway, I had forgotten all about this old usage until the other day I was walking in London from Charing Cross to the City, along Fleet Street and visited some of the many churches along the way. I love the quiet and peacefulness of old churches amid the hustle and bustle of modern-day London.
I sat at a pew in a church called St Dunstan-in-the-West for a while contemplating life and as came to leave, I decided to read one or two memorial plaques on the wall. The photo is the first one I read - a sad story of a young man drowned in the Rhone in 1848 near Geneva and there were the words:
"He had his conversation in the world". That old 14th century meaning was still in use almost 200 years ago.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
“For society to change, we all have to start making small changes. Get out and talk to other people. Change your travel habits. Read more and different literature. Take some to sit and reflect. It sounds simple ... but keeping at it will be the hard part.” https://buff.ly/2W9Ozr0
Word of Mouth - Listen and learn: how to make better conversation - BBC Sounds https://buff.ly/2W9Iyut #ConversationalLeadership #TalkingRevolution #KM #KMers
"Agree to Disagree is a project born out of the conviction that people of differing political viewpoints should be able to have a respectful discussion and learn about one another's beliefs.” https://buff.ly/2VZENHV #ConversationalLeadership
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner says the biggest skills gap in the US is not coding and that perhaps the popular bootcamps of tomorrow will be those that can teach us how to have a conversation. https://buff.ly/2AcLX3s #ConversationalLeadership
Are we having the conversation we need to be having? https://buff.ly/2tnjOT8 #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership /John Hovell @klowey22 and Priya Farish talk with me about Conversational Leadership
What are the unintended consequences of what you are doing right now? - Comments
I was recently asked, along with others, to comment on a regional digital transformation strategy. Now, this is an area in which I have no real expertise and the other experts gave some fascinating input to the discussion.
I kept my feedback simple:
Several people have mentioned this already and that is the need for vastly improved cyber-security, data protection and regulation in its broadest sense.
Digital transformation is creating a hyper-connected, massively complex digital economy.
A complex system by its very nature is impossible to understand fully. It is volatile and unpredictable.
This brings unprecedented risk and in my opinion, should be foremost in our minds as we race at times blindly into the future.
A conversation we should have every day: "What are the likely unintended consequences of what we are doing?" The consequences are not always obvious, but they are frequently not so deep that a good conversation won't reveal many of them.
How do we to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures? - Comments
I love writing. I love quotations. I love serendipity. And I love it when they all come together.
In writing my blook, I am continually updating posts, often with quotations that I have tripped over while browsing the web, researching some topic or another.
Recently, I was thinking about love and evil and my mind went back to the work of Scott Peck, and so I went to my Gurteen Knowledge website as I knew I had some material there on the subject.
I was right; here was Scotts definition of love. But as I scrolled down, I found more quotes I had clipped over 15 years ago and had long forgotten about including a quote on community that was perfect for the introductory post to my emerging chapter on Community.
Here is the quote, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
So how do you think we can transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures? Is it needed? Is it possible? Personally, I think it is the key to our future and that we start by "talking with each other more".
We know the rules of community; we know the healing effect of community in terms of individual lives.
If we could somehow find a way across the bridge of our knowledge, would not these same rules have a healing effect upon our world?
We human beings have often been referred to as social animals. But we are not yet community creatures.
We are impelled to relate with each other for our survival.
But we do not yet relate with the inclusivity, realism, self-awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community.
It is clearly no longer enough to be simply social animals, babbling together at cocktail parties and brawling with each other in business and over boundaries.
It is our task - our essential, central, crucial task - to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.
It is the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed.
Are we having the conversation we need to be having? - Comments
If you are a podcast fan, you may enjoy this one Are we having the conversation we need to be having? where John Hovell and Priya Farish talk with me about Conversational Leadership and we explore what it takes to have a real conversation.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: February 2019 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
The most effective form of sustainable leadership is developed through effective and meaningful informal discussions (i.e., conversations) with others, which help them develop their thinking and new insight.” https://buff.ly/2GZiPAF #ConversationalLeadership #leadership
A leader is not necessarily a senior person in the organization, nor is it a hierarchical position, it is a decision people at any level of the organization make to start impacting the people around them. https://buff.ly/2GZiPAF #ConversationalLeadership #leadership
7 Differences between complex and complicated | More Beyond https://buff.ly/2Xd6gai #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership #KnowledgeCafe #complexity
The Talking Revolution is an initiative to improve the quality of human connection worldwide. It's a revolution that anyone can initiate, whoever and wherever they are. https://buff.ly/2BMyiAB #TalkingRevolution #ConversationalLeadership
The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2BKcg1k
Are we having the conversation we need to be having? https://buff.ly/2tnjOT8 #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership /John Hovell @klowey22 and Priya Farish talk with me about Conversational Leadership
This is not bad education. This is anti-education. Don't write what you don't believe, or you will come to believe it. https://t.co/jSYTQzGLge
When did you last connect with someone so deeply that it changed your life, changed your mind, shifted your perspective, grew your world? https://buff.ly/2EuVVvX #ConversationalLeadership /Has it ever happened?
Imagine that it is 1920 and you have somehow been granted absolute power to predict the future.
You happen to visit the mayor of Rotterdam and, during that time, you describe in vivid detail what is going to happen to his town over the next 25 years.
Thus, in an otherwise perfectly normal working day, the mayor hears about the advent of the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation, the 1929 stock exchange crash, the Great Depression that followed, the rise of Nazism in Germany with its (for Rotterdam) damaging economic policy of autarchy, the outbreak of the second world war, the carpet bombing of the town's city centre and, finally, the systematic destruction of the town's port installation during the calamitous winter of 1945.
The mayor listens to this information placidly. He gives every sign of believing you. And then he asks, “If you were in my shoes, hearing all of this, amid all the other opinions and facts that reach me during the course of my day, what would you reasonably expect me to do about this information?“
What is it reasonable to expect the mayor to do?
When I ask this question in discussion groups, we always reach the same answer: there is nothing the mayor can be expected to do.
Even if he gives your prediction a higher degree of credibility than most of the other information which reached him, he would have neither the courage nor the powers of persuasion to take the far-reaching decision that is required by such a prediction.
The future cannot be predicted. But, even if it could, we would not dare to act on the prediction.
Now suppose a time traveller returned to the present day from 2120 and told us in graphic detail what was to become of the world as a consequence of global warming. We already have a pretty good idea of the consequences but now we know for sure. Would it make any difference whatsoever?
Even with perfect knowledge. Even if we could accurately predict the future, more often than not, we do not have the ability to act on that knowledge.
Knowledge is not power. The self-motivation and the ability to act on knowledge and to influence and work with people (especially those in authority) is power.
How do we each improve our agency to act? This is the question that consumes my thinking right now.
I wrote recently about stammtisch tables - "tables for conversation with those sitting near you whether you know them or not" and someone replied to tell me about the Chatty Café scheme.
Sit at a Chatter & Natter table
A Chatter & Natter table is where customers can sit if they are happy to talk to other customers.
We are looking for supermarket cafes, community cafes, large and small cafes to get involved so that just maybe we can make the Chatter & Natter table a part of everyday café culture.
A Chatter & Natter table brings people together and everyone is invited! If you're on your own, in a couple, with a friend, if you're a carer why not sit there with who you care for, mums and babies, dads and babies, grandparents and babies, young people, older people and anyone in between!
When you are deciding where to sit, look for the Chatter & Natter table and sit there! Stay for five minutes while you have your drink or longer. It's not about making friends, just having good old fashioned human interaction!
A stammtisch table with a more catchy name! What a great idea! So good in fact that Costa Coffee has taken it up.
While on the topic of conversations with strangers in public places - my good friend Alan Stewart is doing some great work in Adelaide, Australia with his Conversare Events. We need more of these social initiatives.
Every so often I come across a fascinating article or blog post that has a major impact on how I see the world.
This is one such article - an interview with Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist and Professor of Psychology and Economics.
Part of his program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate and we need to think of it all as biological evolution. He has begun to pursue the idea that he calls the cultural brain hypothesis -- that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was a growing cumulative body of cultural information.
An example he gives is of fire and cooking. This is what he says:
Fire and cooking have been important selection pressures, but what often gets overlooked in understanding fire and cooking is that they're culturally transmitted -- we're terrible at making fires actually. We have no innate fire-making ability.
But once you got this idea for cooking and making fires to be culturally transmitted, then it created a whole new selection pressure that made our stomachs smaller, our teeth smaller, our gapes or holdings of our mouth smaller, it altered the length of our intestines. It had a whole bunch of downstream effects.
Fascinating, slowly but surely, we are making better sense of how we evolved to be what we are today. I'd love to come back in 100,000 years time and see how evolution has further shaped us - of course if the human race has not long become extinct!
The importance of the freedom of speech - Comments
It is just over 2 years ago that I wrote about Jordan Peterson and his passionate defence of the freedom of speech. In those 2 years, he has managed to establish himself firmly as a controversial figure.
Since then I have added a video of his stream of consciousness description and defense of "free speech" and the transcript to my blook in a post on freedom of speech.
Go take a look, what ever you think of him (there are highly polarised views) what he says about freedom of speech I think is so important.
I love the way above that he describes how free speech works – a sort of “group thinking out loud” in pursuit of a better understanding of the world and ourselves - a major part of what KM and Conversational Leadership are all about.
Crowds within crowd outperform 'wisdom of the crowd' - Comments
You will no doubt have heard of the “wisdom of crowds” in which individuals in a crowd are privately asked to give an answer to a question, such as how many jelly beans are in a jar and that when the answers are averaged together, the answer given by the crowd is generally better than for any given individual.
By dividing the crowd into small groups of five, and having the five small groups discuss the question come to a consensus, that is then averaged produces better results than the average produced by the large crowd.
To my mind, the research lends support to the idea that the Knowledge Café can make an effective collective sensemaking tool, though there is clearly a big divide between estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar and coming up with an effective response to a complex business or social problem.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
“When was the last transformative conversation you had?” https://buff.ly/2EuVVvX #ConversationalLeadership
Why Tone (of Voice) Matters - ConversationSpace https://buff.ly/2QP4nfM #ConversationalLeadership
Stephen Hawking short video: For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk. We learned to listen. https://buff.ly/2QGItet #ConversationalLeadership
Strengthening the conversational skills of leaders is the first step to enabling organisations to thrive, say Sara Hope and Chloe Walton https://buff.ly/2D0kVgZ #ConversationalLeadership
StoryMaking & StoryShaping in a Divided World https://buff.ly/2LyuLI4 #ConversationalLeadership
The notion that our lives succeed or fail on conversation one at a time is
at once commonsensical and revolutionary. - Ken Blanchard https://buff.ly/2QgRsYK #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership
I usually attend this conference every year and will be there again this year. To my mind, it is the best KM conference by far, both in terms of speakers, content and interactivity. The location on the banks of the river Thames is also hard to beat.
You don't need to be a member of the forum to attend. If you are interested in joining contact Marina Hart - her details are on the webpage linked to above.
If you are not familiar with the Henley Forum and the amazing research work that they do - go take a look at their Knowledge in Action Leaflets - 38 x three or four page downloadable reports on a wide range of topics from "Improving conversations to enable effective knowledge sharing" to "Embedding change".
If you have received a book token for Christmas and are looking for an interesting book to purchase then take a look at my Conversational Leadership Books page in my blook.
The book I have been reading over Christmas is this one "Humble Leadership: The power of relationships, openness and trust" by Edgar Schein and his son Peter Schein.
I particularly like their four levels of relationship tough I think I may like to add one or two more levels.
Level Minus 1: Total impersonal domination and coercion
Level 1: Transactional role and rule-based supervision, service, and most forms of the "professional" helping relationships
Level 2: Personal cooperative, trusting relationships as in friendships and in effective teams
Level 3: Emotionally intimate total mutual commitments
It has also stimulated my thinking about "conversational levels".
And one other new book that I am just starting to get into "The Talking Revolution: How Creative Conversation Can Change The World" by Peter Osborn and Eddy Canfor-Dumas which has a lot of overlap with my thinking on Conversational Leadership.
Several years ago I was working in the library of the RSA in London and fell into conversation with two people at the same table.
We had to whisper, as after all this was a library, but we got to talking about the fact that although many people used the RSA library and bar and other facilities there was no easy way to meet people and strike up a conversation if you were there on your own.
I talked about some of my conference ideas such as wearing a badge that said “talk to me” or even creating special tables where people could sit with the expectation of talking to strangers. And we discussed what a great idea it would be if the RSA had something like this.
It was then that one of my new acquaintances told me about the German concept of Stammtisch.
I had never heard about it before but when he explained the concept I immediately fell in love with the idea. A Stammtisch is a table in a pub or restaurant reserved for regular customers or alternatively outside of Germany a table reserved for people who would like to meet to practice their German.
I liked the idea of bending the concept a little further and creating tables in bars, cafes and large conferences etc where people can sit if they wish to have conversations with strangers. Many people need a little bit of an excuse to start up a conversation and this would provide it but maybe it needs a new label – a “knowledge table” or “conversation table”.
That was in 2007 when I talked to several people at the RSA about the idea but nothing came of it, so imagine my delight today in 2018 when I see they have created a Stammtisch table their new Rawthmells coffeehouse.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: December 2018 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Who said “We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us" Marshall McLuhan? Winston Churchill? Robert Flaherty? Emerson Brown? John Culkin? William J. Mitchell? Anonymous?” https://buff.ly/2UGxAfR
Spiritset: the essence of who we are & what ultimately makes us human. Deep within us, we each have a unique identity that struggles for expression & growth. It's what ultimately defines us & our deepest needs. @jhagel https://buff.ly/2RUCxQD #ConversationalLeadership
Generative conversations are based on the premise that the way people see and respond to the world is determined by out-of-awareness cognitive structures that may be identified and addressed during everyday conversations. https://buff.ly/2RGfwk7 #ConversationalLeadership
Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried. Tim O'Reilly https://t.co/NIo60QIGsz
The notion that our lives succeed or fail on conversation one at a time is
at once commonsensical and revolutionary. - Ken Blanchard https://buff.ly/2QgRsYK #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership
How you talk to your child changes their brain https://buff.ly/2JsR1Um #ConversationalLeadership
Many of you will be familiar with my face-to-face Knowledge Cafés and know that I also run them virtually using the Zoom video conferencing platform.
On November 28th I did something a little different and somewhat more challenging, I ran a Future Café for Paul Nunesdea at Visual Collab 2018 - a hybrid Café where some participants were in a room face-to-face (the RSA in London) and others were remote on their laptops running Zoom. They could have been anywhere in the world but were in Canada, US, Italy, Finland, Belgium and Portugal.
The event was not as difficult as it sounds as we had two large interactive touch screens in the room plus some high-tech microphones and video cameras courtesy of Jon Knight of Ascentae.
I hosted the room at the RSA and my good friend John Hovell hosted the Zoom room from Washington DC.
As if this were not enough, we are also used some innovative software Nureva Span Workspace from Nureva to allow participants (both local and remote) to capture ideas and insights on virtual post-it notes that they posted to a virtual wall in the room (one of the big screens) from their smartphones. This was really quick and easy to do.
It was a bit of an experiment but it worked exceptionally well and we learnt a great deal about how to do it better next time. I am sure this type of interactivity for large globally distributed organizations has got to be a wave of the future.
Amazon book reviews often tell me a lot - Comments
When looking at Amazon book revews, I find it just as useful to read the one-star ratings as to look at the five-star ones. There is nearly always a perspective I have missed.
The rating distribution is also of interest.
A book with nothing but five-stars is probably good even if the author did get all his or her friends to rate it.
A book with mainly 1-star ratings is probably bad.
But a book with a polarized distribution of stars - lots of five-stars and one-stars - is probably the most interesting, people love it or hate it.
Why? Sometimes it is obvious if the topic is on politics or religion but often it is not - the author has something controversial to say. This many well be a really good read!
not have the political skills to influence or persuade senior management to take you seriously
not have the budget or other resources to put the knowledge into action
not have the leadership skills to act
not have the collaborative skills to work with other people
Knowledge is not power. The self-motivation and the ability to act on knowledge and to influence and work with people (especially those in authority) is power.
Banter is an art form - a conversational game. It requires a degree of skill and sensitivity. The fact that you are bantering needs to be understood by both parties. Played sensitively, it can help build and strengthen relationships. Played poorly it can be destructive. Play it with care.
I say a little more about banter and have two short video examples in a post in my blook.
I'm not so sure I would call this a real conversation but let me share with you a little game I often play in my head. I usually play it when I am driving on a long journey, and sometimes when I cannot sleep at night or when I know I am not going to be interrupted.
I interview myself on a topic; usually, one of interest, e.g. Conversational Leadership or one for a bit of fun, say my views on Trump or Brexit.
I pretend that the interview is in real-time say on stage or the radio and I am being interviewed by a tough, maybe highly skeptical, even aggressive interviewer. I am as hard on myself as I can be. I don't allow myself, to start again, and if I talk myself down a one-way alley, I have to talk my way out of it. I put the pressure on myself!
It's interesting to reflect as to what's goes on in my head when I do this.
In response to a question, I draw fragments of knowledge from deep in my mind and form them together in some structured away and express them through speech in real-time.
At the same time, I'm listening to what I'm saying and looking for the flaws in my logic.
Also in parallel, I am thinking of questions and responses that I'm going to verbalize through the mouth of my phantom interviewer.
It's quite amazing that the human mind can do all of this at the same time!
I also have two variant's of this that are a little kinder on myself, first I make it a conversation rather than an interview and second I pretend I am giving a speech on a topic. No preparation, I launch right into it.
Try it, its a great way of testing out how informed you are on a topic on which you hold strong opinions
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: November 2018 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
“Much development and humanitarian thinking and practice is still trapped in a paradigm of predictable, linear causality and maintained by mindsets that seek accountability through top-down command and control. ” https://buff.ly/2qZkMDG
We now face the uncomfortable reality that truth, fact, statistics and “expert” views are losing currency in decision-making and democratic choices, being replaced by assertions that “feel right” but have no basis in fact ... https://buff.ly/2DNnsgh #BridgingDivides
“How often do you talk to someone who has completely different views? Switzerland has ventured into a social experiment this month: People with different opinions met on blind dates. An algorithm chose the pairs. ” https://buff.ly/2S2rEf4 HT @klowey22 #ConversationalLeadership
In a world of unprecedented accelerating change there is an eminent need to improve our decision making capability. Effective decision making of our leaders is paramount to be able to address current global challenges. https://buff.ly/2RPCK72 #ConversationalLeadership
“A team does not learn from reading a document about what some other team has done.” @nancymdixons https://buff.ly/2zMsDst #KM #KMers#KnowledgeManagement
“A document in a repository is not knowledge any more than a book on a shelf is knowledge. Knowledge is created and resides in the minds of human beings.” @nancymdixon https://buff.ly/2zMsDst #KM #KMers#KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership
Towards the idea that complexity IS a theory of change https://buff.ly/2QtRcSa #ConversationalLeadership #complexity #km#kmers
How you talk to your child changes their brain https://buff.ly/2JsR1Um #ConversationalLeadership
Nancy Dixon recently posted a blog post entitled "Six Ways Leaders Kill Conversation".
Take a look at the post and go the Gurteen Knowledge Community Forum and add the ways that you have seen managers (I won't call them leaders) manage to kill conversations!
I feel this is a really important topic as most of us one way or another frequently manage to close down conversations before they have even got started! We need to learn how to sustain conversations and not kill them.
Writing about people we don't totally agree with - Comments
In last month's newsletter I talked about Elon Musk and made reference to Prof. Jordan Peterson. I received two emails in response.
The first email said "Given Elon Musk's recent behaviour, I'm rather surprised to find him featured here!"
And the second, "Really disheartened that you would include a reference to Jordan Peterson, who has been accused of sexually misconduct. Have you heard him speak about women? He's atrocious. And his failure to acknowledge students who eschew binary pronouns? Disrespectful, to say the least." They then unsubscribed from my newsletter.
This was my reply to the second email.
A big thanks for your email,
It is giving me a massive amount of food for thought. Especially as I received this email the same day.
"Given Elon Musk's recent behaviour, I'm rather surprised to find him featured here!"
I have a particular way of looking at the world that I am going to try to write about at some point.
I have watched many of Jordan's videos and have read his new book, also read a lot of heated "fights" on discussion forums between people who love him and people who hate him.
He is a controversial figure indeed.
I personally think he is acting in good faith and that he has a lot of deep insights into what it means to be human. I think he is also often misunderstood.
Like all of us, he has his "demons" and I don't think he is always right. But interestingly - he admits that. He is trying to make better sense of the world and is a passionate believer in free speech.
I think we need to listen to and engage with such people - even if we do not like what they have to say at times. This is how we make progress in the world.
Once again a big thanks for provoking my thinking on this. David
In the this video by former CIA undercover officer Amaryllis Fox, she points out two simple truths that she thinks her work has taught her:
Everybody believes they are the good guy.
and
The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them.
It's a strange human phenomena but everyone believes they're the good guy or maybe not so strange as we get to learn more about what it means to be human.
I am sure both American republicans and democrats think they are they are the "good guys".
So do UK Brexiteers and remainers.
And, everyone else across the "human divides" of gender, sexuality, religion, politics, race and more.
We need to take Amaryllis's advice and start talking with each other, listening to each other and understanding each other better, rather then seeing each other as enemies.
Introduction to BS ISO 30401 Knowledge Management Standard - Comments
On 8th October a webinar was given by the BSI (British Standard Institute) to introduce BS ISO 30401 - the new Knowledge Management Standard.
Personally, I am not a big believer in the value of the standard (but I am happy to be proved wrong). I do like the fact though that it is principle based and not prescriptive.
But take a look and draw your own conclusions. You can watch a recording of the webinar here.
The Henley Forum has a meeting coming up on
Wednesday 28th November 2018 - Accelerating innovation.
It's a members' only event but there are a few guest places available at £175 + VAT.
This is a great learning opportunity at a low price to experience the Henley Forum.
There is also a 2-day workshop next year - Advancing your OD practice 22 – 23 January 2019 open to non-members.
Where does progress come from in the world? - Comments
Where does most of the progress come from in the world?
I always remember back in my corporate days that the people I admired the most for their creativity were the "geeks" - often in faded jeans, t-shirts and their bicycle leaning against the wall in their office. They were not the folks in fancy business attire.
Sure this is a generalization but I recall the feeling well, so when I came across this passage in a 1993 book Microcosm by George Gilder it resonated soundly with me - I love it :-)
The United States did not enter the microcosm through the portals of the Ivy League, with Brooks Brothers suits, gentleman Cs, and warbling society wives.
Few people who think they are already in can summon the energies to break in.
From immigrants and outcasts, street toughs and science wonks, nerds and boffins, the bearded and the beer-bellied, the tacky and the upright, and sometimes weird, the born again and born yesterday, with Adam's apples bobbing, psyches throbbing, and acne galore, the fraternity of the pizza breakfast, the Ferrari dream, the silicon truth, the midnight modem, and the seventy-hour week,
from dirt farms and redneck shanties, trailer parks and Levittowns, in a rainbow parade of all colors and wavelengths, of the hyperneat and the sty high, the crewcut and khaki, the ponytailed and punk, accented
from Britain and Madras, from Israel and Malaya, from Paris and Parris Island, from Iowa and Havana, from Brooklyn and Boise and Belgrade and Vienna and Vietnam,
from the coarse fanaticism and desperation, ambition and hunger, genius and sweat of the outsider, the downtrodden, the banished, and the bullied
come most of the progress in the world and in Silicon Valley.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
A strategic conversation is one that has the potential to influence the future direction of an organization. #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2SftsCw
Knowledge is the capacity for effective action. There is no capacity for effective action in a database. Credit: Peter Senge #ConversationalLeadership #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement https://buff.ly/2S9Ytrn
Our brains rapidly and automatically process opinions we agree with as if they are facts https://buff.ly/2J6s5kb
“My-side bias” makes it difficult for us to see the logic in arguments we disagree with https://t.co/19pEfsAWDd
The Case Against Rewards and Praise: A Conversation with Alfie Kohn @alfiekohn https://buff.ly/2ICQr6g #education #PunishedByRewards #AlfieKohn
Knowledge is not power. The will and the ability to act on knowledge and to influence people and events is power. #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2Seyj79
The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity. Tom Peters #Culture #Engagement
Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity https://buff.ly/2BTthc3 #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership
Future Café: the future of visual collaboration tools - Comments
One of the challenges I have in seeing the Knowledge Café more widely adopted is conveying its power as a "group thinking" or "group sensemaking" tool and how it can be adapted for a wide variety of purposes.
To this in end, in my blook on Conversational Leadership, I have two chapters, the first describes the various Café applications and the second is a collection of stories of how the Café has been or is being used in practice.
What I consider to be one of the more powerful of the applications is the Future Café - a Café that is intentionally designed to explore trends and issues that shape, influence or in some way impact the future.
It is not very often that I get to run such a Café at a public event but on the 28th November in central London I am facilitating a Future Café at the Visual Collab 2018 event that will look at the future of Interactive Flat Panel Displays as visual collaboration tools and their application in team work.
It's not confirmed yet, but I hope to use some innovative ideation software to capture the thoughts and ideas of the Future Café participants in a way that minimally interferes with the dynamics of the conversations (a key Knowledge Café principle).
If the event is of interest and you would like to experience a Future Café then you can learn more and register here.
The Henley Forum is researching Knowledgeable Practice for the next 10 years.
They wish to understand how knowledge, learning and change practice might develop over the next 10 years. They are asking practitioners two key questions:
What key qualities and skills have you relied on in doing your best work?
What qualities and skills do you believe will be most useful and important for practitioners over the next 10 years?
They have created a questionnaire to solicit some input. Please it would help tremendously, if you would complete the questionaire.
In return, if you include your contact details, you will receive a summary of the report.
Would you like to learn how to design and run a Knowledge Café? - Comments
Would you like to learn how to design and run a Knowledge Café and how they can be applied?
I'll be giving a Knowledge Café masterclass at CILIP in central London on Thursday 1st November 2018.
The thing to note about my Knowledge Cafés is that they are more than just about sharing knowledge and building relationships.
They can be applied in a wide variety of ways and at their best are a powerful sense-making tool.
Here are some real-life stories to help you better understand the versatility and the power of the Café.
It may sound corny but love is the answer - Comments
It may seem corny, but love is the answer.
I have long thought that to help cure many of the ills in the world that all we needed to do was "to care more." To care more about each other and to care more about our planet.
To say that "love is the answer" seemed a little too twee especially in a business context.
However, since I discovered that Elon Musk using the phrase in a recent interview with Joe Rogan I am having second thoughts - maybe "love is the answer" conveys the message far more effectively.
Here is a clip from the interview where Elon and Joe talk about the future of humanity and "love is the answer."
And here is the full interview (beware 2 1/2hrs long but well worth the time)
Joe comments at the end of the clip "How do you fix that - do you have a love machine you are working on?" Elon laughs and suggests you should spend more time with your friends and less on social media.
However, it has got to be far more than that - how do we learn "to care more" or "love humanity more"? If "love is the answer" what do we need to do? I have some thoughts of my own, but I'll leave you with that question for now. It would make a good Knowledge Café question!
Moreover, if you take the time to watch the full interview, step back and observe the "conversation," Joe is a skilled interviewer and draws Elon out and gives him space to talk without interruption - tolerating long silences at times.
When I find my mind wandering to trivial matters or worrying over things I have no power to control, I think of this quote and consciously change what I am thinking about to something of value. The more I do it, the better I get at it.
Oh, by the way, I am sure this applies to women too. Annoying that quotes from even a few years ago are sexist but I think it would be wrong not to use the original words.
Updates to my blook on Conversational Leadership September 2018 - Comments
I have made a number modifications and additions to my blook over the last month.
One key new feature is the ability to see the most frequently visited pages.
The three most popular pages of my blook over the last 30 days were:
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
A big difference maker is when participants in a network (or an organization, for that matter) embrace new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing. https://buff.ly/2o0J13f #ConversationalLeadership
Thought is not just reflecting whatever is there, but on the basis of what is known from the past, it helps to create the impression of what is there. It selects; it abstracts; and in doing this, it chooses certain aspects, which then attract our attention. – #DavidBohm
Jordan Peterson: Overcome anxiety: Articulate your rationale by journaling to lessen your doubts https://buff.ly/2Mdhsx6 /interesting - watch the video
The Knowledge Café: Preparing graduates for the real world https://buff.ly/2x07bj1 #KnowledgeCafe #ConversationalLeadership
Dilbert thinks Brainstorming ineffective but he still enjoys them! https://buff.ly/2MUs892 #KM #KMers #KnowledgeManagement
Happy birthday Knowledge Café: It all began 16 years ago today on Sept 5th, 2002 at the Strand Palace Hotel in central London. Just a stone's throw from Trafalgar Square. https://buff.ly/2MPmiWE #KM #KMers#KnowledgeCafe #KnowledgeManagement #ConversationalLeadership
Shared meaning does not mean that people see things the same way but understand each other's perspectives well enough to accept them #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2wDvsLx
Coffeehouse Conversations in Vienna, where strangers are paired for two hours of intense conversation. https://buff.ly/2Q1aBKj #ConversationalLeadership #BigTalk #TheodoreZeldin
“School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself.” Ivan Illich https://buff.ly/2wAUfjr #education #learning
Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity https://buff.ly/2BTthc3 #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership
Reframing questions: from an individualistic perspective to a community one - Comments
I recently added this post on Reframing Question to my blook on Conversational Leadership.
The post was inspired by a good friend of mine Charles Savage, who pointed out that some questions I had put together to initiate Big Talk conversations were mainly from an “individualistic” perspective and few were from a "community" one.
He also made this keen insight.
We've built an economy focused on inspiring/motivating the self-interest of individuals, rather than one where we co-create one another in deeper conversations.
In my travels to SE & East Asia one of the things that has always interested me is the concept of saving face and losing face - something you need to be very aware of when working in the region.
In researching the concept, to better understand it for my blook, I found these three articles that make a fascinating read about "face" and the differences between Western and Asian cultures.
Deeply rooted in the Chinese concept of face are conceptualizations of a competent person in Chinese society: one who defines and puts self in relation to others and who cultivates morality so that his or her conduct will not lose others' face.
This contrasts with the American cultural definition of a person who is expected to be independent, self- reliant, and successful.
The end result is that a Chinese person is expected to be relationally or communally conscious whereas an American person is expected to be self-conscious.
The Henley Forum has a meeting coming up on
Thursday 27 September 2018 - Absorbing complex change.
It's a members' only event but there are a few guest places available at £175 + VAT.
This is a great learning opportunity at a low price to experience the Henley Forum.
If you are interested in participating contact Marina Hart - her details are on the above webpage.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Just 66 percent of millennials firmly believe that the Earth is round. https://buff.ly/2Lmqurn /if you can believe in a flat earth you can believe in anything!
Episode 1, How to Disagree: A Beginner's Guide to Having Better Arguments - BBC Radio 4 https://buff.ly/2wfGR3a #ConversationalLeadership
Small Talk, Big Talk and Meaningful Conversation https://buff.ly/2KKN2kX #ConversationalLeadership
What I have tried to suggest is that we will never capture reality in any set of words or concepts. It will always be a case of analogy, of a description that's sufficiently similar to actuality so that we will understand something. – #DavidBohm
Have you thought about how your conversations impact your work? Some advice on how to have better and more effective conversations: http://ow.ly/mWj030lc3Cj #ConversationalWisdom #Leadership
KMs secret sauce: How to solve the knowledge sharing problem? Encourage more face-to-face interaction, more direct conversation. Keep it simple and keep it between two humans. https://buff.ly/2MczGjj #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership
Knowledge is not power. The will and the ability to act on knowledge and to influence people and events is power. #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2t68Y3Y
I work on it every day and have added a lot more structure to it over the last few weeks. There are now pages dedicated to books, videos, quotes ans people and these pages over time will be exstensivey cross-linked.
A profile of Dave Snowden by Stan Garfield - Comments
Dave is a self-described “proud curmudgeon and pragmatic cynic” and the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge.
I think without any doubt, he is the most influential thought-leader in the KM world.
He has had a massive influence on me and whenever I am struggling with an issue - I think to myself "What would Dave's views be on this?"
I will often google the issue and find he has some very strong opinions on the subject in question.
I don't always agree with him but he really causes me to think deeply about the topic.
Whether you are familiar with his thinking or not go take a look at this profile of Dave's work
David Snowden: Profiles in Knowledge
recently created by Stan Garfield. A lot of interesting material.
Note the session was 56 minutes long but I stop my talk at 26:20 to allow the audience to have a conversation and after 7 minutes I start to take questions at 33:20. Q&A lasts 23 minutes. So 50:50, about 25 minutes for my talk and 30 minutes for conversation and Q&A.
I call this a conversational talk. I wish more speakers would adopt a similar format.
In this talk, however, I wish I had given more time over to conversation and less to Q&A
as I think Q&A is not really interaction and it is in the conversation where the real value lies.
Oh and
I dont like lecterns either but in this case there were no lapel mikes and I was forced to stand still.
Henley Forum for Organisational Learning and Knowledge Strategies Events - Comments
The Henley Forum for Organisational Learning and Knowledge Strategies (known as the Henley Forum) has a meeting coming up on
Thursday 27 September 2018 - Absorbing complex change. It's a members' only event but there are a few guest places available at £175 + VAT. This is a great learning opportunity at a low price and a chance to experience the Henley Forum.
There is also a 2-day workshop next year - Advancing your OD practice 22 – 23 January 2019 open to non-members.
And a date for your calendar - the Henley Forum Annual Conference takes place 06 - 07 March 2019 "Amplifying our practice: leading the way with knowledge, learning and change". The conference is also open to non-members.
If you are interested in any of these events contact Marina Hart - her details are on the above webpages.
The Henley Business School campus is on the banks of the River Thames near Henley-on-Thames. I always love going there as it is delightful any time of the year.
He has just published the 2nd edition and if you would like to get some idea of what it is about take a look at this excerpt adapted from the "Welcome" chapter in the book.
In the midst of the growing awareness of and innovation in thinking about the need to build community, the dominant practices about how to engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially unchanged.
Building community and belonging is going to be our most powerful strategy for ending the displacement and isolation that plagues so many aspects of our world.
The work is to seek in our communities a wider and deeper sense of emotional ownership and communal ownership. It means fostering among all of a community's citizens a sense of ownership and accountability, both in our relationships and what we actually control.
Credit: Peter Block
Peter Block - Change the Conversation, Change the Culture
And during the month, I have added one major new feature:
a list of over 50 books on the power of conversation or that relate in some way to Conversational Leadership (most of them I own). Each book has its own page with a brief description pulled in from Amazon. Let me know any I have missed or that you think I should add.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Dissenters seem like a pain. But principled troublemakers who challenge prevailing groupthink create more space for all https://buff.ly/2KIjkP2 #ConversationalLeadership
Reviving the Dying Art of Meaningful Conversation https://buff.ly/2KPse0I #ConversationalLeadership
The Knowledge Cafe principles are at the heart of the Cafe. In a Knowledge Cafe, conversation is King. #KnowledgeCafe #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2majt2l
It's not clear whether quality conversations actually make people happier, or if happier people are more likely to have quality conversations. https://buff.ly/2L5TXXa #ConversationalLeadership HT @klowey22
How best to bump: Designing spaces to encourage conversation https://buff.ly/2KXvaEu #ConversationalLeadership #KM #KMers
How might leaders be meaningfully attentive in order to bridge the requirements both to deliver and to care in the contemporary workplace? https://buff.ly/2MZSLVB /short write up of a recent London Knowledge Cafe by Mark Cole. #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership #KnowedgeCafe
Julian Treasure explains how to speak so that people want to listen https://buff.ly/2G7skys #ConversationalLeadership
Jim McCann talks about his book "Talk is (Not) Cheap" and the Art of Conversational Leadership https://buff.ly/2u2Mukd #ConversationalLeadership
Knowledge is not power. The will and the ability to act on knowledge and to influence people and events is power. #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2t68Y3Y
Future Proofing the Organisation - Nadim Habib at Social Now 2018 - Comments
I spoke at Social Now 2018 in Lisbon back in May and the keynote speaker at the event was Nadim Habib who talked about Future Proofing the Organisation. An excellent talk - well worth watching.
I have vastly improved the internal navigation (scroll down to the end of any page and you will see) - though still not totally happy with it. And am getting pretty good at hacking code in Wordpress (once a programmer, always a programmer!). Anything I wish to do, I google and if I can't find a plugin I can find the code and with a few tweaks it is working.
One of the main chapters I have been working on is the Knowledge Café Principles. I have long had these documented but never to my satisfaction. They are much better now. I think I am happy with the seven principles I have defined and hope to clean up their descriptions and finalise them over the next few weeks. But take a look at them below in the meantime.
The strength of the Café rests on these few critical principles that to a large degree differentiate the Knowledge Café process from other conversational methods.
How to quickly and easily capture ideas - Comments
I was asked recently how I capture ideas during a conversation without unduly interrupting the flow of the conversation.
At conferences, workshops and knowledge cafes I keep a small 4 x 2 card and pen in my shirt pocket.
During a conversation to avoid taking lengthy notes and disrupting the flow of the conversation I write just a word or two on the card to remind me of an idea or insight I have had.
Immediately after the conversation if possible, I expand these one word notes by dictating the full idea into my iPhone.
I use an app called Captio to quickly and easily capture my dictation and translate it into text.
Captio then automatically emails this note into another app - Evernote where I can categorise and tag it and where is easily searchable.
Evernote is cross-platform so I can also access it from my laptop and iPad.
These notes then later get incorporated into blog posts or my blook or just pop up serendipitously every so often to remind of something I feel important.
The Captio/Evernote combination is also an ideal way for capturing ideas almost any time day or night. I pick up my phone, I open Captio with one click, click on record, dictate the idea, click send and I am done. Why not straight into Evernote? Captio is just that little bit faster.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses. Margaret Millar http://bit.ly/2MoawO1
Knowledge is not power. The will and the ability to act on knowledge and to influence people and events is power. #KM #KMers #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2t68Y3Y
Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, ‘What else could this mean?'” ― Shannon L. Alder
"ability to truly listen (and not just hear) is the foundation of having a conversation, building trust, influencing others, resolving conflicts, driving your vision, building relationships, implementing change and learning." - http://qaspire.com/2016/07/18/leadership-and-the-art-of-effective-listening/ #sketchnote #listening
The ten principles of digital work http://bit.ly/2LbEXXp Esko Kilpi keynote at #Arctic15
How to be a great leader in a complex world https://buff.ly/2HdviNG #ComplexWorld #ConversationalLeadership #leadership
Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. – Stephen Hawking https://buff.ly/2kpxuZ9 #ConversationalLeadership
We live in a hyperconnected, socio-technical world
- Comments
As I write my blook on Conversational Leadership, I find myself capturing fragments of ideas that I know will get refined and fit in somewhere in due course.
Here is one such fragment:
We are not separate from the world.
We are integrally connected.
We are each a node of one huge global network.
It is as if we are all attached by a large number of elastic bands to a multitude of other nodes: people, things, places, and history.
We live in a hyper-connected, socio-technical world.
Every node pulls on us, and we, in turn, pull on everything else.
It is this dynamic network that shapes us and determines our behaviour far more than any conscious, rational decisions.
Flip charts and butcher paper get in the way of the conversation - Comments
One of the fundamental principles of the Knowledge Café is that anything that gets in the way of the free flow of the conversation is a bad thing and should be eliminated.
Another principle is that everyone is equal.
Flip charts and butcher paper on tables contravene both of these principles, and in general in a Knowledge Café, you should avoid their use.
Take a look here if you would like to learn more on my rationale for this. Comments and feedback will be greatly appreciated.
Cognitive Edge and Code Genesys to Combine Operations - Comments
You may not have heard that Cognitive Edge and Code Genesys have announced a merger of their business operations.
The new company will be known as Cognitive Edge.
Ajay Reddy of Code Genesys will be CEO of the merged company and Dave Snowden, cofounder of the original Cognitive Edge, will be Chief Scientific Officer.
See the press release.
I have been a huge admirer of Dave's work now for more years than I care to remember and wish him all the best in this new venture.
And it's good to see Dave taking part in a World Café in Zurich in September.
The book is free and you can download it from here.
John Girard tells me that about 1000 people have downloaded a copy of the book already and that they are in the process of developing a series of companion videos, the first of which is now available on YouTube.
For those of you who know John, you are in for a treat, he has shaved off his beard :-)
The list of limitations is long including libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, non-disclosure agreements, public security, and perjury.
Like most things in life there are few absolutes Things are nuanced including freedom of speech.
A big thanks to Silvia Bombard for telling me abut the work of Frederic Laloux. I googled him and found this article: The Future of Management Is Teal: Organizations are moving forward along an evolutionary spectrum, toward self-management, wholeness, and a deeper sense of purpose.
He tells the fascinating story of the evolution of the organization (human collaboration) starting 10,000 years ago. He gives each phase of the evolution a colour: red, amber, orange, green and teal. It is well worth a read and helps put today's collaborative efforts into some sort of perspective and explains where he thinks we are heading with a number of examples of what he considers to be teal organizations.
One passage jumped out at me:
In just two and a half centuries, these breakthroughs have generated unprecedented levels of prosperity, added decades to human life expectancy, and dramatically reduced famine and plague in the industrialized world.
But as the Orange paradigm grew dominant, it also encouraged short-term thinking, corporate greed, overconsumption, and the reckless exploitation of the planet's resources and ecosystems. Increasingly, whether we are powerful leaders or low-ranking employees, we feel that this paradigm isn't sustainable.
The heartless and soulless rat race of Orange organizations has us yearning for more.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Organisations are linguistic structures built out of words and maintained by conversations. https://buff.ly/2F3b2gx #ConversationalLeadership
Ralph Stacey: Complexity and Paradoxes https://buff.ly/2qKSBrW #complexity #ConversationalLeadership
“The First Amendment does not protect all types of speech.” https://buff.ly/2JX81lE /the list of exceptions is actually quite extensive #ConversationalLeadership
You Don't Just Need One Leadership Voice — You Need Many https://buff.ly/2JTLwOg #ConversationalLeadership
Short video: What are complex adaptive systems? - Stockholm Resilience Centre https://buff.ly/2JcFw2X / a really good, simple 3 minute introduction to complex adaptive systems
If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking. https://buff.ly/uoY6eN #FreedomOfSpeech
Maybe we've been putting the wrong focus on KM. Maybe KM is not about increasing production or saving dollars. Maybe it is about creating the kind of culture where we would all like to work. @nancymdixon https://buff.ly/2tyOOSZ #KM #KMers /Spot on in my opinion Nancy :-)
Resolve issues face-to-face whenever you can - not by email - Comments
Let me share a true story.
A friend of mine was told by their manager never to resolve problems face-to-face but to do it by an exchange of emails and to copy him so that there was an audit trail. Then if anything went wrong, it was obvious who was to blame.
Sometime later, my friend noticed that the sales manager had made an incorrect entry in the new CRM database. It was a relatively trivial mistake.
Usually, he would have just walked around to the manager's desk explained to him the problem and resolved it in a short conversation. But following his manager's orders, he sent an email to the sales manager pointing out the mistake and explaining that he needed to correct it.
The IT manager misinterpreted the tone of the email and felt he was being criticised and being treated like a child. He responded emotionally and of course copied my friends boss and also copied another level up the hierarchy.
The whole issue took a face-to-face meeting to resolve between my friend, his boss, his boss's boss and the sales manager. It was resolved but at the expense of the relationship between my friend and the sales manager. Things were never quite the same again between them.
Although I have slightly changed the details, this is a real story and not an unusual one.
If you have the choice, always resolve issues face-to-face, not by email. It's the human way to do things.
The next Café coming up is an online Zoom one on Tuesday 3rd April 11:00am - 12:30pm EST.
The topic: "How can experts share and innovate across different disciplines?"
Clearly what is great about online Zoom Cafés is that you do not need to be in Washington DC to take part.
So where ever you are in the world, if the time zone works for you do sign up and join the Café.
I will be there too which will be fun for me as I usually host such events - not take part as a participant. So I can relax and enjoy the conversations.
If you cannot make this Zoom Café but would like to be kept informed of other virtual Cafés - please sign up to my Zoom mailing list.
On the Thursday, my talk is titled "Improving Online Conversation and Knowledge Sharing".
Deep and meaningful online conversations don't come naturally. This is especially true across cultural divides. Based on my experience of facilitating face-to-face conversations around the world, I plan to look at some of the human barriers to conversation and knowledge sharing such as deference to authority, fear of loss of face, and humility. I will then go on to look at some of the technology barriers and to explore some ideas to improve the results of online exchanges: both through good tactical decisions and small improvements in the design of digital tools.
On the Friday, I will be running a masterclass on how to design, convene and facilitate Knowledge Cafés.
In our increasingly complex, fast paced, rapidly changing, ambiguous world, no single leader or individual can know everything or be smart enough alone to address the challenges that face us. One of best ways to make sense of an issue or challenge and ultimately make better decisions is to bring a diversity of people together for a conversation in a Knowledge Café.
But of course I am not the only speaker or masterclass leader. Take a look at the agenda where you will find great speaker/facilitators like Paul Corney, Eric Hunter and James Dellow to name only three.
Strangely, I have never visited Lisbon before but everyone tells me but what a beautiful city it is so given the conference is Thurs/Fri I plan to stay the weekend to make the most of the trip. Why don't you do the same? :-)
The London coffeehouses of the 17th & 18th centuries were the engines of creation that helped drive the Enlightenment – the European intellectual movement of the time that emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition.
Modern-day coffee shops such as the likes of Starbucks, Costa Coffee, and Caffč Nero have their roots in these old coffeehouses but they were quite unlike the establishments we know and love today.
In 1652 Pasqua Rosée, a Greek opened the first coffee stall in the churchyard of St Michael's Cornhill in the City of London and the rest is history as they say but what a fascinating story - one I have been researching these last few years.
I'd love to see the return of those old coffeehouses. Not for the vile coffee of the day but for the real face-to-face conversation.
I'd love to walk into a Starbucks and sit down next to a total stranger and yell out “Your Servant Sir what news from Tripoli?”
Knowledge Management Matters: By Practitioners for Practitioners - Comments
Some of the top thought leaders in KM have been brought together by John and JoAnn Girard to create a very practical book on KM. See the description below. You can purchase a hardcopy from Amazon or download a free e-version.
Knowledge Management Matters: By Practitioners for Practitioners
Knowledge Management Matters: Words of Wisdom from Leading Practitioners is a collection of works penned by an amazing and diverse group of thought leaders. Each of these trailblazers has generously shared their knowledge with a view to helping you and your organization succeed in the knowledge environment. The tips, tactics, and techniques they suggest are time-tested and proven concepts that will help you achieve your organizational objectives. Their collective works are based on decades of experiences with real-world organizations. This is not a book of untested theories that might work, but rather a compilation of genuine words of wisdom from experienced KM practitioners who know knowledge management.
Knowledge Management Matters starts with a brief overview of the evolution of knowledge management. Building on this historical foundation, we launch a wide-ranging exploration of the domain. Throughout the book are excellent examples of what works, what doesn't, and some thought-provoking teases about the future. The authors offer great advice on a variety of subjects including storytelling, big data, creativity & innovation, leading communities, knowledge assets, co-creation, catering for a transient workforce and so much more.
The Practitioners
Stephanie Barnes, Director of Doing Things Differently at Art of Innovation
Shawn Callahan, Founder of Anecdote
Paul Corney, Founder of knowledge et al
Nancy M. Dixon, Author of Common Knowledge, HBSP
Stan Garfield, Knowledge Management Author, Speaker, and Community Leader
Anthony J. Rhem, President/Principal Consultant of A.J. Rhem & Associates, Inc.
Arthur Shelley, Founder of Intelligent Answers
Douglas Weidner, Chairman & Chief Instructor of KM Institute
Ron Young, Founder of Knowledge Associates International
The Editors
John Girard holds the Peyton Anderson Endowed Chair at Middle Georgia State University's School of IT. JoAnn Girard is the founder and managing partner of Sagology, a firm that focuses on connecting people with people to collaborate, learn, and share knowledge.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Want to Dramatically Improve Your Work Life? Start Having Radically Candid Conversations https://buff.ly/2pyqwDu #ConversationalLeadership
We still don't appreciate that work is communication: we live and work in a network of conversations http://bit.ly/2FrToIm
Ditching Performance Reviews for Authentic Conversations https://buff.ly/2zWhm7K #ConversationalLeadership /It's about time this was the norm.
Human ingenuity has created a world that the mind cannot master. Have we finally reached our limits? https://buff.ly/2u087VN #complexity
The Incredible Thing We Do During Conversations https://buff.ly/2GnlRw0 #ConversationalLeadership
Knowledge Management Matters: a new free e-book by @johngirard @MPuzzlePiece @ShawnCallahan @PaulJCorney @nancymdixon @stangarfield @tonyrhem @Metaphorage @KMInstitute @ronyoung #KM #KMers https://buff.ly/2Grwz4Z
Let's spend more time listening to what really matters: listening to our partners, to our children, to our friends, to our patients, to our employees, to our managers, to ourselves, and especially to our bodies. @Mintzberg141 #ListenMore https://buff.ly/2Fr0ahD
Maybe we've been putting the wrong focus on KM. Maybe KM is not about increasing production or saving dollars. Maybe it is about creating the kind of culture where we would all like to work. @nancymdixon https://buff.ly/2tyOOSZ #KM #KMers /Spot on in my opinion Nancy :-)
Blog Post: Career, Community and Cause - the three things people want out of work http://bit.ly/2GQJps9
Career, Community and Cause - the three things people want out of work - Comments
According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review based on some people analytics research at Facebook, people want three things out of work.
Career is about work: having a job that provides autonomy, allows you to use your strengths, and promotes your learning and development. It's at the heart of intrinsic motivation.
Community is about people: feeling respected, cared about, and recognized by others. It drives our sense of connection and belongingness.
Cause is about purpose: feeling that you make a meaningful impact, identifying with the organization's mission, and believing that it does some good in the world. It's a source of pride.
The results are maybe not too surprising but the item that jumped out at me was community as I have been trying to document just what it community means in my blook. It is still work in progress to some degree and I'd love any feedback you may have.
Dave Snowden: A succinct overview of his groundbreaking work - Comments
Dave Snowden is an prodigious and extraordinary thinker and I guess best known as the developer of the Cynefin framework - a decision making tool. I love his blog and read every post. He has had a profound influence on my thinking.
Next year, I hope to see his long awaited book published but in the mean time if you are looking for a succinct introduction to his work take a look at these takeouts (by Sonja Blignaut) and video from a TedX talk he gave in November 2017.
It's an 18 minute summary of the key aspects of his work and a wonderful resource for anyone looking for a succinct introduction.
There are many subjects that everyone should be taught in school but I think one of the most important things that children need to learn is how to make sense of the world and thus they need to learn about the scientific method.
They need never be scientists if that is not their calling but they simply need to understand how science works.
Science is not a collection of facts; it is a way of viewing and studying the world. Teaching the scientific method for kids does not expect them to reason as miniature adults, but kids can use a simplified version of the scientific method to explore their world.
Ask a question.
Learn as much as you can about it.
Come up with a hypothesis (a possible answer/solution).
Since 2012 the BBC have been collecting intimate conversations between friends or relatives, to build a unique picture of our lives today.
They have collected over a thousand so far, and most are being broadcast on BBC radio and are being archived by the British Library to preserve them for future generations.
Go listen here. Each conversation is only a few minutes long.
The project was inspired by StoryCorps, an initiative set up in the United States.
Their mission is “to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives”.
The conversations are stored at the Library of Congress.
I personally think in terms of the Human Economy - as it is broader than just caring. The concept is a simple one.
As technology develops, especially AI, there are going to be less and less traditional jobs. The machines are going to take them. We can see the impact already.
The jobs that will be left will be the "human ones" - the jobs ONLY human beings can do - the "caring jobs"- the jobs that require human warmth, touch and empathy, nursing, healthcare, education etc and of course other work that only humans can do such as entertainment, the arts and sport.
These will be the only jobs available to the vast majority of "young people" with or without skills or a University degree.
There will still be a Knowledge Economy but it will be for the few - the people who program and tend the computing machines and digital infrastructure.
Jonathan Norman interviews me about Conversational Leadership - Comments
If you have 15 minutes and would like to learn a little about Conversational Leadership then take a look at this short video interview that Jonathan Norman of the Major Projects Knowledge Hub held with me recently.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: February 2018 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
“Community is about people: feeling respected, cared about, and recognized by others. It drives our sense of connection and belongingness.” https://buff.ly/2CzsKXM /interesting research at Facebook as to what people want from work. Career, Community and Purpose.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. Groucho Marx /Just love Groucho Marx!
The two views of “labor as a resource” and “engaged workers” are incompatible @nancymdixon https://buff.ly/2CsvGVU #KM #KMers#EmployeeEngagement
The Listening Project: a partnership between BBC Radio 4, BBC local and national radio stations, and the British Library: Capturing the nation in conversation. #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2o4aJwl
“How to Save Face and Not Cause Someone to Lose Face” https://buff.ly/2ESvJx0 /A really good article on the mainly Asian concept of "face"
The biggest assumption that humans make is that everyone sees life the way we do https://buff.ly/2nICbiO
You'll be surprised at the strongest predictor of how long you will live - Comments
I will be 70 years old later this year and would love to make it to 100.
I thought that mainly meant some good genes, eating well, exercising and a huge dose of luck.
Yes of course, those things matter. But I was amazed to see the top two predictors of a long life in this TED talk by psychologist Susan Pinker:
I am sorry I don't know enough to have an opinion on that - Comments
I have long thought that in our modern day culture it is almost illegal not to have an opinion on an issue regardless of whether we know anything about it or not.
Confident ignorant people argue with equally confident ignorant people.
We all do it.
In the UK for example, how much does any one of us really know about the impact of a complex issue such Brexit - but we all have strongly held opinions.
We need more dialogue and a little less debate - Comments
One of the many posts I have in mind for my blook is to compare debate with dialogue.
We often say we need to debate something - especially in the political world - when what we really need is a dialogue.
Dialogue is collaborative: two or more sides work together toward a common understanding while debate is oppositional: two sides oppose each other and attempt to prove each other wrong.
In dialogue, finding common ground is the goal while in debate, winning is the goal.
In dialogue, one listens to the other side(s) in order to understand, find meaning and find agreement while in debate, one listens to the other side in order to find flaws and to counter its arguments.
Dialogue enlarges and possibly changes a participants point of view while debate affirms a participant's own point of view.
To resolve issues and make decisions, we need both debate and dialogue. One is not intrinsically better then the other - they serve different purposes.
But we have a strong tendency to enter into debate and even argument when we should be doing is having a dialogue.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Non-verbal signals play a role in communication but they are not more important than the words. #ConversationalLeadership https://buff.ly/2EOTZ1Y
Volume 15 Issue 4 of the Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management has now been published. EJKM is an open access journal and you can read, download and print the papers from here https://buff.ly/2CMxWZ2 #KM #KMers #EJKM
When all is said and done, nothing beats human relationships, dialogue, discourse, dialectic and discussion. Turn off our e-devices, close the books and have a chat. https://buff.ly/2EqfmX5
James Dyson: Listen. Create an open environment where everyone's involved and appreciated. If you don't put people down for making a silly suggestion, you can get great ideas. A lot of great new ideas come from silly suggestions or wrong suggestions. https://buff.ly/2m36Plu
Free Book to download" “Knowledge Productivity in the Public Sector” https://buff.ly/2lGekP2 #KM #KMers
The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting - Comments
Whether it is our educational systems or the presentations we give at conferences, we focus far too much on filling people's heads with content. It is not an effective way of teaching. We need to inspire people to learn for themselves, not attempt to fill their heads with stuff.
Plutarch understood this, almost 2,000 years ago when he said:
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
You are probably familiar with this quotation but actually it is a popular contraction of what he really said, here is a translation of the original text in context.
The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting -- no more -- and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.
Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.
Getting your head around the Cynefin Framework - Comments
Some years ago,when I first started to learn about Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework, it took me a little while to wrap my head around it as there were never any good examples given of the different types of problems associated with each domain.
If you have the same problem, take a look at this excellent article The Cynefin framework: applying an understanding of complexity to medicine. You don't have to understand too much about medical practice to make sense of it and it really does bring the Cynefin model to life and demonstrate its usefulness in thinking about problems and decision making.
In our increasingly complex world, I think everyone should have a grasp of the Cynefin framework. So, take a look if you are not familiar with it or wish to understand it better.
PS. If you are a game player, you may find this explanation more readable.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: December 2017 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
I've just spent a few days in Riyadh where I gave a talk and run a Knowledge Café as part of a KM Forum entitled "Knowledge Management Utilization in Realizing Saudi Vision 2030" organized by the Naseej Academy.
Saudi Vision 2030 is a plan to reduce Saudi Arabia's dependence on oil, diversify its economy, and develop public service sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation, and tourism.
My talk was about how KM could be used strategically to help achieve the vision and the question that initiated the Knowledge Café "Given that even the experts do not have a good track record of predicting the future, and strategic plans often fail to deliver fully on their promises, how can KM help us better formulate and execute strategy?"
It was good day and I was delighted with the extent to which the participants engaged with the Knowledge Café and saw it's potential.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation (MBRF) recently organized and held the fourth annual Knowledge Summit in Dubai. Here are a few videos that you may find of interest from the Summit.
I do wish conference organizers would make their events more participatory - making conference conversational is not the full answer but is a simple enough, low cost step.
A bit of harmless fun you might think or is it harmless?
Harmless enough, if you understand that Sophia, although a fantastic bit of technology is not that smart. It is somewhat like Apple's Siri combined with some sophisticated puppetry plus the ability to recite preprogrammed scripts. No intelligence there at all.
But if you don't understand this, Sophia is misleading you (and even scaring you) into believing that general artificial intelligence is far more advanced than it is.
There are many articles on the web about Sophia but what concerns me is that so few of them explain or even seem to understand how Sophia works.
This article however, does explain a little: Inside the mechanical brain of the world's first robot citizen.
But I cannot find any articles other than this one that get to the heart of this issue and that sum up my feelings on the matter:
Humanoid robot Sophia is a sad hoax that harms AI research. I think we need to take artificial intelligence a little more seriously.
They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain.
Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener.
When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects' brains.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: November 2017 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
My virtual Zoom World Values Day Café went off exceptionally well.
117 people registered from 25 countries but there is always a large drop-off and in the end I had 47 people from 16 countries - still a good turnout.
The countries were: Australia, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Martinique, Netherlands, Nigeria, Romania, Switzerland,Trinidad and Tobago,Tunisia, Turkey,UK and USA.
We had some in-depth conversation for 2 hours triggered by two short talks from Charles Fowler and Alan Williams and the question "What could be done to bring values to life?"
Sorry Asia-Pacific, this was out of your time-zone but I will make up for it!
What really amazes me about these virtual Cafés is just how well they work. This one worked a treat.
First, I wasn't aware of anyone who had connection problems - Zoom worked flawlessly.
But it is not just the technology - the small group break-out conversations work well too. This is what one of the participants said in the final whole group conversation.
This is only my second knowledge cafe and I'm still really struck by the quality of the conversation that I can have with people that I've never met before in some other
part of the world through an online medium.
And I just wanted to say that and I found it really meaningful. It's like I don't think it would have been more meaningful if they would have been right here in the office.
I'm real surprised by just how much I enjoyed it and how impactful it is.
I never thought, before Zoom, that we could get so close to the quality of face-to-face conversations through an on-line medium.
My good friend David Pottinger and I both started our career's as physicists but I am sure he was a far better physicist than I ever was. I could never really handle the maths.
So it was fascinating to see this article he recently posted on his blog titled Feynman's Breakthrough about Richard Feynman - the well known American theoretical physicist.
It is a lovely little story, well written and with an important message if we are struggling to be creative - "Disregard Others!"
If you are based in the UK or fancy a trip to the beautiful Thames valley countryside then take a look at these upcoming events at Henley Business School.
Although they are primarily for members of the Henley Forum, a few guest places are always available. Contact Marina Hart [email protected] at the Henley Business School if you are interested.
It's a litte lengthy but I hope you find it useful and get to understand a little better why I think conversation is so important - not only in business but at a personal level and society at large.
I am starting to pull together in my blook quite a few good stories about how the Knowledge Café is being applied or has been run by different organizations.
Here are three that are almost finished and are directly accessible but you will find more in the
Conversational Stories chapter in various stages of development.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
I gave a talk and ran a Knowledge Café at a recent Large-Scale Scrum Conference in London and had the pleasure of meeting Craig Larman, the co-creator of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) with his colleague Bas Vodde.
I have long been critical of measures because they are too easily gamed and I only wish I had come up with this catchy way of expressing it myself as an alternative to "What gets measured gets done."
This was said in the context of adaptive capacity - a key goal of Agile software development. So in other words "to quickly change direction at a low cost".
It reminded me of this quote that is so often miss-attributed to Darwin:
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
It is not the most intellectual or the strongest of species that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able to adapt to and adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
In our rapidly changing, unpredictable world, the ability "to turn on a dime for a dime" is fundamental to personal, organizational or societal survival.
In order to adapt, we need to better understand the changes taking place and to act accordingly. We can only do this through open conversation and collective sensemaking. Hence our "conversational capacity" - our ability to hold strategic conversations is key.
Are vague Ideas sometimes better than firm ones? - Comments
I rather like this thought about ideas from Pablo Picasso.
We don't necessarily need a clear, crisp, sharp idea or vision.
A hazy one, a sense of vague direction may sometimes be better as we are then more likely to explore along the journey and make serendipitous discoveries.
Maybe vague ideas are at the heart of being creative.
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: September 2017 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Heuristic for epistemically humble adults: Try saying 'I disagree' at least 10x as often as you say 'I'm offended'.
Humans May Be the Most Adaptive Species - Constant climate change may have given us our flexibility https://buff.ly/2xmm6oe
J.K. Rowling On People's Intolerance of Alternative Viewpoints https://buff.ly/2ewSBGl #FreeSpeech
Out of the coffeehouses came a number of institutions that exist to this day such as the London Stock Exchange, Lloyds of London. The auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's also have their origins in coffeehouses.
Another was the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) which was established in a coffeehouse in 1754 by a group of people who came together with a shared vision for a better tomorrow.
I am a member of the RSA have long thought and even suggested that they should turn part of their London premises into a coffeehouse in the tradition of those long lost coffeehouses.
I doubt that I had anything to do with it but that is just what they have decided to do - to create a 21st century enlightenment coffeehouse. I am so looking forward to it.
Was James Damore acting in good faith and does it matter? - Comments
I am sure many of you are by now familiar with the Google memo controversy where a Google software engineer James Damore was fired for a memo that questioned Google's diversity policies.
If you have not read the memo you will find it here.
The memo has caused a heated online debate with people fiercely arguing in support of James Damore or against him.
To me, the issue is not who is right or wrong, it is "Was James Damore acting in good faith, was he genuinely trying to open up a conversation or was he expressing misogynist views?"
I have read the memo and watched several interviews with him and I believe he was sincere in his motives.
If you are not familiar with the controversy and wish to form your own opinion here is some interesting reading.
So what do you make of it? Was he acting in good faith? If he was expressing misogynist views, should he have been fired?
And even if he was acting in good faith, should he still have been fired?
A beautiful piece here by Paul Graham on How to disagree where he attempts to create a disagreement hierarchy of six different levels from "name calling" to "refuting the central point".
His bottom line is "don't be mean" and his rationale is that it makes people happier.
I don't think howver that this is the main argument. You are more likely to convince people of your point by being "less mean" and moving higher up the hierarchy in you conversational style.
If you enjoyed the above article, I think you will enjoy this one too What you cant say. This comment about Galileo particularly set me chuckling:
"If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking."
Thanks to James Damore (yes the guy who wrote the Google memo) for pointing me to both of these articles via his twitter stream. (You can understand why both articles resonate with him.)
This all makes interesting and relevant fodder for my blook on Conversational Leadership. And it is at the heart of what Knowledge Management should be all about - "making better sense of the world".
In researching for my blook on Conversational Leadership I come across some fascinating people, doing some great work.
Julia Galef is my latest find.
On her Twitter feed she says she is "A SF-based writer & speaker focused on reasoning, judgment, and the future of humanity." So you can see why I am drawn to her work.
One of the many things she has done is to create a number of short video blogs on YouTube where she shares some of her thoughts and ideas.
Good faith is central to holding real conversations. In human interactions, good faith is the intent to be sincere, to be fair, open, and honest, regardless of the outcome of the interaction. Without good faith, a conversation can never be a real one.
Benjamin Franklin's Junto Club and Franklin Circles - Comments
Last month, I wrote about Benjamin Franklin's Junto Club.
This idea has really grabbed my attention and I have written a substantial description for my blook.
Franklin's Junto Club was about self-development and improving his local community.
What I like about the Junto Club concept is that anyone can start their own modern day Junto.
You can decide on your community and select, twelve or so members from diverse backgrounds.
I think the focus should be on community improvement not on personal development as individual learning comes naturally from taking part in the Junto.
So what community are you part of that you would like to improve? It could be your local community as in the case of Franklin, or any other community you care about and to which you belong.
This includes the organization for which you work.
The Junto Club is not a community of practice but a form of community of innovation.
The other thing to do is to review Franklin's 24 questions and four assertions and update them so that they are more suited to the present day and your chosen community.
Interestingly, having spent some time thinking about modern day Junto Clubs or even Junto Cafés (a cross between the Junto and the Knowledge Café) I came across Franklin Circles - another form of modern day Junto focused on societal improvement.
Let me know if you feel inspired to form your own Junto Club or Franklin Circle.
Zooming around the world to Singapore and Sydney - Comments
I have run two more Zoom virtual Knowledge Café this month - one for the Singapore time zone and another for the Sydney time zone, made a few mistakes, learnt a lot and becoming more adept in designing and running them.
Planning now to run a Café for Dubai. I will also be running one as part of World Values Day. Here I am going to be a little bit more ambitious - all my virtual Cafés so far have been for less than 20 people but for the World Values Day I am going to shoot for 100 participants. A little bit of a risk but I'll learn a lot and hopefully it will attract people from many different countries. More on both these Cafés soon.
If you would like to be the first to hear about my Zoom events, please sign-up to my Virtual Café mailing list.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Building a “Speaking Up” Culture in Teams @nancymdixon https://buff.ly/2xv6nQZ #KM #KMers #GurteenTalk
How do you tell who is arguing in "good faith" and who is not? @juliagalef https://buff.ly/2wAaUW1 #GurteenTalk
Meet the group reviving the fine art of conversation @Heather_Bourke https://buff.ly/2wHyEH3
A great quick intro to the Cynefin model..making sense of complexity https://t.co/XbzteFWspK
Enlightenment Coffeehouses: During the Age of Enlightenment coffeehouses became the centre of innovation @theRSAorg https://buff.ly/2xlcAiq
Prof Jordan Peterson @jordanbpeterson interviews James Damore @Fired4Truth on his #googlememo on Diversity https://buff.ly/2uAt1GP
An oldie but goldie from Patrick Lambe @plambeSG (aka Prof. Gervaise Germaine) https://buff.ly/2vN9XZn /I can't stop laughing #KM #KMers
Content tagged with a "*" is freely readable but if you wish to access the blook in its entirety please request access and I will I will grant it,
If you wish to take a look at just the latest material visit the Recent Updates page.
One recent addition - is a new chapter on Conversational Space. It is still rather bare but includes a substantial post on the Enlightenment Coffeehouses of 17th and 18th century London, and more rudimentary posts on Stammtisch Tables, the Dewaniya, the Salons of France, the Viennese coffee houses and of course the Junto Club.
I have more conversational spaces to add and much more to write about them - both the specific spaces themselves and more generally what makes a good conversation space, their purpose and benefits.
If you have any conversation spaces specific to your culture such as the Kuwaiti Dewaniya - I would love to hear about them,
I ran another Zoom virtual Knowledge Café a few days ago. Yet again it went exceptionally well and I had some great feedback.
I also joined a KMI KM workshop in Washington DC with John Hovell and give a short talk/conversation on Conversational Leadership via the Zoom platform and it worked a treat! It is the second one John and I have done together and I think John may have cracked how to do the Q&A session by passing an iPhone around the room also with Zoom loaded.
If you would like to be the first to hear about my Zoom events, please sign-up to my Virtual Café mailing list.
You know, all mystics - Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion - are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
So what do you make of the idea that "all is well?"
When I reflect on the reality of the world in an everyday way then it is hard to see that "all is well" but deep down I understand what de Mello means.
Somewhere else in his book "Awareness" he says that "problems only exist in the human mind". If we look at the universe in its totality and from a perspective of its evolutionary history then its hard to see that it could be any different.
So maybe in a strange sort of way "all is well". That thought though should not stop us from striving to make it a better place!
But I think I know what Tony would have said "Don't try to change it - it will change of its own accord".
Benjamin Franklin's Junto Club led to the birth of the first US Public Library in 1731 - Comments
I was driving into town recently and switched on the car radio and caught the last few minutes of BBC Radio 4 programme called Making History and was gobsmacked at my serendipitous discovery of a so-called "Conversation Society" founded in 1727!
I have downloaded the audio and clipped out the key passage and uploaded to YouTube - it is only two minutes long. (I am sure the BBC won't mind.)
So Benjamin Franklin was convening a Book Discussion Café (well not really but it's a nice fantasy) back in 1727 that morphed into the Library Company of Philadelphia - the first public library in the US in 1731.
I love the thought that they bought books to inspire their conversations and that this book collection was the foundation of the public library.
An absolutely amazing story!
Why not start your own Junto Club. It has some very KM like features. All you need to do is update Benjamin Franklin's 24 questions into modern day English and a business environment - and you have it!
Embedding Change: delivering value from knowledge and learning - Comments
The Henley Forum for Organisational Learning and Knowledge Strategies (known as the Henley Forum) is a members-only forum but some of its events are open to the public.
I will be there as a participant. Do come along if you are based in the UK. It should be an engaging day. It is a reasonable cost. It's a great campus. And you get to experience the Henley Forum too.
In each case, the submission is held in a queue until I have checked it out and categorised it. This normally only takes a day or two. If the item is off topic or I feel it is inappropriate for any other reason I reserve the right to delete it. The service is free.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
IFLA KM @IFLA_KM Newsletter June 2017 http://buff.ly/2uwiKw9 #KM #KMers #IFLAKM #KnowledgeManagement
What concerns me is not the politics, but the increasing ability for anyone to conduct cyberwarfare. It could be a nation-state, a terrorist organization, or a 13 year old from their bedroom.
It is the Internet, the web and the computerization of our world that has made this sophisticated cyberwarfare possible.
It is a serious threat.
Which is more serious, attacks on infrastructure or on sources of information? Personally, I think it is that later and is the more difficult to defend against.
I am often asked how to get started designing and running Knowledge Cafés.
Given that the outcomes of the Knowledge Café are sometimes seen as “soft” by more hard-nosed, business focused managers, and by those working under time pressure, you may have difficulty convincing people of their value, and so it is essential to think carefully about how to get started.
I suggest you do not try to run a Knowledge Café with the sole purpose of convening some “interesting conversations.”
What you have in the Café is a powerful business tool, so when you see opportunities to use the Café for a real business purpose then seize the opportunity.
Offer the Café as a response to an issue – maybe don't even call it a Café and do not try to “sell it” in a traditional way.
A Café should always have a strong business purpose.
If you are a manager, then you should not have too much of a problem as you have the authority and power to do new things, but even if you are lower down the organizational hierarchy and do not manage people, then it is still possible.
On May 17 it was 21 years since Leif Edvinsson inaugurated the Skandia Future Center.
To celebrate the event Leif has collected some volunteering 12 voices, into a free of charge on-line booklet Forward Future Center 3.0.
This booklet is about some of the global experiences from more than 20 years of prototyping since the start of Skandia Future Center in Sweden in 1996. It has been followed since by many others both in Europe and Asia, especially Japan, with its Future Center Alliance Japan.
When does the Future start? According to some research from Japan it starts in about 14 seconds. Are you ready?
Patricia, very kindly gave me a copy at KM UK a few weeks ago. It is an excellent little book packed full of short stories about various KM programs - in fact 19 of them including ones from Airbus, ARUP, Cadbury Schweppes, Hewlett Packard (HP), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, (CIAT), Lloyds Register Marine, NASA, MPM PETRONAS, U.K. National Health Service Digital, and the U.S. Army.
In it, they examine and analyze these diverse KM programs, using quotes, insights, and stories to show why these programs were successful and how they improved both knowledge capture and knowledge flow in their respective organizations.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
#ECKM2017 7-8 Sept 2017 Barcelona - preliminary agenda published http://buff.ly/2rW71Jb #KM
I am really starting to question everything I ever been taught!
For example, I was taught that people during the Middle Ages in Europe thought that the Earth was flat and not spherical.
Well it turns out, it's another big, fat myth as explained here in Wikipedia and again here. It seems that since the third century BC, few educated people in the western world have believed the earth to be flat - expect of course members of societies such as the Flat Earth Society.
The prevailing logic seems to be that as we build more and more powerful processors that have a similar compute capacity to the human brain or similar massive connectivity that consciousness will simply emerge. "Experts" predict AGI will happen in the next 25 - 50 years.
I believe this is wishful thinking. We could connect a quadrillion or more iPhones and consciousness is not just going to emerge!
Today, we don't have a clue how the mind works or the nature of consciousness and until we do any prediction of when AGI might happen is just a wild guess.
I am sure we will crack it one day - just not in any of our lifetimes. That's my best guess :-)
I have been a friend of the Henley Forum for Organisational Learning and Knowledge Strategies (known as the Henley Forum) ever since its inception back in 2000 and frequently take part in its events.
It is an exceptionally good forum and I would highly recommend it.
The events are mainly for members-only but some are open to the public.
Take a look -- you may be interested in becoming a member or attending some of the public events.
Here are a few of the activities coming up later in the year:
Yet another myth: 70% of organizational change initiatives fail - Comments
I recently pointed out that although the Hawthorne Effect was real - the research that it was based on was flawed - yet we still call it the Hawthorne Effect. So in some ways it is a bit of a myth.
And then there was the Mehrabian Myth that 55% of the message is conveyed by our body language, 38% is conveyed by the tone of our voice and only 7% is conveyed by our actual words.
I am as guilty as the next in "falling" for all three of these myths in past. It makes me wonder how many more common management concepts and practices we take for granted. Jack Martin Leith lists some more on his Debunking Unit website.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
I facilitated a Knowledge Café a month or so ago in my home town of Worcester for WINN (Worcestershire Innovation) on the topic "What are life's big questions that require innovation as an answer?"
It was an excellent evening and they captured its essence quite nicely in this little video.
If you are concerned with what the future may hold - why not run a Future Café to explore the trends and issues that are shaping, influencing and distrupting our world and your organization. One of the great things about the Knowledge Café method is that it is so easy to adapt and to run to fulfil a wide variety purposes.
The Knowledge Café as a Research Technique - Comments
I have come to learn over the last 15 years that the Knowledge Café is more a state of mind than it is a fixed process.
It is a way of viewing the world through a conversational lens.
It is about looking at any organizational process or activity and asking:
How can I apply the Knowledge Café philosophy and principles to make this task more effective by making it more conversational and engaging?
Some held firmly; some held not so tightly. Some true, some false. Some we are prepared to change. For others, we are prepared to die.
One of my firmly held beliefs is that if we are going to create a better world, then each and every one of us needs to figure out which of our beliefs are true and which are false. We should be forever questioning everything.
We need to understand better how the world works and the nature of what it means to be human, especially how we think and make decisions. We do this through conversation - by thinking together.
I recognize that many people do not fully hold this belief. They believe that some things are preordained; that they are the way they are; that some things should just not be questioned. Even beliefs such as these are worth talking about, however difficult that might be.
Let's look at an example of different beliefs:
I believe in climate change. Some people don't. I would like to persuade them that climate change is a reality. And they would like to persuade me that I am wrong.
I am open to being proved wrong, and as long as they are open to changing their minds too, I am happy to have a conversation with them. But I don't want a debate. I don't want to argue. Such interactions usually only entrench each other's beliefs.
I would like to have a conversation where we can "think together" and leverage our different views on the subject to gain a better understanding.
I am always looking for ways in which we can do this. Here is one nascent idea.
For the purpose of the discussion, I would like to swap places with the other person. I'd like to "argue" against climate change while they "argue" for it. Wouldn't that be a revolution in how we hold conversations and think together?
I wonder, could I adapt the Knowledge Café process to have such contra-conversations?
This isn't about liberal verses conservative thinking.
It is about how we all think and make decisions.
None of us are logical in our thinking and there are clearly many deep emotional influences.
Empowering conversation in the workplace - Comments
Conversation is not a nice-to-have but a critical competence of a 21st-century organisation. But often we take it for granted and fail to capitalise on the power of conversation to drive performance, transfer learning, build relationships, make better decisions, innovate and more!
Dr Sharon Varney will start the day by warming people up to the theme and I will follow with a Knowledge Café -- using conversation to help you explore how to empower conversation in your own organisation.
Fiona Hiscocks and Jim Scopes from Sparknow will then consider the issue of "speaking up" – empowering more difficult conversations.
And finally, Vicky Short and Monica Danese-Perrin from Lloyds Banking Group will share how they put people at the heart of their work in embedding Knowledge Management into a fast paced Financial Services organisation that is in the midst of a large scale digital transformation.
Although this is a members' event, a few guest places are available. Contact Marina Hart [email protected] at the Henley Business School if you are interested.
The Mehrabian Myth - another persistent myth - Comments
Recently, I pointed out that although the Hawthorne Effect was real - the research that it was based on was flawed - yet we still call it the Hawthorne Effect. So in some ways it is a bit of a myth.
Here is another persistent myth - the Mehrabian Myth.
I would be surprised if you have not heard the statement, often in a training course or at a conference that when we communicate:
55% of the message is conveyed by our body language
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Pop The Bubble: Having Conversations that Make Us Think http://buff.ly/2ovm3ib #GoodToTalk
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time ...
Then in doing a little bit of due diligence - something I do far more often today - given our era of "fake news" and "alternative facts", it seems there is no record that Churchill ever made the first statement :-)
But two interesting quotes nevertheless regardless of author.
And quite a fascinating, thought provoking talk it was too. Here are few clips from the book.
We think we know far more than we actually do.
Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works.
How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Because whilst individuals know very little, the collective or ‘hive' mind knows a lot.
The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We're constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact -- and usually we don't even realize we're doing it.
The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individually oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. Our collaborative minds, on the other hand, enable us to do amazing things.
I have bought his book and although I have not had time to read it yet, I doubt that he mentions the term Knowledge Management once but I think his work has profound implications for KM.
How do we manage our knowledge when we understand so little but think that we know it all and resist being proved wrong?
And how so we mitigate the fact that we are unknowingly influenced by what everyone else thinks in our close circles?
You may have come across the phrase "speak truth to power" a lot in the last year and wondered quite what it meant, and it's origin.
The Quakers coined the phrase during in the mid-1950s. It was a call for the United States to stand firm against fascism and other forms of totalitarianism.
I think it can take two meanings.
The first meaning is in keeping with the Quaker use and maybe typified by Shari Runner in this Huffington Post article:
Speaking truth to power means believing deeply in what you say and fighting every day to have that heard.
It may not be popular; it means taking a risk, it means standing for something.
But depending on the context, it has a second, less grandiose meaning that I can best describe like this:
“Speak truth to power” means speaking what we believe to be true to someone in authority who might take it as a criticism or be offended and who has the power to punish us in some way.
In writing my blook, I am researching the barriers to what makes a good conversation and being afraid to "speak our minds" is clearly one of the obstacles.
There are many reasons why we might be reluctant to "speak up." Fear of authority is one of them.
But I am starting to use the phrase in a slightly different way.
Fear comes from the power difference between ourself and the other person. We feel we have less power (perceived or real) than them and so are afraid.
But there are many forms of power difference:
seniority
gender
education
class
articulateness
accent
nationality
race
dress
financial
to name but a few.
What I am trying to better understand is how we learn to "speak truth to power" in all of these contexts or create conversational environments that make it easier.
Well, it is not just a name for a conversational method to bring people together in conversation but a metaphor for that process. Let me explain.
The term "café," frequently written as "cafe" without the e-acute accent, comes from the French and means "coffee."
And of course, a café is a small restaurant which mostly serves coffee, tea, other drinks and an assortment of snacks. But cafés are far more than places to eat and drink.
They are places where people, usually friends and sometimes strangers, meet in pairs or small groups to have informal conversations and to socialize. They are also places to read books, magazines, and newspapers.
Many cafés have comfy, easy chairs or sofas or small nooks where people can relax, chat in comfort and chill a little.
Today, many people use them to access the Internet through their laptops or smartphones, sometimes to browse the web, other times to work but frequently to chat with other people on Facebook or Whatsapp.
In short, cafés are hospitable, social places where people go to connect, to have conversations, face-to-face or virtual and to read.
In some ways, the coffee and food are secondary, though conversation is always enhanced while eating and drinking together.
Cafés have a long and distinguished history as places of creativity and innovation where people meet to talk and exchange information going back to the Enlightenment Coffeehouses (or penny universities as they were sometimes known) of 17th and 18th century London.
And "knowledge"? It is through conversation that we learn and develop our personal knowledge.
So the term "Knowledge Café" makes a great metaphor for the types of conversation you might have in a café.
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
I am asking you for permission to continue - Comments
What with Brexit and Trump I have been dismayed this last year by the lack of respect that people, especially politicians show for each other.
Regardless of your politic leanings or views on oil pipelines, I hope you admire the way that Justin Trudeau handles this situation when demonstrators interrupted him recently in a town hall meeting in Winnipeg.
How are we ever going to sort out the problems we face in the world if we can't talk respectfully with each other?
I plan to run a number of Virtual Cafés and Café style webinars starting in March 2017.
If you would like to be kept informed about them then please sign-up to my Virtual Café mailing list.
I think Zoom will most likely replace Skype, Google Hangouts and many of the corporate webinar platforms such as Webex and Adobe Connect over the coming few years.
Non-violent communication: Ed you have a big mouth! - Comments
My daughter Sally posted a short item on her blog recently about the verb "to be" and violent communication.
Can we (or should we) ever say that 'something is', if it is not a permanent state of being? In Spanish, for the verb 'to be' we say 'ser' and 'estar'; essence and condition; identity and being; one is often more permanent than the other.
The verb 'to be' in the English language, however, has just one core manifestation.
Does this have the capacity to be most violent in communication?
Sally's use of the term "violent communication" reminded me of the work of Marshall Rosenberg and I Googled to find a YouTube video of him explaining what he meant by the term.
Exploring the relationship between space, collaboration and knowledge transfer - Comments
A few years ago Paul Corney asked a number of Knowledge & Information Management (KIM) professionals about the environment in which they worked.
He believes that creating the right environment is one of the core requirements to nurturing a culture where people are willing to share. The results of that questionnaire were shared at a workshop, at the annual KM UK conference and as an open report.
With the growth of the digital workplace and more transient ways of working now is a great time to revisit the topic and Paul is asking for a few minutes of your time to answer just 10 questions which can be found here in this survey.
The survey will close 5pm GMT on Friday 3rd March 2017.
Gurteen Knowledge Tweets: February 2017 - Comments
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
Decisions Are Emotional, Not Logical: The Neuroscience behind Decision Making http://buff.ly/KEloGW
I am sure most of you by now will have heard the phrase alternative facts.
This is what Wikipedia says if you are not familiar with the term.
"Alternative facts is a phrase used by Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statements about the attendance at Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States."
You can see the interview here.
It has of course caused quite an uproar and a lot of laughter.
But it is a serious issue as this TEDx talk by Sharyl Attkisson makes plain in explaining how fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages.
It has always been the case but these days we need to be extra vigilant especially when republishing material through social media!
I think the Knowledge Café is often at its best in organizations when it is used to convene conversations to give people “a say” in topics and issues that are relevant to them and where they can express their opinions freely.
This helps them make better sense of the issues and allows them to appreciate that other people have different perspectives to them. This helps build community.
I received an email in January 2017 from Samira Ahmed in the Group Learning Department of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation in which she explains how the Knowledge Management Team has used the Café in this way to great effect.
I am experimenting with a potential Virtual Knowledge Cafe platform - Zoom Meetings.
The experiment is confined to my local time zone right now but if all goes well I will open it up globally. (Download Zoom and connect with me if you wish to play with it.)
If you don't want to read too much - just watch these two videos and you will see why I think it will make a viable platform for Virtual Knowledge Cafes.
Ignore the content - just see the format :-)
Now read on if you wish to know a little more.
Zoom is a relatively new (January 2013) cloud-based video meeting system.
You can read more about the company here.
Why Zoom?
It is inexpensive, easy to use, can handle the requisite number of users for a Knowledge Café. Not only can it be accessed through your Windows or Mac desktops but also through your Apple or Android smartphone or tablet. The quality seems good and I am told it is stable.
Critically it has a break-out room capability where the Café host can randomly assign participants to one of several break-out rooms for small group conversations.
I don't know of any other video meeting system that meets all these criteria. (break-out rooms, numbers and cost being key.)
There are two versions of Zoom, a free basic version and a pro version that costs $15 per month. The pro version can host up to 50 participants.
The free version contains many of the key features of the Pro system except meetings are limited to 40 minutes.
So to host a virtual Knowledge Café, only the Café host needs to subscribe to the Pro version of Zoom (to get past the 40 minute limitation).
The Café participants need only the free Basic version.
As the Knowledge Café works best for less than 30 participants, 50 participants in not a limitation.
So all in all, it looks a viable technology platform for virtual Knowledge Cafés.
What will be interesting is how the dynamics differ to a face-to-face Café. I'll let you know how it goes.
The discussion on "What makes a powerful question?" in the Gurteen Knowledge Community group on Linkedin has pretty much wound down.
But take a look if you have not already - there are some really useful insights there.
And take a look at David Griffith's recent post on Do you ignite knowledge wildfires? where he makes the point that Knowledge Management doesn't have to be about the theatre of action.
A simple change to the way people ask questions can ignite knowledge wildfires and get everyone in the organisation practising Knowledge Management.
Who should you be talking with in your organization and what are the questions you should be exploring together?
Here are some of my more popular recent tweets.
Take a look, if you are not a Tweeter, you will get a good idea of how I use it by browsing the list of micro-posts.
If you are interested in Knowledge Management, the
Knowledge Café
or the role of conversation in organizational life then you my be interested in this online book I am writing on
Conversational Leadership
The Gurteen Knowledge Community is a global learning community
of over 21,000 people in 160 countries across the world.
The community is for people who are committed to making a difference:
people who wish to share and learn from each other and who strive to see
the world differently, think differently and act differently.
Membership of the Gurteen Knowledge Community is free.
