Andrew Armour is one of those people and has become a good friend and a regular participant in my open London Knowledge Cafes.
He's blogged about knowledge cafes several times in the past including On Cafe Conversations,Connections & Collaboration and Are You In The Conversation Business?
But in a recent blog post on Stimulating Conversation And The Marketing Cafe he talks about how he has adapted the knowledge cafe to create what he calls a Marketing Cafe - in other words a knowledge cafe that focuses the questions on marketing issues.
Naturally, I love it as the KCafe process can be taken and applied in so many different ways - something I teach in my workshops
Here are a couple of quotes from Andrew's blog post.
A lack of important conversation between the right people prevents many businesses from becoming truly innovative . Too often the important questions, the ones that may challenge the status quo and help paint a picture of the future – are left unasked or dominated by the usual suspects.
Credit: Andrew Armour
Most meetings, workshops and conferences are not viewed as an opportunity to converse, listen, build dialogue and explore solutions, but a means to present, report, control, persuade -- to control your own plan, to get buy-in, to approve or deny.
No wonder then, that when the time does arise for focused, innovative, open and progressive conversation that most of the time --we fail.
Credit: Andrew Armour
