Gurteen Learning Events

Gurteen Knowledge Conference, Managing Organizational Complexity, London, March 3rd 2004

While I strongly believe we should continue to develop new concepts behind KM I also believe we need to get much better at persuading managers to adopt these new concepts. Part of the secret to doing this I believe is to get much better at turning the intangible benefits of KM concepts into tangible measurable business benefits.

Eight years ago I met Jon to discuss his research into virtual teams. For the next four years Jon moved on to how to link virtual teams together, and then the impact of culture on this model. It took him another fours years to learn how to turn the intangible research into a tangible measurable solution that managers could quickly see the benefits off. In fact Jon would say the research was the easy part, selling the intangible benefits was by far the greater challenge.

While his company, TeamPerformance, created to sell the research results is now taking off, Jon’s strong believe in the concepts of KM means he is keen to get organizations to support more KM type initiatives by enabling KM devotees to turn their intangible concepts into tangible measurable benefits that any manager can quickly asses the cost/benefit of implementing.

Jon first tried his approach in one of my Knowledge Cafes. He presented a complex business problem that could be solved by many of the concepts behind KM. Following the Knowledge Café format he asked groups of people to present a business case for change but without mentioning words like Knowledge Management, Community of Practice etc. The idea was that people would learn by doing.

Based on the positive feedback Jon recently ran a one day workshop where he extended the concepts to include how to put together a tangible proposal that managers would sign off against. The success of that day has prompted the development of this first Learning Event in a planned series - "The One Minute Pitch: Making Concepts and Ideas work" which is coached by Jon.

More Learning Events are planned for 2004.