Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 315 - September 2026

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 315 – September 2026

John Hovell and I have decided to postpone the five-day, face-to-face Conversational Leadership workshop we had planned for early September in partnership with the Knowledge Management Institute (KMI).

Five consecutive days is a substantial commitment, and we are now considering bringing the workshop online and spreading it over several weeks. Nothing has been settled yet, but it may take place later this year or early next year. I will share more when our thinking has developed.

1. Connecting Chatgpt to My Working World
   How MCP is changing the way I work with AI
   
2. Thinking Again About Interthinking
   How a Knowledge Café sent me back to the idea
   
3. The Adjacent Possible on a Chessboard
   How a game of chess can help us understand what becomes possible next
   
4. Quote of the Month
   September 2026
   
5. Reading Worth Your Time
   Curated links, September 2026
   
6. Keep My Work Alive
Sustaining 25 Years of shared learning and conversation
7. Coaching
Bringing Conversational Leadership into your daily practice
8. Events
Talks, Knowledge Cafés and Workshops
9. Unsubscribe
Unsubscribe to the Knowledge-Letter
10. Gurteen Knowledge Letter
A monthly reflection on Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management

Until recently, ChatGPT could help me think and write, but it could not see the large body of material I had accumulated elsewhere. It knew nothing about my Evernote archive of more than 27,000 notes, ideas, quotations, articles and fragments of thinking that I had collected or written over the last 12 years. Nor could it access the files on my computer or the transcripts of my Zoom conversations unless I manually copied the material into the conversation.

That is beginning to change through something called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP.

MCP is an open standard that allows an AI application to connect to external sources of information and to other tools. It has been described as rather like USB-C: instead of creating a different kind of connection for every application, MCP provides a common way for them to communicate.

MCP is not limited to ChatGPT. It is also supported by Claude and by a growing number of other applications, including development tools such as Visual Studio Code and Cursor.

In ChatGPT, many of these connections are becoming available through plugins. There are already quite a few that can be selected from a directory. In many cases, installing one is little more than choosing the plugin, connecting the relevant account and deciding what permissions to give it.

I have been experimenting with connections to Evernote, my Zoom transcripts and files on my Windows computer. ChatGPT can also search my Conversational Leadership website directly, although that particular access does not currently use MCP.

The combination is powerful. I can ask questions such as:

What have I already written about this?

What old notes might strengthen this idea?

Where does something I wrote years ago conflict with what I think today?

Which ideas have I collected but never developed?*

ChatGPT can search across the material, find connections I had missed, compare ideas and help me develop them. It is already changing the way I read, think and write because so much more of the work can take place within a single conversation.

For now, I am being cautious. I am allowing ChatGPT to read my material, but not to change or delete anything. Once I am confident that everything is stable and that I understand the safeguards, I may allow it to write as well.

Even with read-only access, however, the difference is substantial. ChatGPT is becoming less of a separate tool and more of a conversational doorway into my own accumulated work.

My recent Knowledge Café, Interthinking: Can We Think with AI?, attracted around 150 registrations from 36 countries, with approximately 60 people joining us on the day.

The conversation explored whether people can genuinely think together and, if so, whether AI might become part of that process.

Neil Mercer uses the term interthinking to describe the use of language for collective thinking. The idea is that conversation does more than allow us to exchange thoughts that have already been formed. Through questioning, responding, and building on what others say, thoughts and understandings may emerge that none of us brought into the conversation.

I had already written an introductory piece, Interthinking: Thinking Together, explaining the idea and why our best thinking often happens in conversation.

But the Café revealed that not everyone was convinced. Some participants questioned whether thinking could really happen between people rather than solely within individual minds. Others wondered whether interthinking was simply another name for brainstorming or co-creation, or whether a new word was needed at all.

These were useful objections. They encouraged me to look more deeply at Neil Mercer’s work, explore some of the research behind the idea, and sharpen my own understanding. The result was a much fuller piece, Interthinking Is Real, in which I address these questions and explain why I believe conversation can become part of the thinking process itself.

This is a good example of how my work develops. I write something and put an idea into the world. I bring it into conversation through a Knowledge Café. People respond to it, question it, challenge it, and sometimes disagree with it. Their responses send me back to reading and writing, where I reconsider and further develop the idea.

The Café did not settle the question. It did something more useful: it challenged me to return to the idea, explore it more deeply, and think again.

The adjacent possible is a relatively straightforward idea, but it can take a little while to fully grasp. Looking at a game of chess through the lens of the adjacent possible may help make better sense of it.

At any moment in a game of chess, the position of the pieces determines which moves are possible. You cannot make any move you like. You can only choose from the moves available from the position you are currently in.

Make a move and the position changes. New moves become possible, others disappear, and your opponent’s response changes the possibilities again. Each position opens up a new adjacent possible.

There is a clear overall goal: to win by checkmating your opponent’s king. But there is no predetermined route for getting there. You may have a strategy and a sense of direction, and you may anticipate several moves ahead, but you cannot simply plan the whole game and then execute that plan. The path emerges as you play.

Conversation works in a similar way. Each contribution changes the conversational situation. A question, an observation, a challenge, or a new perspective can open possibilities for thinking that were not available a moment earlier. What becomes possible next depends partly on what has just happened between us.

This also connects the adjacent possible with the Vector Theory of Change. We can have intent and a sense of direction without having a detailed plan for getting there. We act from where we are, see what happens, and respond to the possibilities that emerge.

Chess is, of course, only an analogy. It is a highly constrained system with fixed rules, known pieces, defined moves, and a clear objective. Human organizations, communities and conversations are far more complex. We may not know all the possibilities available to us, and entirely new possibilities may emerge through our interactions.

When we do not have to know the whole path in advance, we need to pay attention to where we are now and to what has just become possible.

Each month, I feature a quotation that I have found particularly thought-provoking. If you enjoy it, you might also like my Quote of the Day service, which delivers a carefully selected quotation by email at a frequency you choose. You can browse the collection and subscribe here:

One of the ways of thinking about leadership is thinking about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise.

Credit: Patricia Shaw

Comment:

In complex situations, no one person can see the whole picture or know in advance what needs to be done. The work of leadership is often not to provide the answer, but to bring people together so that different perspectives can meet, assumptions can be questioned and a way forward can emerge.

Anyone can do this. Practising Conversational Leadership begins with noticing the conversation that is missing and taking responsibility for convening it.

Each month, I share three articles that made me stop, think, and sometimes rethink my own assumptions. I hope they stimulate your thinking as much as they did mine.

Goals in Complexity

Chris Corrigan explores the uneasy fit between fixed goals and complex work. Drawing on Dave Snowden, he argues for establishing a direction of travel, understanding the present situation, and taking several safe-to-fail steps towards the adjacent possible. A useful challenge to approaches that decide the destination first and assume the route can then be planned. Read the article

Why Some Conversations Don’t Need a Script

Rod Naquin draws on research into interactive alignment to explain how people in conversation gradually begin to use similar language and develop a shared understanding, often without consciously trying. He also offers a simple conversational practice called the three-word echo. An interesting account of how conversation can help us think together without requiring a formal process. Read the article

Telling Is Listening

Drawing on an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, Maria Popova challenges the familiar idea of communication as information passing from a sender to a receiver. Human conversation is portrayed instead as a mutual, embodied and relational process in which speaking and listening continually shape one another. It connects beautifully with interthinking and the idea that a real conversation can change everyone involved. Read the article

For 26 years, I've been sharing the Gurteen Knowledge Letter each month, and many of you have been reading it for five years or more. My Knowledge Café also reached a milestone, celebrating its 20th anniversary in September 2022.

If my work has made a difference to you, I'd be grateful if you could consider supporting it. A small monthly donation or any one-off contribution would greatly help cover some of my website hosting costs.

Thank you to the 50+ patrons who have already supported me - your generosity means a great deal.

If you're curious about how a more conversational approach might shift the way you work with others, whether in leading, learning, or collaborating, I offer one-to-one coaching tailored to your context.

We explore real challenges and possibilities through dialogue, helping you develop your own way of practicing Conversational Leadership in daily work.

I host regular Knowledge Cafés, both in person in London and online via Zoom. Open to all, they provide an opportunity for shared learning, reflection, and conversation. For details of upcoming public events, see here.

I also run tailored Knowledge Cafés for organisations, networks, and professional societies. For more information, see here.

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The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a free monthly email newsletter, in its 25th year, designed to inspire thinking on Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management. You can explore the archive of past issues and subscribe here.

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David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom