Gurteen Knowledge Cafe: The University of the Future

It is great news that David Gurteen is planning to run several Knowledge Cafes in London this year and good news that I was able to make the first one.

Keeping with the good news, it was held at Regent's University, in Regent's Park funnily enough, and it is always nice to have an excuse to go there. The travel worked reasonably well (Richmond to Hammersmith to Baker Street and then walk) and I got there around 6:15pm which gave me plenty of time to have a few veggie sarnies and a cup of coffee before the event started at 6:30pm. I also had the chance to say "hello" to a few of the other regulars.

The reason we were there was to discuss The University of the Future.

At first glance this is of little interest to me but, on the other hand, I was involved with schools for several years, I like to go out of my comfort zone and I love Gurteen events.

The session was expertly introduced by Peter Sharp who, amongst many other things, has a PhD in Knowledge Management and has worked in the field of business management and professional skills at Regent's University.

In a few drawings (a welcome change from the usual slide format) he explained some of the pressures that universities were under in several areas including money, expectations on all sides, and competition.

That set the conversations rolling. As usual we did these in three rounds of small table discussions (with people moving to different tables in each round) before having a group discussion at the end. Also as usual I took very few notes at the time because the conversations got in the way and what follows is a mix of these notes, additional memories and subsequent analysis in a desperate attempt to produce something coherent.

I do not usually comment on the conversations themselves but it is worth doing so this time because they had a different feel. Having universities as the theme attracted a lot of people from universities which tended to restrict the scope of some of the conversations and they were restricted even further, in my experience, as they seemed to have come with their answers prepared rather than waiting for the conversations to provide some. They were still good conversations, perhaps I felt that because I was an exception to the universities rule (there were others), and I both enjoyed the evening and learned from it.

Peter Sharp opened by contrasting Balir father (50% to go to university) to son (apprenticeships are better) but we never addressed that argument directly as the argument for apprenticeships was not in the room. I think that was a shame as there are clear issues with the universities model and I would have liked to hear how outsiders playing in the same area feel.

If we look at a cube (sorry, I cannot draw this) with numbers of people along one axis (say 0-6 million), their ages along another (say 0-100) and then all the things that universities might provide to students (academic teaching, clubs and sports, social interaction, etc.) then universities fill a very small part of that cube in that they provide some of those services to only 50% of the population for only 3 or 4 years.

There are many other providers of all of these services and the cube is fully populated. The big question for universities, I feel, is deciding where to be in that cube. For example, it may make sense for them to be more engaged in life-long learning so that they can use their skills, knowledge and facilities to provide formal education after graduation instead of leaving this to professional bodies (e.g. Institute of Chartered Accountants) and probably the easiest way to do this would be to absorb such bodies.

Michael Porter famously said, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do" and I think that applies here. There are lots of things that universities do (e.g. sports) and/or are interested in doing (e.g. teaching life skills like critical thinking) that may be best left to others with universities commission these services for their students for the period that the have them.

Part of this is to ensure that useful skills, like critical thinking, are not exclusively the property of the 50% or so who go to university but are available to all. Someone ranted in the final whole-group session on how this focussing reasoning skills on just the elite had enabled Brexit and Trump. It was me.

There are a lot of players and potential customers in the university world, in its broadest sense, and I think university will operate better if they become part of the community rather than just a campus.

[The photo from the event was copied from cooperativelearning.works who also wrote a blog about it.]

Accelerating change at Gurteen Knowledge Cafe with cultureQs

I had missed a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe or two thanks to my poor organisation and work commitments (I really must give up work soon!) so I was even keener than usual to get to this one. I even cut my holiday in York short to do so. The main attraction was that this was a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe, and all that means (i.e. process and people), with the secondary attraction that it was about Change Management.

One of the possibly over-simplistic statements that I often repeat is that the technology is the easy part and the difficult bit is the people. Change Management is often overlooked, especially by IT companies. I work for an IT company.

Being on holiday meant that I was travelling there from home instead of the London office only a mile away. I had had a quiet morning, walking very few steps, so I decided to leave the Waterloo train at Clapham Junction and to walk up to Westminster Business School from there. It was only 8km.

The walk was pretty uneventful, i.e. dull, apart from the Serpentine Pavilion that I took a quick detour into as I walked through Hyde Park. Despite having little to look at the walk was a success in that I got lots of steps in (around 10k) and was able to catch up on lots of podcasts.

This Gurteen Knowledge Cafe was slightly different in that we did not swap tables or form a circle at the end but it was essentially the same in that we had a facilitator, Eric Lynn, introduce the subject and then we carried on the conversation at our tables before summarising as a group at the end.

Eric introduced us to his invention, cultureQs, which he had developed over a number of years as a way of accelerating cultural change by getting people to share things about themselves. The game like format produced a neutral environment in which to ask and discuss some difficult topics.

I'll call cultureQs a game just because it is a short easy word and it looks like a game. In practice it is a technique with a tool.

Eric started by showing us his idea of the seven components of culture, e.g. ethnic, beliefs and organisation. I was surprised to see that he had age and gender in there but not class. Perhaps that is an English thing, but I doubt it.

After a brief introduction to the game we were left to play it on our tables. We had four people on ours only two of whom, Conrad and myself, knew each other beforehand.

The point of cultureQs is that the game format decides which questions to ask. We moved around the board using a die, as in Ludo or Snakes and Ladders, and the places we landed on determined which question was asked. The person whose go it was answered the question first and then the other three of us did.

There was lots of agreement on the first question about good managers, and so we learned little from this. There was less agreement on how to work with business partners and I was the odd one out here as my company has a very formal approach to this, partially dictated by fairness and anti-bribery legislation.

I felt that some of the questions were too formulaic, like answering a Prince2 exam. and others were on generic topics, like equal rights, and so did not reveal much about us as people.

I wondered why the questions were set as a game when they could, for example, have been asked randomly just by shuffling the pack and each person taking the next card. I also wondered what the point of the game was, i.e. how it ended. I was able to ask Eric this in the group session at the end and he said that the game format with the board gave the players a focus and that the game had no end, it would just be stopped after a set period of time, around 70 minutes, but being a game meant that the players stepped into game mode and were more prepared to answer the questions.

We decided that the point was to get us to find our more about each other and that the blue rootQs were best for those so we ignored the board and the die and just answered those instead.

The other tables liked the game more than we did which may have been due to the way that we worked as a group or to the questions that came up in the short time that we played the game.

As a way of learning about people, I was reminded of two questions that Robert Elms asks his Listed Londoners, You have a day off, what do you do? and Where would you take a visitor? If I was setting the questions then I would include these two.

I was not convinced by the implementation of cultureQs but I could see the merit of asking these sorts of questions when getting teams to try and understand each other better and of asking them in a controlled manner in a neutral space. It is also fair to point out that I played the game for about half an hour in an artificial situation (we were not colleagues who had to work together), that the game was developed over several years of use with clients and has been used hundreds of times since being published.

The Gurteen Knowledge Cafe again proved itself to be a good way to explore these ideas and it was also good to catch up with some Gurteen regulars (e.g. Keith, Conrad, Sally-Ann and Noeleen) as well as meeting some new people too. It was another good evening spent stimulating new ideas with interesting people, and that is what Gurteen Knowledge Cafes are all about.

Exploring Open Data at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

Gurteen Knowledge Cafés do not come along that often and when they do it is often at short notice and I sometimes find that I have already booked something for that evening, even though I usually book my theatre at fairly short notice too. When I can get to one then I do because I always find them stimulating, which is what happens when you get a room full of bright enthusiastic people together and hit them with a conversation stick.

The theme of this event was Transparency and Open Data, a hot topic indeed. Making it hotter was having it hosted by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) who were at the forefront of opening up government (our?) data for wider use.

As usual the evening started off with some casual networking and then some more formal speed-networking before we sat down to hear the speakers kick-off the discussions.

The usual caveat; what follows is a mixture of what various people said and what I wrote at the time modified by my further thoughts when writing this up. None of the comments are attributable to anybody and all the errors are mine.

The website Data.gov.uk lists all of the government data sets. There were 2,4000 of them! Data was being opened to improve transparency, enable internal improvement within the government and to boost the economy. A value of £1.8bn had been put on this but I remain very sceptical on that.

A big issue with sharing data is understanding how it is structured and what the values actually mean. For example, is a postcode one item of data or two and does a gender value of "0" mean male, female or unknown? There are data standards in some areas to let organisations co-operate, e.g. banks on sending payments, but there are few of these examples and they cover quite narrow and very specific fields.

Another big issue is the accuracy of the data. I have not had proper data on the 371 bus times for months with my two nearest stops not included in the feed.

This issues of what the data means and how accurate it is brings us back again to that all important topic of Information Literacy. Open Data is only useful if it is understood properly and is accurate.

Open Data has many passionate advocates and great claims are made for it but the success stories are few and relatively minor. Things that have worked reasonably well include maps, transport routes and timetables, and data from the financial markets.

The government's approach is to throw its data out there in the expectation that somebody will want to use it but this is a shotgun approach and most of the data misses. A better approach might be to let potential users approach government bodies and ask for the data that they want to use.

For example, I would be very interested in a simple way of accessing planning data across local authorities (within just one authority would do for a start!). It is incredibly hard to find out simple information like how old a building is and how tall it is.

Personal data is another important issue and this has two sides to it, e.g. the doctor and the patient where one needs information about the other in order to help them.

The various table discussions and the large circle discussion that closed the evening where interesting and stimulating and I was an active participant in both (no surprises there then). It felt a little as if we were going around some old circles at time and while the conversations were fun I am not sure that I got much new out of them.

At some point in the evening I wrote "Knowledge is Beautiful" and that seems like a good note to end on.

Exploring Gamification at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

The word "gamification" has got a lot of use in recent years as a term to describe a set of tools that encourage different behaviours. It is much like "nudge" in the respect. But despite this heavy use it was still very much a mystery to me so I jumped at the chance to attend a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe on the subject.

This was held at the Westminster Business School which was both very convenient for me, it is just by Baker Street station, and a very hood place for the session thanks to the large square room that we were in.

There were, as usual, many new faces there among the many regulars and it was good to have the initial speed-networking session to talk to some of them.

Our guide for the evening was Andrzej Marczewski. His day-job was Internal Web Manager for Capgemini UK and gamification was a passion that he was developing both inside and outside of that role.

Andrzej kicked-off the discussions which we then continued in small groups at our tables, where we moved around a couple of times to cross-fertilise our ideas, and then as a group when we came back together in a circle. What follows is me trying to make sense of the sessions rather than a report of what happened. There is no chronology and no attribution.

The main strand of gamification is to bring elements from games in to the real-world to encourage specific behaviours. It is about making work slightly less horrible.

A simple example of this is a app like FourSquare which uses a league table, badges and mayorships to encourage people to use it to check-in to places using the app.

This gave me an immediate problem as I am a fairly heavy FourSquare user but I am not interested in any of those gaming elements. I use it to tell me when I was last at a venue and how many times I have been there.

Other popular websites/apps that use simple game elements include Klout (ranking), TripAdvisor (contributor level), Twitter (number of followers) and Google (web stats).

Another game element that we discussed was instant feedback and I had a problem with this too. This, and other elements, were not limited to games. For example, an airplane's cockpit is full of devices that give instant feedback. So to claim this as gamification seemed to be stretching the definition.

Similarly missions are a game feature but they also exist in real-life as tasks and projects. The same is true of progress bars.

A slightly less well-defined element of gaming is its informality where it is possible to learn the game by trying things out, often without any instructions, and with no serious consequences from losing. In contrast, business procedures tend to be well documented and the outcome is expected to be right first time. Perhaps it is work if I tell you to do it but a game if you decide to do it yourself.

The flip-side of gamification is gaming where people exploit weaknesses in the new rules. An example of this could be to post lots of trivial entries to a knowledge store when people are rewarded for the number of entries posted. Incentives distort behaviour, and this is a problem.

A contextual measure, e.g. peer feedback on the articles, would be harder to game but would also be much harder to collect fairly and the cost of doing this could be more than any benefits achieved by adding gamification in the first place.

If a game has a winner then it has many more losers. People could be put off playing the game if, for example, it was obvious that they were never going to get anywhere near the top of the leaderboard.

It is easy to find success stories for gamification, publications like HBR survive on their success stories, but the failures are out there too. It is just that nobody is shouting out about them too much. One that was mentioned was the endorsement system introduced by LinkedIn which nobody had a good word for.

Exhibitions often have games for children, to keep them occupied while their parents do the serious work of viewing the exhibition, but why not make this a game for adults too?

What was missing for me from the discussion was any remotely firm definition of what a game is or what the elements of a game are that can be used in gamification. It seemed to me that gamification thrived on this ambiguity by being able to find something game-like in any success story. That may be good for the people in Team Gamification but of little use to the rest of us trying to learn from the example.

The wider field of design, as discussed at the BCS recently, seemed to cover all of gamificaction and more. Design uses a whole series of tools and techniques to try and modify behaviour and does not care whether any of these originated in, or are also used in, games.

I left the discussion probably more cynical about gamification than when I started and that was because it was a good discussion that had allowed me to explore, test and define my scepticism.

Conversational Leadership at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

This was most unusual Gurteen Knowledge Cafe with David Gurteen leeding a discusion on how the ideas behind the Gurteen Knowedge Cafe could be expanded in to something that David called Conversational Leadership.

We were gathered in the Westminster Business School as guests of Gurteen regular Keith Patrick. We had been there before and it was a good place to be.

It was billed as come at 6 for a 6:30 start. I took an unusual route, via Richmond and Willesden Junction, and still managed to arrive just a minute or two after 6. At first I thought that I had got the timings wrong as there were already twenty or so people there. I was not the only keen one then.

We kicked off at 6:30 as planned with David as our facilitator. He then broke two of his own conventions by not starting with a speed-networking session and then talking for longer than the recommended maximum. But these were conventions rather than rules and no serious harm was done.

David explained that he had been running his Knowledge Cafes for 12 years. He had started them as a response to the death-by-powerpoint style of conference sessions with the aim of making the dialogue between presenter and audience more conversational.

Conversations are the natural way to share knowledge and a lot of conversational tools are used within Knowledge Management, e.g. anecdote circles and after action reviews. In other formats we should change the agenda to allow time for reflection, conversation and question.

Conversational Leadership was the synthesis of all the lessons David had learnt from his many conversations about conversations. He defined this as, "Conversational Leadership is a style of working where everyone in an organization, especially managers, understand the transformative power of conversation and take a conversational approach to the way that they work and interact with people."

Conversations are necessary and are used widely but are not managed very well. For example, there is often too much talking at and not enough talking with.

David closed by putting this question to the group, How do we each bring conversations into our work?

We then followed the usual Knowledge Cafe of discussing the question in small groups (4 to 6 typically) in three rounds to cross-fertilise ideas and then coming together in one large circle for a final round-up of ideas.

What follows is my notes from the four sessions refined by some reflection since then.

I had an attempt to differentiate conversations from other dialogues a few years ago and I think that my musings on conversations then are still valid. What is needed now is to dig in to the central box to understand conversations better.

The term "conversation" covers a wide range of activities. Some have specific objectives (e.g. project review) while some are much looser (e.g. catch-up). Some are to exchange information while others are to build connections and networks. Some conversations are arranged (meetings etc.) but others are unplanned (meet at the coffee point).

There are times when conversations are not the answer. For example, the best way to get across simple information to a lot of people is via a presentation, or even the less personal email.

The conversational style suggests a dialogue between equals and so they are less likely to work in, say, a manager/employee relationship. Even if the manager wants to be open and conversational the employee is likely to be wary of being too open because of the possible consequences.

Conversations need a place. We enjoy conversations, we have them in the pub etc. for their own value. Physical conversations are still far more effective than electronic ones, which is why we still use them.

If a conversation has a clear objective then it needs some management to get there. These management tools include artefacts (e.g. agenda) and roles (e.g. chairman and recorder).

Managing participation to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to contribute and that nobody dominates or deflects the conversation is a separate matter and applies to all conversation types, though to varying extents. For example, in a project review the only topic should be the project and it is important to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to raise any issues whereas the subjects covered in a pub conversation are unpredictable and it does not matter if somebody chooses not to say very much.

Some of the things that I need to do to improve my work conversations are to go in to our Kings Place office once a week to find some colleagues to chat to and to identify a circle of people that I should keep in regular contact with.

There is a 2x2 matrix on conversations inside me trying to get out but I am not yet sure what the axes are. On the short-list are things like clarity of purpose and structure. In the middle I want to put some conversation types, such as meeting, speed-dating, workshop, gossip, catch-up, morning payers and wash-up. I think what I need to do is to identify all of the types of conversation there are and then tease out the differences between them.

This was another excellent Gurteen Knowledge Cafe. It confirmed that conversations are key and I am interested to see where David goes with his idea of Conversational Leadership to make more of them.

Collaboration at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

The Gurteen Knowledge Community returned to the Westminster Business School to discuss collaboration.

This was my second time there and that last was with Gurteen too. Unfortunately that was a few years BB (Before Blog) so I do not know exactly when that was or what we discussed.

I do remember enough of the venue though to notice some of the changes that had been made in the intervening years. This time we were in a large room of the main reception area with glass wall on two sides. That made us very visible and apparently that had taken some getting used to by some of the staff but I have worked in open plan offices for many years so the visibility did not matter to me.

Our host for the evening was Gurteen Cafe stalwart Keith Patrick, as it had been the last time that we were there.

Keith opened by saying a little about Westminster University and I was surprised to hear that it was celebrating its 175th birthday.

We were then given our topic for the evening - collaboration.

Keith made the point that in recent years new technologies have brought us more tools to collaborate with but these had not made collaboration more natural or more common.

We were asked to consider how we could encourage collaboration, and to do this with our own organisations in mind rather than treating this as an academic exercise.

As is usual at Gurteen Cafes, we discussed this in small groups of 4 to 6 people for about fifteen minutes or so then we moved tables to mix the conversations for another fifteen minutes and then swapped again to mix some more for a further fifteen minutes. This cross-fertilisation of ideas by moving people around is a key element of the evenings and is instrumental to their success.

These are some of the notes that I took during these conversations.

The new technologies can be useful but they are not a prerequisite. Old technologies can work too, e.g. email. We should use what is available and what people are comfortable with.

Whatever tools we use we need to be prepared to seed and moderate conversations until momentum builds and the conversations become self-sustaining.

Two motivators for collaboration are learning and boasting.

There needs to be a purpose for collaboration and this needs to be understood by everybody in the conversation. This could be as simple and specific as saying what information is required (e.g. examples of good practise) or as broad as a framework for contribution explaining the scope of the conversations and the rules that apply, e.g. it must be work related and behaviour must be professional.

One approach is to create a place to share, e.g. a group of experts. There is prestige of being seen to be an expert.

It is not always down to the facilitator, we could all Invite people to participate, e.g. by asking, "Why don't you blog?", or by asking questions to get somebody to answer.

Must be realistic about what you can achieve, even with a lot of pushing not everybody will join in.

If collaboration is seen as an important part of corporate culture then companies should explain the ground rules during recruitment.

Should also be prepare to criticise bad behaviour, e.g. knowledge hoarding, use sticks as well as carrots.

Seeking is as important as sharing, receive as well as give.

We make sharing and collaboration decisions all the time, but we do not always recognise them as such.

The value of sharing can come from the connections that are made. Connections make conversations that build trust.

Collaboration is a selfish activity. All parties have personal motivations for asking for and giving information.Why are we all collaborating at the Knowledge Cafe tonight?

Sharing is the same as learning. It helps us to understand what we know.

We must be a really nice group of people. Almost all our ideas for encouraging collaboration are carrots, there are few sticks.

In a slight change from the usual we collected our ideas on post-it-notes which we then clustered on one of the walls. I am not sure that this step added much value from the table conversations but most people seemed to get involved in this so I may have been in a minority in thinking this.

The evening ended with a whole group session where we exchanged our main learnings from the evening. This part was facilitated by David himself.

That ended the Cafe as such though a few of us went to the Wetherspoons across the road to have some more conversations, they are addictive.

This was another highly interesting Gurteen Knowledge Cafe and it managed to shed some new light on an old topic. There were real lessons learnt that each of us could take back to our organisations.

Passion at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

There is so much to like about Gurteen Knowledge Cafes and that includes the different locations that it takes you to.

Our hosts for this evening was Regent's College which is a private university occupying a cosy corned of Regents Park. We were there to take advantage of their wooden floor in the main hall.

After some very welcome refreshments and the usual introductions, including the traditional speed-networking, we were set on our way by Alida Acosta.

In quite a long talk without notes or a presentation, Alida explored the role of emotion and intellect in decision making. The emotional part includes our accumulated experience to date and that is always with us and is always changing.

The tango was used as a metaphor, hence the need for a wooden floor. The Tango was invented in Argentina as a way for people to communicate when they had no common language. To dance the Tango properly you need the intellect to learn the mechanics of the steps and also the passion and confidence to let the music take you.

Given the question of passion in our working lives we formed in to groups of around six to have the conversations that define what these events are about.

As usual, with an open question to answer our conversations went all over the place and I tried to make sense of this in my notes when I was not too busy listening and talking.

We questioned whether the split between intellect and emotion was real or artificial.

I once heard that we make major decisions, like buying a house, with our hearts and then try to justify it with our heads, e.g. we tell ourselves that it is close to good schools. We seem to feel guilty that we let our hearts rules our heads.

We are generally reluctant to show, or share, emotion at work and when we do we seem to find it easier to share a gripe (e.g. bad weather) than success. The later seems a little too much like boasting.

Success is not a zero-sum gain, if we win then several other people lose.

Some people have real passion in their work, e.g. the teacher in our first group. I would stop (paid) work tomorrow if I could afford it whereas my father, also a teacher, worked for as long as he could on in to his seventies.

After three rounds of group discussion we reformed in to a large circle for a final Tango demonstration and some closing comments.

This took us in to the use of passion as a corporate imperative. Someone mentioned a job advertisement that asked for people who were passionate about clean streets. This use of the word risks devaluing it, in much the same way that "team" is now meaningless.

It struck me then that we are asked by corporates to be passionate but they do not feed that passion, if we do well they give us money which has no passion in it at all. I said that it annoyed me that theatres do the same, they keep asking me to join their supporters groups and the first thing they offer is cheaper tickets when my passion is for theatre, not cheap tickets, and the way to feed that passion is to give me access to the creatives.

Then we went to the pub.

The passions were in full flow and I had some more fantastic conversations across a range of topics and with a range of people, none of whom I knew particularly well beforehand.

I headed for home around 11pm, some five hours after the event started, still buzzing and totally invigorated.

And that's the magic of a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe and why passion was such an appropriate topic.

Gurteen Knowledge Cafe on behavioural metaphors

You can always rely on a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe for sparkling conversations and this one was no exception.

Our conversation leader for the evening was Arthur Shelley founder of The Organizational Zoo and designer of metaphors that it uses.

Arthur bounced around the room as he introduced the topic and led us through a couple of exercises. The energy was infectious and there was a buzz all evening.

The Organizational Zoo looks at behaviours that can be used in conversations and looks at how those behaviours can work together or against each other.

To avoid the personal aspect of analysing behaviour, e.g. "Colin is too aggressive", it uses animal metaphors, hence the zoo. There are twenty six animals each with a set of positives and negatives; it's a little like playing top trumps.

These are described in a set of cards and it is these that we played with in our exercises.

In the first each table had to identify five animals that they thought were positive (e.g. owl) and those that are negative (e.g. piranha).

Having forced a consensus on each table we then went to see what a mess the other tables had made.

Not surprisingly, given the question and the homogeneity of the group, there was a great deal of commonality, e.g. we all liked owls and eagles, but there were some differences and it was interesting to see these.

Having learnt the ropes in the first exercise we were given something harder to do.

We had to invent a scenario and then find four animals that exhibited behaviours that were core/expected to the objective, desired/accepted, tolerated and rejected. That is four animals in each of the four categories.

We picked the scenario running a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe but other teams were more imaginative and picked things like robbing a bank.

This task was a lot more difficult as we started to think more about how the team would work together, i.e. we could tolerate some negative behaviours that could provoke conversations at the Cafe without being disruptive. In the end we found very few behaviours that were rejected and that is my real experience of the Cafes, which suggests that the model was working.

As before we moved around to look at other tables where similar discussions had been held about balancing teams and the extent to which any behaviours were completely rejected.

Of course there was more to the evening than I have summarised here and the room was rich with conversations as we all got totally immersed in the lesson, participation and sharing.

Also of course, the conversations continued in a nearby pub until the call of the last reasonable train home gradually pulled us all away.

The Organizational Zoo offers another way of looking at behavioural styles that sits nicely alongside things like Myers-Briggs and has the advantage of using easily understandable and neutral metaphors. And a metaphor is a glorious thing.

Discussing sustainability at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

Somehow it has been three years since I last went to a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe.

Some of that is David's fault for being so busy with real (i.e. paid for) work that he has had to cut the number of free events down and it's also my fault for going to the theatre and opera on dates that Cafes have been arranged.

The three years made little difference as I was soon talking with some familiar faces, and some interesting new ones in the two-minute speed-networking session that David always kicks the evening off with.

The speaker setting the theme for the evening was Will Day, sustainability advisor to PwC, who (on video) made the case for companies facing up to the changes that have to come.

David then put the question for us to discuss. He used different words but essentially we were asked if our current efforts to address sustainability were too little and is there a silver bullet that we could use.

We sat in tables of five or six to address the question for fifteen minutes before shuffling around to form new groups and to continue the discussions in new directions.

And then we moved around again for a third and final table discussion.

The formal part of the evening ended with us all in a large circle sharing our main learnings from the evening.

As usual I took a random notes that I will now try and make some sense of.

We should abolish money as a store of value, while keeping its use as a means of trade. Money, of itself, has no value yet we consume vast resources acquiring and managing it.

We also need other measures of success to reduce the peer pressure (and advertising) that drive so much consumption.

Success means different things to different people. Systems like Myers-Briggs are used by companies to identified people's differences and to make the best use of them but corporate HR then uses the blunt instrument of money to rewards people.

Evolution has taught us that variation is key to long-term survival yet we have (mostly) one economic model throughout the world. We need to try different systems and let the best elements of the best ones combine to make the next set of models; and so on.

There is probably not a single one-size-fits-all solution to sustainability. Mongolian nomads already have a sustainable lifestyle but most people would reject that option. Suburban America is the least sustainable and will require the most effort to fix.

Faith in either a technical or spiritual miracle is preventing us from addressing the problem seriously. A more likely solution is something like a pandemic that kills most of the population and takes out most of our production.

One reason that sustainability is not taken seriously is that we have been divorced from the planet that sustains us. Most people have no idea how water gets to our taps, how food gets to our table or how the lights are kept on. We consume easily with no vision of the consequences.

While not as big an issue as sustainability, public mood on drink-driving and smoking has changed in recent years helped to some extent by legislation. The Government could take some easy steps to nudge us in the right direction, such as an immediate ban on plastic shopping bags and on bottled water.

If Governments will not step up to the mark do we need different forms of leadership, such as a benevolent dictator?

If nudge could help, what about other methods for understanding and changing attitudes, like Behavioural Economics and Gamification?

A worrying thought that I raised at the end was if America continues to consume that planet that we all need to share, will China let them get away with it?

Thinking about text and TVs

The latest Gurteen Knowledge Cafe was hosted by the British Computer Society (BCS) and was on "Imagining the knowledge technologies of the future".

The evening started in the familiar Gurteen way (if it works well, why change it?) with some unstructured networking time fuelled by soft drinks and biscuits before we moved into the large meeting room to find a friendly looking table to join.

The formal part of the evening started with three sessions of speed networking where we are forced to make contact with people we had not met before. For some reason each Knowledge Cafe attracts many first-time attendees so while there are many regulars (myself included) there are always plenty of new people to meet.

In my sessions I met Madeline (knowledge manager for a law firm), Laila (operations manager for a small systems integration company) and Ian (a young geek).

The session on future technologies was introduced by three BCS members Alan Pollard (President), Conrad Taylor (Gurteen regular) and Chris Yapp.

They gave some examples of how knowledge technologies have changed over the years and also some examples of things that have been predicted but not yet happened (e.g. ubiquitous speech recognition and effective virtual collaboration) before leaving us to take the topic in any direction that we wanted on our individual tables of 5-6 people.

After 20 minutes or so there was a break and some people moved tables. This happened again after another 20 minutes so that we each had three sessions on the topic with different people, thus allowing us to get different perspectives on the same subject.

The final session brought us all back into one group and anybody who wanted to share something from their discussions with everybody could do so. It is not necessary to speak in this session and most people are happy just to take away their own thoughts on what they have learnt.

To show the range of the conversations that had been had I'll give an example of somebody else's thoughts before adding my own. One table came up with the concept of a virtual angel that can be summoned to help you with all sorts of life issues, including love. This concept was slightly ruined for me because I had recently watched Disclosure (for the umpteenth time) in which Michael Douglas goes into a virtual environment where the help function is manifested as a rather dubious looking angel.

My thoughts were, unusually for me, rather technical and covered text and television.

My first table started talking about Human-Computer Interaction (somebody else had just watched Total Recall) and it soon became clear that text is still the major way that we share information and is likely to remain so for some time but the technology to support it is old and no longer fit for purpose. We all know that the qwerty keyboard was designed to slow typists down yet we all still use them.

Resistance to change is clearly an issue here as some better text technologies have been developed but have not been widely adopted. I recall a one-handed keyboard with just five buttons winning an award on Tomorrow's World because of it's speed and simplicity. There are also ways to write faster, e.g. Pitman Shorthand. Predictive text is common on mobile phones but has yet to make the transition to PCs (though the ZX Spectrum is a good example of what can be done albeit with a limited vocabulary).

Good speech-to-text and text-to-speech would also improve the way that we create and consume text, Audio input also has the advantage that the play speed can be varied to allow quick listening of simple text.

There is also a case for looking at the English language itself to see if significant improvements can be made in the time that it takes to write correctly, including correction times. Revisiting some archaic spellings could be part of this as could a wider and more formal adoption of l33t; we may not always approve of shorthands like "m8" and "OMG" but they are faster to write!

One of the tables that I joined and started to develop a 2x2 matrix of social and technical capabilities and were looking at the issues that face the group with low skills in both areas. It occurred to me that the television is best placed to help here as it is ubiquitous and easily understood.

Previous convergence attempts had been to marry the PC and the TV, normally by doing little more than using the TV screen as a PC monitor. There is a problem with this approach in that you are bringing the complex PC world to the PC and having a dual use screen does not make this any easier for the non technical user. I think that a better approach is to bring the simpler technologies found on mobile phones to the TV - think of the TV screen as a large screen for the mobile and the mobile as a remote control for the TV. In this world the interactive user would be using applications specifically tailored for the TV rather than going through the generic PC environments of Windows and a browser. Imagine the Apple Apps Store delivered through your TV!

The excited conversations continued over the excellent buffet and wine provided by the BCS and then over the Timothy Taylor's Landlord provided by the Coal Hole nearby.

It was yet another truly excellent Gurteen Knowledge Cafe and I really do not know what I would do for personal learning if I did not go to these. Thanks again David!

Human will and human won’t

The latest Gurteen Knowledge Cafe was hosted by HM Treasury, was facilitated by Kate Hopkinson and addressed the subject of Human will and human won't, i.e. the reasons why change can be difficult.

We got to see little of HM Treasury at 1 Horseguards Parade as the meeting room was close to the entrance but it is impressive from the outside and there were a couple of quick glimpses of a courtyard and an atrium.

I'm pleased to say that there was not too much evidence of our money being wasted on furnishing and fittings.

The session topic was based on the work Kate Hopkinson does at Inner Skills with a model she calls Landscape of The Mind.

This shows how actions and behaviours are driven by our individual inner skills that can be categorized into six sections (essentially a 2x3 matrix) which she draws like a map of the Earth, hence the use of the term "Landscape".

Without going into too much of the detail, what the Landscape of The Mind shows is that different people have different comfort zones so in trying to implement a business change we need to be aware that we are sometimes introducing discomfort and that we need to manage it.

Unfortunately the facilitator took rather longer than usual in introducing the topic and that rather limited the discussion that we could have in the Cafe. However, quite a few of us made the short walk to St Stephen's Tavern and were able to continue the discussion.




As usual, I made a few notes of learnings and ideas to explore further, including:

• You need to engage with people that reflects the way they work rather than the way that you do.
• This means using a mix of messages and media to engage with a diverse group of people.
• We adjust our style without thinking as we move between people and groups that we know but when engaging with new people and groups we have to start with a flexible and neutral stance and then adapt to the norm - and they will be reacting to us too.
• Motivating people (carrots) to change is an inexact science as you need to understand what really motivates them and how they ill adapt to the new rules.
• Similarly for punishment (sticks), this only works if people understand why they are being punished and can accept the reason for this, otherwise you just built resentment.
• Give people time to play with the new rules so that they can adapt at their pace and in their way.
• Is there a meta-model here that includes Belbin, Myers-Briggs, right/left brain, etc.?

I think that what I posted on Twitter when I got home is a good summary of the event (that's the power of the 140 character limit), "The Gurteen Knowledge Cafe was OK and the talk in the pub afterwards was excellent, so it was another superb evening overall :-)".

Conversations about conversations

I've talked previously about the preparation that I did for the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe on Conversations, and on the process that we went through on the evening, now it's time to address the subject matter itself.

But first, here's another one of David Gurteen's photos from the event so that you can see me in action. Until I saw this picture I did not know that I did that with my hands!

What follows is a fairly random set of comments that I made during the evening or which have occurred to me since as a result of further deliberations.

Our group was tasked with looking at the definition of conversation and while we looked effectively we failed to agree. The majority view was that a "conversation" had to be balanced, i.e. a dialogue between equals, but some felt that it could be any dialogue including some extreme cases like interrogation. I remained neutral as I am not sure that we really need a definition.

We also looked a little at conversational skills, e.g. listening and open questioning, but without any surprising ideas. What struck me was whether we could define a conversation as anything that uses conversational skills, much as a song could be defined as anything that is sung.

Our conversation certainly made me think if there were tools that I could use better to recover failing conversations or to make OK ones sparkle. Things that I need to look at include, humour, sentence length and structure, body language. Alternatively, could a failed conversation not be the fault of the conversation but a symptom of something else?

The concept of conversational disease prompted some interesting thoughts and example, such as a politician being interviewed who deliberately does not answer the questions put. This may kill the conversation from the point of view of the interviewer and, probably, the audience, but the politician sees this as a valid response and the conversation is a success from his/her viewpoint. This also returns us to the original question of whether this is a conversation in the generally accepted term or is it better described as an interview where the rules and objectives are different.

Web2.0 conversations do exist and they have different rules and behaviours. The plus side is that in many cases you can lurk in a conversation to learn the rules before joining in. This is much harder in real life, though Alison did give this an honourable try in the pub later!

Trust was mentioned a lot but I remain unconvinced. I have had lots of good conversations with people that I would not lend £10 to.

Are conversations just a means to an end or does the chitter-chatter have its own value? Can we live without conversation? Is there a basic need here that helps to explain the amazing success of Twitter?

Is it possible to judge the success, or quality, of a conversation if the end point is undefined and can change throughout the conversation? Something unexpected is needed to lift a conversation from the good to the exceptional, and you cannot plan for the unexpected but you can be prepared to respond to it.

I am paid to have, or enable, conversations. These are mostly held by phone and email.

All this is just a sample of the thinking prompted by the excellent Knowledge Cafe. Thanks Ray and David!

Gurteen Knowledge Cafe on conversations

It has taken me rather longer than I hoped to write something about the recent Gurteen Knowledge Cafe on conversations so I am making it easier for myself by doing it in two parts - process and content; this is the process.

David Gurteen opened the show and then retired in to the background to take lots of photos of the event. I've taken the liberty of using some of them here but it is worth looking at the full set to get a proper feel for what the events are like.

Ray Shaw was the facilitator for the evening on his chosen subject of conversations.

Here we see Ray explaining the structure we would use for the sessions.

It was a slightly different process from normal, and David even billed it as a "Cafe Ray", but the similarities were greater than the differences.

The main difference was that instead of everybody discussing one topic we were offered four different aspects of conversations to consider.

In the initial session Ray addressed us all as a group, and it was quite a large group of seventy or so showing the keen interest in the subject.

The four broad topic areas were 1) defining conversations, 2) web2.0 conversations, 3) brilliant conversations and 4) business conversations.

Having four topics to cover gave Ray the excuse to talk for longer than usual for these events and he did this with enthusiasm, energy and insight.

Just to prove I was there and paying attention you can see me on the right of this picture.

Once the topics had been introduced we all chose the one that we wanted to discuss and split in to smaller groups with two groups per topics to keep the sessions manageable.

The small group sessions are a key part of these evenings and are where I get a lot of the value from going to the Knowledge Cafes.

Obviously the direction the discussion takes depends on who is in each group and the the unplanned mix adds to the fun and the learning.

This learning is expanded and reinforced in the last two sessions of the evening, the whole group session, where individuals offer up their key learnings and, finally, at the debrief afterwards in the pub where the previous sessions provide the foundation for conversations that take off in all directions.

I hope I have given some idea here of why the Knowledge Cafes work and why I make every effort to attend each one. Later I'll try and explain some of the things that I learnt about conversations at the last one.

Good conversations on KM

Despite having worked for thirty years, I am still keen to develop my skills and knowledge and with limited opportunities within companies, where training is typically aimed at more junior roles, I tend to rely on events like the Gurteen Knowledge Cafes.

Not only are these events educational, they are also a lot of fun!

The most recent Knowledge Cafe was hosted by Deloitte in the city and three of their consultants led the discussion on the highly relevant topic of How do I know if my KM programme is effective? But that's jumping ahead a little and I should start at the beginning.

These events always start with half an hour of socialising which could also be mistaken for networking. Deloitte provided some very welcome soft drinks and nibbles which always helps people to mingle as they have to move around the room to get their refreshments. As usual I said a quick "hello" to some of the other regular cafe goers and a slower one to some new people.

After the informal socialising came the structured socialising with the usual session of "speed networking". Here you have to find somebody you do not know and have a two minute conversation with them. When the whistle blows you move on to find another new person.

It so happened that I had three conversations with Deloitte people who were there to support their own event in numbers. Which was very interesting for me as their knowledge management needs are very similar to Logica's.

The discussion was fed by three Deloitte consultants who described how each of them sought to measure the success of their KM work. In each case there were some sensible sounding suggestions made but these were then caveatted by a list of issues.

The seeds having been planted we split into groups of six (there were about sixty of us there) to discuss the subject in more detail for around fifteen minutes. Then we moved tables (randomly) to continue the conversations with different people. We changed tables twice to give us three sets of conversations.

The table changing may seem like bit of a gimmick but it works well as each table will head off in a specific direction depending on the interests and personalities of the people involved and when the shuffling happens it is always interesting to see how the previous conversations have developed and to try and build on them to start new ones.

The Cafe ends with a whole-group session. Again this sounds wrong but works. It gives people the opportunity to share a key learning point or insight that they have gained, whether or not that view had been the consensus of their table, the comments made at this stage have all emerged from earlier debate and are richer for this, and those people that do feel daunted by speaking to a large group have still had the opportunity to participate fully in the earlier conversations.

These are the main points that I made during this wrap-up session:

• To measure the success of what you are doing you must first know where you are.
• There are often many initiatives trying to address the same issue so it may be impossible to pin the credit on any one intervention.
• The temptation can be to measure what can be measured, e.g. the number of hits on a web site, rather than the outcome that you are trying to achieve, e.g. winning more business.
• Stories (case studies) may be the best way to sell a KM program but initially you do not have any of your own stories and so you need to adapt other people's, which may not always be a valid interpretation.
• One approach is to review knowledge gaps at the end of a process (did we have, or could we find, the information we needed for this bid?) and then look to fill these gaps.
• At some point somebody will force you to invent hard targets, e.g. to make a business case or to set personal objectives.
• Some of the benefits will be indirect, e.g. lower staff turnover as staff are happier at work having the knowledge they need to hand.

The session ended with no firm conclusions reached but with everybody happy that they now understood the issue better and had enjoyed the conversations that got them there.

Conversations continue in the pub next door where new angles were explored on the topic and brand new topics were opened, relationships were widened and deepened, business cards were exchanged and promises made to meet at the next event in January. It's in my diary.

What will be the impact of Social Tools on KM?

This was the topic of the latest Gurteen Knowledge Cafe and, like all the others I have been to, it was an interesting and provocative night out.

For a change, David led the session himself, rather than facilitating a session for a guest speaker and it was probably because of this that he forgot to do the "speed networking" session that normally opens the show and we had to remind him to do this after his presentation instead.

The presentation was just a way of introducing the talking point and so it was short but still fairly broad in scope. It was based on a talk that David has been giving in various forms recently, e.g. at Online Information 2007. This explained how KM started with two opposing perspectives, technology led and people led, and that Wed 2.0 had become a disruptive change. Hence the question, what will be the impact of Social Tools on KM?

Following the usual Knowledge Cafe format, we then discussed the topic in our tables and, as is also part of the Cafe tradition, the conversation wandered off in all sorts of directions that may, or may not, have been related to the topic in hand. Table discussions like these enable everybody to contribute to the debate and is one of the main reasons why the Cafe format works.

After half an hour or so it opened up to a whole room discussion where points that were discussed earlier were shared and built on. David stopped the session around 8:15, probably something to do with getting a train home, and we die-hards went down the pub to carry on talking. So, a good night was had by all.

And as for the question, well there was no real answer, nor was one expected, but there seemed to be a consensus that social tools are useful and are here to stay but whether KM has any role in this or will survive as a discipline (if it is one) is much less certain.

Video killed the radio star

This blog's title was prompted by the support act to the Yardbirds at the Boom Boom Club, minuscule hey, who played a rather weird set that included this Buggles classic (I bought the single at the time). However, the blog is actually about the latest Gurteen Knowledge Cafe that I went to last night on the subject of the impact of video.

The two speakers made a compelling case for the role of video, particularly in getting groups who would not normally meet (or want to meet) to start to understand each other better. The case study was given of ethnic minorities in France (who felt let down by the establishment) and major employers (who associated ethnic minorities with rioting and crime). Using videos that we created in each side's comfort zone enabled prejudices to be broken and paved the way for real meetings that led to some of the ethnic minorities getting good jobs with the major employers.

The table discussions that followed took the video theme in many directions (as usually happens at Knowledge Cafes, which is why they are so good) and inspired me to look more seriously at video as a means of communicating all sorts of messages.

Most consultants point to the YouTube video on what web2.0 is all about at this point (and it is good) but here's a recent one of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band instead.

What a good evening that was!

On Thursday I went to the fifth Gurteen Knowledge BBQ which proved to be an excellent event that combined several of my interests, hence the multiple tags on this post!

It was a Knowledge Cafe so all the people there had an interest in KM and this meant that we all had plenty to talk about.

We started with a guided tour of the former Navy College in Greenwhich that was both informative and entertaining; did you know that there used to be a nuclear power plant there?

The site has some wonderful buildings by some famous architects, including Inigo Jones and Wren. The riverside location had great views of Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome (as I still think of it).

There was even a photograph by Spencer Tunic,that was taken locally, in the Admiral Hardy pub where we started the evening.

Knowledge Management (KM)

Knowledge Management (KM) has been an interest of mine since work at IBM around ten years ago alongside the KM practice and it just struck me immediately as being "right"; though what KM actually is is a difficult thing to pin down. For me it's about getting the right information to the right people at the right time and this can be done directly (e.g. by making the information easily available over an intranet or internet) or indirectly (e.g. by providing the time and space for people to interact so that they can share their knowledge).

Taking this definition of KM means that it covers a wide range of topics covering all aspects of technology and sociology. Initially KM was technology led (largely thanks to the IT suppliers) and focused on things like intranets, search engines, directories of skills and interests, etc. This approach proved to be of limited value except in a few simple cases (e.g. electronic libraries of case law) and the more recently the focus has moved towards the people end of things which is more challenging, more effective and more interesting.

My involvement in KM these days mostly involves going to events like the Gurteen KM Cafes and the TFPL Bath Club. Both of these events are always stimulating and provide interesting new insights. And the company of my fellow KMers is a treat too.