Reflections on the Knowledge Cafe
October 24, 2008Last week I had the priveledge of meeting David Gurteen. He was kind enough to spend some time walking a group of us through the Knowledge Café process.
I was interested to hear the story about how David came up with the concept. As he tells it: He was attending or running (I can’t recall exactly which) meetings with students at a University in the usual ‘chalk and talk’ manner. He wondered why most of the important and interesting conversations happened at the pub afterwards. He thought,”How can I harness that type of energy in the meetings?”. The Knowledge Café is the result.
I can’t help compare this story to that of Harrison Owen’s story about how he came up with the idea of running a conference, using what is now known as Open Space Technology.
Some years ago, Harrison had spent a long time planning a conference in great detail. He came to the realisation during the conference that participants found the ‘best’ part to be the coffee breaks. Dismayed, but also intrigued he wondered: “How can I plan a conference where the coffee break — or the type of conversations and interactions that happen during them — becomes the key element of the conference? Open Space is the result.
Strange that they both seem to revolve around drinking don’t you think? Well, it’s not really all that strange when you think about it. Actually, it seems quite natural — humans are, after all, social creatures.
And that is why techniques such as these are so important. They are conversational, inclusive, and largely unstructured. They promote dialogue over debate and harness the energy and passion of the participants for the topic. Above all — they’re usually a lot of fun!
The role of facilitator and knowledge management
October 7, 2008Despite having worked in the field, I’ve never strongly identified with the discipline of Knowledge Management. Like many others I suspect, I find it’s a little amorphous. There are a broad range of thoughts on Knowledge Management, but there is no unanimous definition.
Interestingly, it’s listed under ‘Computer sciences’ in Wikipedia’s List of Academic Disciplines. That categorisation takes a very techno-centric view. I’ve tended to see it more as a interdisciplinary field, which as a generalist, is why I am drawn to it. But Dave Pollard recently wrote a couple of blog posts that have got me re-thinking—or at the very least clarifying—my position.
In KM2.0, Dave seems to take an ecological-centric view of KM, which sees the interaction of people, identity, knowledge and environmental factors as a complex adaptive system. I feel more closely aligned to this perspective, and with the types of initiatives he proposes:
… the seven most important initiatives of KM 2.0 are context-building, connection-building, and personal productivity initiatives — facilitating better, more informed conversations with the right people.
I also identify with, strive to become and hope to be part of what Dave elloquently identifies as the role of the facilitator in all of this:
… this network of practitioners is global, powerfully connected, and driven to be of use, to make a difference, to make the world a better place. These people are not in any sense like the old style of facilitation consultants, who took instruction from senior executives with a predetermined agenda and pushed participants to deliver on it. Even worse, these old-style arrogant consultants sometimes introduced their own ‘expert’ point of view into the discussion (usually to the detriment of all).
By contrast, practitioners of this new set of facilitation or ‘hosting’ techniques aspire to nothing more or less than to enable more effective conversations leading to peer-consensual decisions and self-selected follow-up actions.
