I thought it would be
best to pen down my experience and insights from David Gurteen’s session
on Knowledge Café (K-Café) at the Pune K-Community Meeting that I attended last
week at the ‘Mindtree
Consulting’. David Gurteen is an independent Knowledge Management
consultant, speaker and facilitator.
In the current scenario,
life has become so fast and stressful for us that we hardly get time to discuss
things, communicate, sit for a moment and come down to conclusions. It is
undoubtedly true that there has been rapid advancement in technology, in the way
we do things, but have you thought any time the enormous problems created by
these advancements?
Globally, companies are
still struggling to effectively manage and harness organization knowledge
despite of having Knowledge sharing portals and platforms. In 90% cases,
unstructured information remains un-managed while companies spend around a lot
of time in searching, reading, relating and comprehending the information and
data. Most of the times opportunity is lost due to poor management of information
Very often, there is
duplication of effort as employees are unaware of work done by others and
companies fail to capture, catalog and reuse the tacit knowledge. It’s been
observed that only smart companies turn knowledge into action and the most
effective knowledge management tool in the current scenario is ‘Conversation’
A K-Café is all about the making people
connect, communicate, share and collaborate. The meeting is conducted in such a
way that most of the time is spent in conversation and it is not about one
person presenting to the group.
It may sound funny but
it is the fact that most of the good discussions happen over a coffee or at a
pub (post the presentation/seminar). And why this happens? When they are there,
they are free to talk, discuss anything and everything, words flow from the
heart, no one is watching them or judging them, nor do they have a any set
agenda to follow.
A Knowledge Café(K-Café) aims to provide an
open and creative conversation on a topic of mutual interest to surface their
collective knowledge, share ideas and insights, and gain a deeper understanding
of the subject and the issues involved. K-Café begins with the participants
seated in a circle of chairs. It is led by a facilitator,
who explains the purpose of knowledge cafés and the role of conversation in the
business perspectives. The facilitator further introduces the café topic and
poses a couple of key open-ended questions. For example, if the topic is
knowledge sharing, the question for the group might be: "What are the barriers
to knowledge sharing in an organization, and how do you overcome them?"
When the introduction
session is complete, the group breaks into small groups and each group
discusses the questions for about 45 minutes. Once that’s done, the facilitator
leads the group through the final 45 minute session, in which people reflect on
the small group discussions and share any thoughts, insights and ideas on the
topic that may have emerged. This ultimately, leads to action in the form of
better decision making and innovation.
The most amazing part of
K-Café is that absolutely ‘no attempt’ made to capture the conversation as it
is believed that doing so would destroy the conversation. The value of the
K-Café is in the conversation itself and the learning that each individual
takes away.
Very often we are so
much technology driven that we fail to address the core need of the situation.
All we do is run behind knowledge/ information capture but we never realize
that we are missing big time on the tacit knowledge that lies within each
individual. And in the mist of all this we fail to engage audience and
destroy value!
Knowledge Management is
all about ideas, insights, opinions and experiences. It is nothing but the way
each one of us thinks and feels. It is not about managing knowledge portals
or maintaining documents. It is much more than that . It is all about
people, teams, communities, groups and networks and how they learn from each
other.
A shared
learning approach is a must if we are looking at
collaboration. So let’s move from thinking that ‘knowledge is power’ to
understanding that ‘sharing knowledge is more powerful’.
