Knowledge Cafe Masterclass, Johannesburg, November 2008

1. Gurteen Knowledge Café Masterclass Johannesburg South Africa November 2008

2. The birth of the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe London, September 2002

5. Introductions

9. My Style

11. Business is a Conversation

15. Conversation “A mechanistic and unproductive exchange between people seeking to defend their own views against one another” “A frank exchange of ideas or views on a specific issue in an effort to attain mutual understanding” Debate or dialogue?

18. Dialogue Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture. David Bohm, Physicist

20. Conversation/Questions

21. Gurteen Knowledge Café Process

41. Conversation/Questions

42. Lets run a Knowledge Cafe

43. Photographs

47. The Challenge of Knowledge Sharing What prevents us from sharing our knowledge more effectively? How might we overcome these barriers?

48. Business is a conversation Here's a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, 'knowledge worker'. A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work. David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto

49. Business is a conversation The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: they're unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they're interested in. David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto

50. Business is a conversation The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don't have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the organization chart at least for a little while. David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto

51. Business is a conversation If you think about the aim of Knowledge Management as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that's not what Knowledge Management is really about, then you ought not to be doing it anyway. David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto

52. Café Conversation So just how important is open conversation in business?

53. Lunch

54. Chicken chicken

55. Tips and techniques

62. The tables

73. Conversation/Questions

74. Applications of the Café

75. ISN Knowledge Café The knowledge café has led to a dramatic improvement in terms of inter-team dialog, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Many internal work processes are now being overhauled for the better as a result of these knowledge cafes and we have seen an explosion of new ideas and initiatives on the part of staff at all levels of the organization. Simply put, the knowledge cafe format has empowered all our staff to speak up and take the initiative in ensuring the successful development of the ISN. Chris Pallaris, Chief Editor ISN, Zurich

81. Other Conversational Tools

88. Thank you!

89. www.gurteen.com David Gurteen Gurteen Knowledge Tel: +44 1252 812 878 Email: david.gurteen@gurteen.com