conversation matters

Creating a Culture in Which Teams and Workgroups Can Engage in Collective Sensemaking

For teams or workgroups to be effective and competitive they must, 1) understand their customers’ requirements and the frequent changes to those requirements, 2) take action
and be fully cognizant of the consequences of those actions, both intended and unintended, 3) detect changes both in the internal and external environment, and 4) develop their collective understanding of the complexities these many factors create.

(In the rest of this paper I will use the term “team”, to refer to both workgroups and teams.)

To accomplish those tasks team members need to engage in a number of learning behaviors, for example, seeking feedback from each other, customers, and other parts of the
organization; sharing information with each other; asking each other for help; talking about errors or problems; challenging the interpretation of others, experimenting to gain insight; and reflecting together.

However, many of those learning behaviors are perceived by team members as risky. For example, members may fear that admitting an error will make them appear incompetent to others, likewise, asking for help. They may be concerned that if people in positions of power notice such actions it could reduce their chances for promotion or job assignments. Individuals who offer opinions that differ from the rest of the team risk being seen as “not a team player” or worse, as being obstructive. At a minimum the individual risks damaging his or her own self-image. Teams may choose not to risk conducting experiments that would gain them insight or trying out new processes that could potentially improve their performance, fearing that they would be blamed for failures. Argyris (1982) has shown that when team members perceive the possibility of embarrassment or threat, they act in ways that inhibit the team from learning; in short they remain silent or resort to meaningless generalities rather than risk negative consequences.

To overcome the reluctance to speak up, team members need to feel “psychologically safe,” a term Amy Edmondson (1999) applies when team members have a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish members for speaking up. Psychological safety is a shared belief, held at the team level, that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. For the most part, this belief is tacit, that is, “taken for granted and not given direct attention by either individuals or by the team as a whole.”

Psychological safety is, however, not the same as group cohesiveness, which, as Janis’ (1982) research has shown, can reduce the willingness to disagree with others’ views – the phenomenon labeled “groupthink.” Nor is psychological safety a matter of team members getting along well together or having no conflict. In fact, psychological safety makes it possible for conflicts to be openly raised and discussed. Edmondson notes that psychological safety is the “presence of a blend of trust, respect for each other's competence, and caring about each other as people.”

If as Edmondson, Argyris, Janis, and others point out, talking about the need for members to trust each other or the leader will not engender psychological safety, how then can psychological safety be achieved in a team?

Edmondson Study
Edmondson conducted a study in 2002 that provides hope that psychological safety can be achieved without lengthy training, special facilitation, or a large-scale change effort. The study was conducted within a large organization where Edmondson held extensive interviews and observations with twelve teams, who were spread across a variety of team types and varying levels. Remarkably, Edmondson found that within the same organization some teams were able to engage in learning behaviors while other teams were not. The findings from this in-depth study indicate that:
• The learning process itself occurs at the team level and is focused on a bounded task(s) or opportunity (e.g. development of a product, strategic planning, delivery of service) and occurs through reflective conversations within the group.
• Culture is localized. It is not the culture of the organization that encourages or discourages the learning behaviors needed for effective reflection on complex issues, it is the culture developed within each specific team.
• “When the group’s belief is that the team is not psychologically safe, individual team members are unwilling to actively and honestly contribute their ideas, evaluations, or suggestions. As a result groups are less able to make sound decisions and implement timely decisions in response to changes in the environment.” (Edmondson 2002)
• Team leadership impacts whether a team is able to develop a sense of psychological safety. In the study, teams that reflected effectively and implemented resulting changes had minimal power differences. The leaders of those teams encouraged input and debate. Where power differences between leader and members were high, little learning occurred.
• Teams at the highest level were as likely to be impacted by power differentials as were frontline teams and were therefore unable to seek feedback from each other, customers, or other parts of the organization; share information among themselves; ask each other for help; talk about errors or problems; challenge each other; experiment to gain insight; or reflect together.

Implications of Edmondson’s Study for Collective Sensemaking
A very hopeful implication of Edmondson’s study is that it is possible to create a culture that supports collective sensemaking within a team or unit, even if other parts of the same organization do not have a compatible culture. This means that it is not necessary to wait on top management support in order for change to occur locally. Nor is it necessary for the whole organization to change in order for any one team to make use of effective learning behaviors.

Another positive implication is that it does not take special skills or facilitation to engage a team in collective sensemaking. The successful teams in this study had no special training or help, yet were able to develop psychological safety within the team.

Power Differential
The study found that the manager/leader role was markedly different in those teams that had less power differential between manager and team members. Thus to develop a culture that supports collective sensemaking may require a role shift for managers from the more traditional “boss” role to one that is coach and convener. Edmondson reports on an interview held with a design consultant who worked with many different teams across the organization. The consultant contrasted the leadership of “Beanstalk,” a team that reflected effectively together and was able to implement resulting changes, with “Radar,” a team that did not reflect together and was unable to make needed changes or course correction. The consultant explains, “’[For Beanstalk] I pick up the phone and call anyone…but for Radar, I have to go through Jan.’ In Beanstalk, any of the members spoke for the team. In Radar, Jan held onto the role of spokesperson. In team meetings, Jan was a ‘boss’ who took on the role of making final decisions. In Beanstalk, Martha was a facilitator who encouraged input and consensus.”

Meeting to Make Sense
Collective sensemaking is the very human action of jointly creating meaning out of the incredible amount of data and input that continuously surrounds an organizational unit or team. Collective sensemaking is a creative act, rather than an act of discovering or uncovering what is already there. The meaning created through collective sensemaking does not exist before the conversation that creates it. In conversation the meaning that is created is continually revised as new data and new patterns in the data emerge.

Teams cannot learn unless they take the time to bring the whole team together to collectively make sense of what is happening. A leader, who prefers to talk with team members one at a time, can not produce this level of learning. Nor does bringing a team together to hear announcements or presentations produce understanding of complex situations. For learning to occur meetings need to be convened in a conversational format where team members address their comments and questions to other team members rather than focusing primarily on the leader.

Learning occurs when team members take action and then meet together to reflect on the intended and unintended consequence of that action. It requires the multiple perspectives of all the team members, each of whom has experienced the consequences in a different way and each of whom interprets the meaning of those consequences differently, in order to provide the rich medium needed for the team to make sense of what happened and what needs to happen next. Weick (1995) notes that “the understanding that results from sensemaking is not a definitive answer, rather it is a configuration that is adequate for the organization to plan and take its next action.”

The Quality of the Conversation
Edmondson’s study indicates that taking the time to reflect together was necessary but not sufficient for members to engage in the risky behavior necessary for learning to occur. Some teams in the study took the time to discuss issues but the discussion was of such a low quality that neither new understanding nor action resulted. As an example, the task of a high level team, labeled “Strategy,” was to create a new business strategy for the organization. Although the team met frequently and held lengthy conversations, during the six months of the study, no plan was developed. Edmondson provides this example of “Strategy’s” dialogue in which, George, a senior manufacturing executive, responds to an earlier metaphor about directing the “ship” of the company by turning the rudder.

George: Listening to Bob talk about the ship, I’d like to explore the difference between the metaphor of the ship and how the rudder gets turned and when, in contrast to a flotilla, where there’s lots of little rudders and we’re trying to orchestrate the flotilla. I think this contrast is important. At one level, we talk about this ship and all the complexities of trying to determine not only its direction but how to operationalize the ship in total to get to a certain place, vs. allowing a certain degree of freedom that the flotilla analogy evokes.

CEO interrupting: There’s a question of doing what you want to do and doing it how you want to do it. But you can’t have people just going off and doing what they want to do. You know, some of them may be playing baseball all day long. But, we have to have some alignment with the corporate directives.”

Reading this dialogue, we can assume that the CEO believes George is advocating an absurd amount of that freedom, yet neither says what he means nor offers concrete suggestions. By speaking abstractly both protect themselves from criticism, and in so doing prevent the group from reaching an understanding that would allow them to move forward. Although this group meets, and even has a spirited dialogue, members do not feel safe enough to say what they mean nor to challenge each other openly. As a result no new knowledge or action is created.

Psychological Safety as a Product of Experience
The power differential is not the only factor that impacts psychological safety. Psychological safety is also a result of the interaction experience members have in the group, both with each other and with the leader. Psychological safety begins to grow when a member of a group admits an error or challenges another and then experiences the response of other team members as curiosity rather than blame. Other team members, witnessing a non-blaming interaction are more likely, perhaps at a later time, to offer an idea of their own. When enough safe interactions have occurred, the group as a whole begins to feel the environment is safe. Edmondson gives an example of a dialogue in Beanstalk that represents how conversation might function when psychological safety exists.

After one member, Angela, described, ‘printer problems with those labels’ and asked, ‘Who can we ask for help?’ another member, Rob, responded, ‘How about asking the vendors who make the labels? They probably know how to fix it.’ And Ken offered to make a phone call – closing the loop. Rob also reported on his use of new, trial equipment for conducting these tests, ‘I used the “color analyzer” [he paused} I know it’s not the right word' and looked to Ken for help. Ken responded supportively, ‘photospectrometer.’ Rob continued, ‘It’s worth the $12,000 because we will save $25,000.’ Ken agreed with Rob’s assessment and promised to follow through on acquiring the machine.

As this dialogue illustrates, although a courageous team member is needed to initiate the dialogue, it is the way others respond that is significant in creating psychological safety.

Silence and Support
The silence of other team members is as discouraging to a member who raises a different opinion or challenge, as is a blaming response. Other team members may agree with a person that speaks up, and after the meeting may even tell the challenger that what he said was right. But the fact that the listener does not chance agreeing during the meeting reinforces the belief that speaking up is too risky.

However, an interesting phenomena identified by Ashe (1952) is that if, during the meeting, even one other person on the team responds in a supportive manner, the member who raised the issue is encouraged to speak up again. Thus team members themselves can begin to alter the culture of a group by supporting each other in meeting settings.

Conversations That Build Relationships
A more deliberate technique to begin to change the culture of the group is structured socialization – time set aside during a meeting for small groups to talk about issues that allow them to learn about each other’s competence and allow them to establish relationships at a deeper level. The issues for discussion should be work related, but also topics that provide the opportunity for each person to disclose values and beliefs. For example:
• “What gives meaning to your work?”
• “Tell a story about the best team you’ve ever been a part of.”
• “Talk about a highlight experience you’ve had in working for this company, a time when you felt you made a real contribution.”

These appreciative topics are best discussed in groups of two or three that are small enough for the listeners to express their positive reception to what is being said. That expression might be verbal, a nod, or a smile - any of which indicates to the speaker that what he is saying is accepted. As mentioned earlier, Edmondson found that psychological trust is the “presence of a blend of trust, respect for each other's competence, and caring about each other as people.” Respect for competence to some extent grows out of daily interaction while working on a project or task, but structured socialization can provide the opportunity to learn about past projects and successes, extending that knowledge in ways that may not occur in daily exchanges. Likewise to build “caring about each other as people” there must be opportunities for team members to reveal aspects of self that are not part of normal workplace discourse and to reveal it in a way that listeners recognize themselves in the telling.

Shared Experience
A final suggestion comes from the work of Karl Weick (1995) who acknowledges that many theorists see shared meaning as a way to produce effective teams. However, Weick suggests that it may not be possible for team members to create shared meaning since any meaning an individual creates is a product of their past experiences, which is necessarily unique to each. He explains, “…so if people share anything, what they share are actions, activities, moments of conversations, and joint tasks, each of which they then make sense of using categories that are more idiosyncratic. ....if people want to share meaning, then they need to talk about their shared experience in close proximity to its occurrence and hammer out a common way to encode it and talk about it.” Some shared experiences naturally occur because of the joint work teams engage in, (for example, "that difficult client we worked for" or "the well we drilled in the North Sea"). He notes that “in those situations the critical element is time to process (reflect) what we learned from the experience. Not everyone will learn the same thing from the same experience but that is not critical, what is critical is that they are able to reference the same event that others recognize. The question always is ‘What does it mean?’”

In situations where the work itself does not provide shared experience it is helpful to design events. An example of a designed shared experience comes from Kaiser Foundation Health plan (KFHP) and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (KFH). The health care system practices a form of Process Improvement that requires employees from a unit, for example the emergency room, to work together as a team. Alide Chase, Senior Vice President of Quality and Service, explains the joint experience each team has before beginning their Process Improvement training.

Before each new team begins their PI training, they engage in Borrow Forward. A team of 4-5 persons from, for example the neonatal unit, makes a visit to a neonatal unit in another location that has already successfully implemented adaptive design. The visiting team goes in a state of inquiry. Each visiting team member shadows his/her counterpart for 2 to 3 days. Before leaving, the visiting team holds a meeting with those they shadowed to talk with them about the observations and insights they experienced. This is a reflective meeting in which both parties learn. The visiting team articulates their insights (see we learn when we talk) which helps them clarify what they learned for themselves and the host team gains new understanding of their own processes by seeing those processes from a different perspective.

After their return, the visiting team begins their PI training and implementation. They hold weekly meetings to reflect on the actions they have taken and the results achieved. Borrow Forward provides a shared experience from which they derive shared meaning, and provides a lens through which they are able to think about their work.

Summary
For a team to be effective and competitive it must be engaged in learning behaviors that are too often perceived as risky by members of the team. To take that risk, team members need to feel psychologically safe, that is, “have a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish members for speaking up.” The actions that help to bring about collective sensemaking are:
• reducing the power differential between leaders and members
• teams taking the time to reflect together on a regular basis about their actions, results, concerns, and innovative new ideas
• members actively providing support for each other in meetings
• holding small group discussions about appreciative topics to build relationships and enhance the knowledge of others’ competence
• engaging in shared experiences that serve as a reference point for meaning.

References
Amy Edmonson, Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1999

Amy C. Edmondson, The local and Variegated Nature of Learning in Organizations: A Group-Level Perspective, Organization Science, March/April, 2002

Chris Argyris, Reasoning, Learning and Action: Individual and Organizational, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1982

Solomon Asch, Social Psychology, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952

Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes 2nd Ed, Cengage Learning, 1982

Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995

How Knowledge Workers Learn Judgment

In today’s world employees often must deal with tasks and problems that require much more that simply following a predetermined step by step procedure – the problems require the exercise of judgment. Judgment is needed when we are faced with thorny questions about which there are no right or wrong answers. When asked one of those thorny questions we often say, “Well, it’s a matter of judgment.” Soldiers, for example, face many situations in which one correct course in not clear, as in this example from one of the US Army on-line communities, PlatoonLeader.

“We were headed out to a pretty easy mission. My front truck reports that there’s a dead body under a car in the middle of the road. He was on the ground. He had been in his car and he had been shot. At that point, the gunner from my lead truck noticed a double-decker bus that had stopped. And there was a guy up on the top deck who appeared to have a blue video camera, and he was just hanging out the window video-taping us. Our rules of engagement permitted us to engage anybody video-taping an attack. I looked down my sight and noticed the same thing. The gunner looked through binos and noticed the same thing. He asked me, “Hey sir, can I go ahead and shoot him?”

In the above example the Platoon sergeant must figure out if the video-taping implies an ambush or if it is just some guy video taping a strange scene.

Weick provides an example in which a nurse in a neonatal unit must make two judgment calls.

“I took care of a 900-gram baby who was about 26 or 27 weeks many years ago who had been doing well for about two weeks. He had an open ductus that day. The difference between the way he looked at 9 a.m. and the way he looked at 11 a.m. was very dramatic. I was at that point really concerned about what was going to happen next. There are a lot of complications of the patent ductus, not just in itself, but the fact that it causes a lot of other things. I was really concerned that the baby was starting to show symptoms of all of them.”

You look at this kid because you know this kid, and you know what he looked like two hours ago. It is a dramatic difference to you, but it’s hard to describe that to someone in words. You go to the resident and say: “Look, I’m really worried about X, Y, Z,” and they go: “OK.” Then you wait one half hour to 40 minutes, then you go to the Fellow (the teaching physician supervising the resident) and say: “You know, I am really worried about X, Y, Z.” They say: “We’ll talk about it on rounds.”

The nurse faces two situations that require judgment, the first is to recognize that the baby is in trouble and the second is how to convey that information to a physician in a way will cause him to turn his attention to the infant.

Such situations occur more and more frequently, not only in the military and hospitals but in much of the work we think of as knowledge work, everything from an architect thinking about a design for a steeply sloping site, to an intelligence analyst determining whether the troop build up on a border signals a threat, to a manager faced with how to implement a change initiative.

In order to respond to these kinds of situations, employees need more than the skills they learn in training, more than what is provided in a manual of regulations, and even more than what can be picked up through reading the best practice of others. There is no way to anticipate all the possible situations a knowledge worker could face during their daily work, and therefore no way to provide sufficient procedures or directions. Rather knowledge workers need to continuously read the situation in front of them and then, based on that interpretation, determine the appropriate next action to take - in other words, to use their judgment.

In Talking About Machines, Julian Orr describes the lunch meetings that copy repair technicians hold to solve the difficult problems they face fixing copy machines. He notes that much of their talk is telling stories about the machines they have been working on. The stories serve to make sense of diagnoses confronting them, but also to reaffirm what it means to be a “competent” repair technician in terms of work habits, what clothing is worn to a client site, how a repair technician approaches a problem, how one works with colleagues and a host of other values and norms that turns a person into an effective repair technician.

In contrast to these informal lunch meetings, Orr describes the view of the corporation about how repair problems are solved, that is, that problems are solved by using the documentation issued to the repair technicians. “The diagnostic procedures prescribe a series of tests, with each action defined in considerable detail, and each branching condition presented as a simple Yes/No choice. Such documentation is based on the scientific management principle that if instructions are detailed and complete, the organization can hire cheaper employees, with less skill, who can do the job by following the instructions contained in the documentation. However, to the technicians the actual question to which they are asked to respond Yes or No is often extremely convoluted… The technicians are quite philosophical about the shortcomings of the documentation, saying that, ‘the machine is far too complex to anticipate correctly all of the possible failures.’ ... They view the documentation as a useful resource to consult when their own expertise cannot solve the machine’s problem.” But it is in the conversations where they learn to deal with the tricky problems that never show up in the documentation.

The corporate view, as reported by the copy repair technicians, is that knowledge and skill are a matter of individual competence, which is gained by attending training, reading journals, and/or listening to lectures. The underlying assumptions of that view are that, 1) there are individuals with expertise who can provide the knowledge required to be effective, through documents or lecture, and 2) that the required knowledge is relatively stable, it changes little over time.

As more and more of the workforce is populated by knowledge workers our premise about of how people develop the judgment to be effective is changing. The newer view holds that:
1. complex knowledge and skills are distributed across the practitioners who use that skill, with no one individual knowing all that the group knows, and
2. knowledge is continually changing as the group of practitioners learn from the act of practicing their craft. Ideas are not fixed and elements of thought are formed and reformed through experience. Knowledge then is not stable, but is ever changing.

The newer view takes into account the difference between “know what” and “know how.” For example, it is possible, to learn the “know what” of negotiation strategies by reading the books about negotiation. But books cannot make a person a skilled negotiator. To be an effective negotiator, requires “know how” or what I have earlier called judgment.

How then do people learn to make judgments? There are three elements involved in developing judgment:
• The most fundamental element is the individual taking action and observing the results – in other words experience. Experience is gained, not through one occurrence, but over enough occurrences that a pattern begins to emerge across all of the actions taken. This implies the liberty to experiment, to try new things and, of course, to fail. Edmondson calls this “intelligent failures at the frontier.” Judgment cannot be learned in the absence of failure because the breadth of experience would be too narrow. If an organization punishes failure or if employees feel the need to hide failure, there is little opportunity to develop judgment.
• The second element is reflection on those actions and patterns. Reflection requires thinking back on the actions taken, the reasoning behind the choice of action, the context in which the action took place, and the outcomes that resulted from the actions, many of which are unintentional. While experience is inevitable, learning is not. To learn from requires deliberate reflection. Reflection is most effective when it is done in the company of others who are involved in the same kind of work. When we summarize what happened for someone else, we begin to understand it better ourselves. We learn when we talk. Each practitioner functions within a somewhat different context, responding a bit differently. Consequently the learning of each practitioner is unique. When those practitioners reflect together on their actions, “creative abrasion” occurs, which leads to greater understanding in those engaged in the conversation. There are a number of processes to choose from that are both conversational and systematic in nature, for example Action Learning, Knowledge Café, Anecdote circles collective sensemaking, coaching ourselves.
• The third element is associating oneself with a community of practitioners and thereby understanding the work and it’s talk from the inside.” One learns to be an effective nurse, copy repair technician, or soldier by talking with others about their work. Such talk develops not only the necessary understanding of technique, but also of values held, norms of behavior and how to think like a practitioner in that field. In other words, how “to be.”

These elements, to a great or lesser degree, are present in the informal interaction among people doing the same work, as we saw in the copy repair example. But in a world where the community of practitioners is spread across the globe, and many practitioners work at locations out of the office, the development of judgment cannot not be left to chance and proximity. It must be designed and supported by the organization including: 1) experimentation that leads to learning, 2) treating failure as an opportunity for learning, 3) establishing a systematic process through which reflective conversation occurs about both team and individual actions, 4) and promoting communities of practice.

The Three Eras of Knowledge Management

In this video I describe the Three Eras of knowledge management that I have previously written about on this blog, Where Knowledge Management has Been and Where it is Going – Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. My understanding about the third era continues to grow so I have elaborated the third era in this post.

 

In the earlier blog post I called the third era, “collective knowledge” and I remain convinced that collective knowledge is at the heart of this change. It is the "means," but what is being managed are ideas. So I am using “Idea Management" as the label for the third era both in this video and in the accompanying chart. The first two eras, Information Management and Experience Management dealt with existing knowledge, that is, knowledge that an individual or a group has gained and is available to be shared with others. The third era is about the creation or development of ideas that have not existed before. It is not the management of anything organizational members have learned through their work experience, but what they create jointly when they are brought together in an environment that supports the use of collective knowledge. That support includes convening, cognitive diversity and transparency.

In the last couple of years I have had the opportunity to work with organizations that are using third era practices and that experience has sharpened my thinking about what is occurring and why. I’m still not sure I have all the words right, but the big change I see is that management has begun to value the sensemaking capabilities of employees, that is, the ability of employees to jointly make sense of complex situations. Over the three eras management’s awareness of the kinds of knowledge that are valuable continues to expand. Initially management only valued explicit knowledge as evidenced by the resources put against building repositories, then they developed an appreciation for the experiential knowledge of employees and allocated resources to build communities, and now there is a growing acknowledgement of the sensemaking capabilities of employees and an accompanying willingness to provide the resources to convene groups for that purpose.

Of course, management being interested in the opinions, ideas, and knowledge of employees is not new. Organizations have long made use of employee surveys, fireside chats, suggestions boxes, and town hall meetings to collect ideas from employees. But in the past management has reserved for itself the right to make sense of what was collected from employees. The subtext of such practices was, “Tell us [management] your concerns and suggestions and we [management] will figure out a way to fix it.” Now working with leading edge organizations that are, by their actions, saying something quite different, I hear, “Let's convene the people who do this work and have them think together about how to make sense of this issue.”

A recent example of convening is a meeting I facilitated for NASA. Over the years each of the ten NASA Centers has grown its own KM strategy, quite independent of the other Centers and Offices. NASA administration, in recognition of the variability in the effectiveness of the various KM strategies, and spurred by a somewhat critical government report, appointed a CKO, Ed Hoffman, and asked him to develop a NASA-wide KM strategy. Ed is a seasoned KM professional, fully capable of developing such a strategy. But rather than doing that, he chose to convene a three-day meeting that brought together fifty KM professionals from across the ten NASA Centers, to think together about what the knowledge strategy of NASA should be. The meeting made use of the collective knowledge and analytic capabilities of the KM professionals. Outside perspective was provided by Christos Kostopoulos, Senior Economist at Knowledge and Learning Department- Corporate, from the World Bank and Grigg Gurvais, CKO from the FBI. All available information about NASA’s KM programs, internal NASA documents, and the government report was provided to the group. By the end of the meeting the group had identified the elements of a system-wide strategy. The following illustration shows the commitments participants made at the end of the meeting.

The NASA example illustrates the three enablers of the third era, 1) convening, 2) cognitive diversity and 3) transparency.

1. Convening
Convening is the skill and practice of bringing groups together to develop understanding of complex issues, create new knowledge and spur innovation. It is about:
• designing meetings as conversations rather than presentations
• identifying who needs to be in the conversation, including those who do the work and are impacted by it
• framing the question in a way that opens thinking
• arranging the space to facilitate conversation
• using small groups as the unit of learning
I have written about convening and the role of the leader in The Power of the Conversation Architect to Address Complex, Adaptive Challenges

Cognitive Diversity
Cognitive diversity is the deliberate use of difference to bring new understanding to an issue. When faced with complex issues our inclination is to collect more data, survey, or assign a task force to conduct interviews; when what is needed is a new way to frame the issue. Cognitive diversity brings people trained in different heuristics, problem solving strategies, interpretations, and perspectives into the room. Cognitive diversity can be found in different parts of the organization (e.g. marketing, finance, engineering), in different disciplines (e.g. biology, neuroscience, archeology), or outside the organization (e.g. suppliers, customers, consultants, academicians, alliances).

Transparency
Transparency includes the willingness of management to say, “I don’t know” and therefore to employ the organization’s collective knowledge. It is also about management providing all the available information and data on an issue so that those convened have what they need to do the work of sensemaking. Organizational members also have a role in transparency, that is, to be open about what is happening at their level, rather than hiding or discounting bad news to appease management – to bring the best available knowledge to bear on organizational issues

I would welcome other’s thinking on the third era and the supporting elements of convening, transparency and cognitive diversity, as well as useful references and examples.

My thanks to Xuehui Liu, a KM Professional in the Strategy and Planning Department of Huawei Technologies Ltd., Zhenshen, China. In addition to being a skilled knowledge management professional, Mr. Liu proved to have great skills as a videographer.

The Hallways of Learning

A number of years ago I wrote an article, “The Hallways of Learning” published in Organizational Dynamics, in which I suggested that we might look at the creative, open ended conversations we have in the hallways of our organizations as a metaphor for the kind of conversations we need in the many organizational meetings we hold each day. Our hallway conversations have several useful attributes; they remove some of the sense of hierarchy making participants in the conversation more equal; they invite multiple perspectives because anyone who wanders by is invited in; and likewise, people are free to move on if they find the conversation uninteresting.

The article was read by some members of a research group at the National Institute for Working Life (Arbetslivsinstitutet) in Stockholm, Sweden and they saw the ideas as a way to enhance their own collective learning. This was a group of about 20 researchers and, as the name implies, they studied workplace issues, including, environment, safety, labor, and management. The normal practice of this group was for each researcher to work on a different project, although infrequently 2 or 3 would collaborate on a project. The group was in temporary quarters while waiting to move into a new building.

In the new building the research group was to occupy one whole floor of individual offices.

They began to contemplate what a design would look like that would facilitate greater collaboration and learning among them and decided they needed a “Hallway of Learning.” One of the researchers was an architect who was very interested in how space impacts the way people work and learn together. The small group met with her to explain what they were thinking about and asked her help to design a “Hallway” in the new space which they wanted to call Researcher’s Square.

I was doing some consulting work with the Institute and while I was there they told me about their plans to build a Researcher’s Square. Together we constructed a small study to test whether having a “Hallway” would make a difference in their ability to learn from each other and to collaborate. We agreed that I would interview all the researchers before they moved into their new quarters and then return in six months after they moved in to conduct a second set of interviews to see what impact the “Hallway” had on the way they worked together.

In the initial interviews I asked each person five questions. Following are the questions and the general response I got to each:
1. “Tell me about your own project”
Everyone was able to explain their own project in great detail. The researchers were doing some very interesting work and as the interviews proceeded, I began to see connections between the projects that were being described, although the interviewees themselves did not suggest any connections between projects.
2. “Describe the projects of others in the research group.”
The responses I got about others’ projects were vague. Each person knew something about one or two other projects, but when I probed, I quickly reached the limits of their understanding. No one mentioned any successes or difficulties other projects were having.
“Jan does something with municipalities.”
“Tommy studies union issues.”
“Marianne and Lena are working on the Ericsson project. But I’m not sure what it is about.”
3. “How would you explain the overall mission of the research group?”
On this question the responses were quite varied. There seemed little agreement on what the mission of the research group was.
4. “During any given week, how many people would you casually stop by their office to chat for at least 5 minutes, maybe just standing in the doorway?”
Each person was able to name 2-3 individuals they chatted with for at least 5 minutes once a week.
5. ”How do you anticipate using the Researcher’s Square?”
Except for the group that had invented “Researchers’ Square,” responses were primarily about food rather than conversation. Most saw it as a glorified coffee bar.
“I don’t think I will use it much, I have too much work to do to spend time there”
“I might go down to get a newspaper and read it for a few minutes while I drink my coffee.”
“I think I’ll probably eat my lunch there and chat with others.”
“It will be good to be able to get a quick cup of coffee.”

A few months later the research group moved into the new building. Researcher’s Square was in the middle of a long hallway and took up the space of 4 offices. The real hallway proceeded through Researcher’s Square, so to get from one end of the hall to the other people had to walk through Researcher’s Square.

On the Northwest side of the space there was a coffee bar with a number of bar stools and opposite it on the Northeast, were several café tables and chairs. On the South side of the hallway was a large conference table with chairs around it. At one end of the conference table was a white board and on the other end a rack that held the recent publications of the researchers. For illustration purposes (I have only shown three office on either side of the Researcher’s Square, but their were actually 10 per side for a total of 20 offices.)

This conference table was the only one on the floor. If a group wanted to have a meeting they conducted it in Researcher’s Square, which allowed passersby to overhear the conversation. Passersby could also read whatever was on the board and if it was a topic that interested them could stop and listen for a few minutes or even add their own ideas to the conversation going on around the table.

Six months after the researchers moved into the newly designed office space I returned to continue working on the project I had started earlier and I took the opportunity to interview the researchers again using the same questions.

The difference in their responses were remarkable.
• Question 2 - there was a tremendous increase in knowledge of what others were working on. Some interviewees knew some level of detail about every project and many knew the issues, both successes and frustrations, of at least half of the projects. Moreover, the researchers were able to say how one project connected to another and to find intersections between the projects. They talked about how they had made suggestions to others or asked others for help on their own project. Questions were asked and answered on methodology, statistics, content, proposal writing, references to articles and information about client organizations.
• Question 3 about mission revealed that a much greater alignment had developed among the researchers about the organizational vision and purpose. The responses were broader and more inclusive of other research efforts than they had been initially.
• Question 4 about the number of doorway conversations showed an increase of 300%. Increasing from 2-3 doorway conversations a week to 9-10 a week after Researcher’s Square. Although the conversations were more likely to happen in Researcher’s Square than in the doorway, or to move from the doorway to the Square.

• Question 5 originally was, ”How do you anticipate using the Researcher’s Square?” Since researchers had now been using the Square for six months, I changed that question to, “How are you now using Researcher’s Square?” As opposed to the earlier responses, very few of the comments were about food. Rather interviewees told me about learning from others and building relationships.
“Sometimes when I pass and see a group sitting around the table I can see what others are doing.”
“Maybe that’s the most important thing: since its a living room it makes living here easy!”
“When you go to someone’s room you have a purpose, but in the Square you just bump into each other. I think I have learned something from everyone.”
“The Square makes what everyone does more transparent, otherwise it’s more secret.”
“You can understand one thing in light of the other through discussions in the Square.”
“I can see now that it is easier to go and talk to those people that I get to know during lunch and coffee breaks.”
“I can read on the whiteboard what other things are being done.”

Four Concluding Observations

• Structured Socialization
We see from this example that people, even very smart people, are unable to anticipate the benefits of in-depth interaction with colleagues until they have experienced it for themselves. Before Researcher’s Square, the researchers at NIWL daily saw their colleagues coming in and out of the building, passed them on the staircase, or nodded to them in the hall, but they learned very little from one another. Moreover, when I asked them to anticipate how they might use Researcher’s Square, they could not envision a benefit beyond coffee and food. But when NIWL created a place for structured socialization* they not only learned from each other, the whole organization became more aligned and collaborative - in a word, more effective. Structured socialization named by my colleague, Robert Dalton, is the intentional design of processes and space that bring people together in conversational formats to create and share knowledge.
• Connection before Content
Before people can learn from each other or collaborate on issues, they need to build connections – that is, gain some understanding of who the other person is, including their skills, depth of knowledge, experience, and attitude toward others. People are unlikely to ask each other questions or ask for assistance, until they have built a connection that allows them to learn that the other person is knowledgeable enough and respectful enough to engage. In Researcher’s Square, the coffee, food, and small tables for chats, all provided an atmosphere in which the researchers were able to build the connections that then allowed content to flow.
• Cognitive Diversity
The researchers proved to be more interested in others’ projects than they thought they would be. They assumed that what others were doing would be of little interest to them and likewise that others would have little interest in what they are doing, after all the projects they were engaged in were greatly varied and appeared to have little in common with each other. However, in Researcher’s Square these differences also brought with them an attribute that boosts creativity and innovation within a group, cognitive diversity. When people are cognitively diverse they bring to any problem, a larger set of tools derived from multiple perspectives, problem solving tactics, heuristics and interpretations.
• Conversation Rather Than Presentation
The learning that occurred in Researcher’s Square did not come from presentations, rather the knowledge gained was through conversation. When we think about learning from others our first thought is to have someone make a presentation. But as ubiquitous as presentations are, they are a poor way to learn from peers. Typically, a presenter offers what happened in his or her own situation, but that is not what learners need to hear. Learners are interested in knowing how to adapt the lessons to their situation and for that they need to have a conversation so that the other person can understand their context, and they also can understand the context of the other.

NIWL created a Hallway of Learning that changed the organizational culture.

Why Knowledge Management Didn’t Save General Motors: Addressing Complex Issues By Convening Conversation

Starting about 2000 GM put together a vibrant KM program. At one point GM had 138 best practice teams and 33 centers of expertise working with identified subject matter experts. The KM program produced over 5000 best practices that impacted both quality and schedule and led to millions in cost avoidance. In 2008 KM was alive and well at GM. In the summer of 2009 GM filed for bankruptcy. Why didn’t KM save General Motors? GM was brought down by a flawed strategy, but an organization’s strategy is clearly a product of the knowledge that exists within its walls. The knowledge existed within GM to develop a more competitive strategy. But between 2000 and 2008 knowledge management did not help GM bring that organizational knowledge together in a way that could have saved it from bankruptcy.

Knowledge Management has the capability to address an organization’s very difficult and complex issues, for example how to merge two cultures or how to refocus an organization from selling products to selling service. For these, and many other complex issues, no standard operating procedure exists and no history within the organization is available to draw on for guidance. The knowledge to solve complex problems does not reside in individuals nor even in the executive team – but the knowledge does exists in the collective. The knowledge management task is to bring together the collective knowledge of the organization to bear on complex issues.

To date, Knowledge Management has primarily been in the service of cost cutting or its twin, time saving. The GM example illustrates, that as KM professionals we have not garnered the collective knowledge to address the complex problems that our organizations are facing. That has certainly been true of my own work over the past 15 years. My work has primarily been about creating more effective knowledge sharing processes and communities. But in the last couple of years, more and more I find myself being asked to help convene organizations to address the complex issues they are facing. The realization about how my own work is changing has led me to think that the time is ripe to move KM to a new level and has encouraged me to write this post.

James March wrote a much acclaimed article in 1991 called “Exploitation and Exploration in Organizational Learning.” In that article he says that the exploitation of existing knowledge (which is what knowledge management has been doing) must be balanced with the exploration for new knowledge. Both exploration and exploitation are essential for organizations, but they compete for scarce resources. Exploration is more costly because new ideas often don’t work out. Exploitation of existing knowledge is cheaper because existing knowledge has already been tested, so there are fewer failures.

But the downside of exploitation is that it is a closed loop that can sub optimize organizational knowledge. An organization, exclusively relying on exploitation, will not move beyond the best practice that already exists within its walls. For this reason exploitation can produce a valued step change, but cannot produce the kind of discontinuous change that exploration can yield. KM has been focused on exploitation; we need to now balance the KM effort to help organizations explore new knowledge.

Johnsonville Foods an Example of Using Collective Knowledge to Address Complex Issues
Ralph Stayer, the CEO of Johnsonville Foods was faced with a difficult issue that was also an opportunity. Johnsonville Foods was a small, family owned sausage company of 1000 people, well known in Wisconsin for its quality. Stayer had received an offer from a food-processing company to buy large quantities of product on a regular basis.
Stayer saw this as a complex issue because Johnsonville Foods did not have the capacity to handle such a large job, so accepting it would mean everything would have to change, e.g. shipping, purchasing, equipment, production, packaging, new people, and training. To deal with this very complex issue Stayer called a meeting of the whole organization, giving them all of the information he had about the offer.

He asked employees to work in teams to answer three questions: What will it take to make it work? Is it possible to reduce the downside? Do we want to do it? Teams all across the organization struggled with the questions for almost two weeks, holding meeting after meeting to talk through the risks - which were considerable - and figuring out how they would have to operate differently if they were to increase production that much.
When Stayer brought the teams back together, each team laid out what would be needed and what the problems would likely be for the others. In the end there was almost unanimously agreement that they should take on the new business. Reflecting on the process later, Stayer said, "If you issue orders you’re telling people, "Don’t think; just do." But if you’ve got 1000 people, you’ve got 1000 minds. And if you issue orders from the top, you’re using only 3 of them, or 2, or one. That’s stupid.”

Elements Needed to Address Complex Issues
There are three elements that are necessary if organizations are to use all their knowledge to address complex problems. All three elements are present in the story about Johnsonville Food.

1. Convening
• How to convene the organizational conversation in a way that allows new thinking to emerge
• How to frame the question for the conversation
• The types of issues that require leveraging the collective knowledge
2. Transparency
• Making all the knowledge available so that those who have been convened are as well informed as possible
• The willingness of the leader to say, “I don’t know.”
3. Cognitive diversity
• Who needs to be invited to those conversations
• How to obtain cognitive diversity

1- Convening

How to convene
Convening is about designing a meeting in a way that allows new thinking to emerge. That requires reconsidering all elements of a meeting, e.g. the activities participants engage in, how the seating is configured, the nature of the invitation that participants receive, the length of the meeting, and so on. I have written about the task of the leader as “conversation architect” in other posts. Here I want to focus on the importance of small groups as the source of new ideas.

In a small group each participant can not only offer his or her own thinking, each can ask others to clarify their meaning, elaborate on what someone else has said, challenge an idea, and offer data to support his/her own position – in other words, a small group can have a conversation. In a large group participants are limited to declaring their position on an issue. Participants are all aware that "turn taking" is considered courteous and that to take up additional airtime by engaging others in the back and forth of conversation is sure to be viewed by others as discourteous.

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Minnesota, who study collaboration, say that the synthesis of diverse perspectives comes from being able to hold both one’s own and another’s’ perspective in mind at the same time. Holding both perspectives implies more than having just heard another’s perspective.
It means fully understanding the reasoning behind a perspective as well as the implications that would result from it. That necessarily means there has been enough back and forth between participants for each to gain that level of understanding.

The format for convening is a mix of three elements:

Framing the Conversation
Convening occurs around a question that frames the problem or issue in a way that has relevance to the convened group and that helps to move the group beyond obvious or known positions. One of the difficulties of framing a question is that questions often have an assumption embedded within them. For example, an organization may have a turnover rate of 15% among employees in their first two years of employment. The question, “How do we reduce the turnover rate of employees who have been with the organization less than 2 years?” assumes that a 15% rate of turnover is a problem. The framing of the question prevents participants from thinking about other possibilities such as viewing 15% as a useful weeding out of unsuitable employees, or as a way to bring new ideas into the company. A less biased question might be “What is the optimum rate of new employee turnover for our company and how do we achieve it?” Or even less biased might be, “What experience do we want new employees to have in their first two years, that prepares them and us to make a sound decision about their future with the company?” The task is to frame the question in a way that opens up the space to invite new perspectives on the topic.

Issues that Benefit from Convening
Here I am drawing on the work of Ron Heifitz, who has written a number of books on this issue, particularly “Leadership Without Easy Answers.” Heifetz talks about two kinds of challenges organizations face, adaptive challenges and technical problems.

Adaptive challenges are complex and unpredictable; they have no known answers. People in the organization may even disagree on what the problem really is. To address adaptive challenges organizations must invent their way to a solution. Examples of adaptive challenges are, hospital systems faced with an interminable nursing shortage; the anticipated retirement of thousands of workers in the government sector; the relocation of 45% of an organization’s employees to a new location.” My mentor, Reg Revans use to say, in his rather outdated way, “These are problems about which reasonable men can disagree.”

By contrast, technical problems are predictable and usually solvable by methods and tools that the organization has already developed to address them. If, for example, a well is to be dug in a new oil field, there are standard operating procedures; if a special issue of a journal is to be published, there are steps outlined that will put the issue out on schedule and within budget; if a new cell phone is to be developed, there are well defined phases of the development process. Technical problems do not require a fundamental change in methods or tools. More importantly, the people who solve technical problems can function within a known set of assumptions about how work gets done in the organization, as well as what kind of behaviors are needed to make that work happen.

Where convening brings great value is in addressing adaptive challenges. Heifitz says, “The power of a leader to address adaptive challenges does not lie in inventing solutions; rather it lies in using leadership authority to convene the conversations.”

Johnsonville Foods faced an adaptive challenge and so did Ecopetrol a few years ago.

Ecopetrol a Second Example of Using Collective Knowledge to Address Complex Issues
Five years ago I got a call from Ecopetrol, the National Oil Company of Columbia. The conference organizers said, “We are having a meeting to develop a knowledge strategy. We have not had a knowledge strategy and we think we need one now as we get ready to be publicly traded on the stock market. Could you come to our three day meeting and make a presentation about what makes an effective knowledge management strategy?” “But,” they said, “we only want you to talk for 15 minutes.” Columbia is over 2000 miles from my home in Austin Texas, so my initial reaction was that 15 minutes seemed a very short time for such a long journey. But when I heard what they were trying to do I got very excited. They were convening the top 200 people from across all parts of the company to figure out what they needed to do about knowledge - a complex issue for which there is no “right” answer.

To obtain the diversity of thought they needed at the meeting, they invited representatives from fifteen MAKE winners to speak on the first day of the meeting. And, like my presentation, each of them spoke for only 15 minutes. After each presentation time was set aside for small group discussions – not Q&A - but pairs or trios talking together to make sense of what they had just heard.

The second day was devoted to a Knowledge Café (some times called the world cafe) where the Ecopetrol managers worked in small groups to incorporate what they had heard the first day. The Knowledge Café questions were, “What are the critical areas of knowledge that Ecopetrol needs to manage?” and “What KM processes should we focus on to manage that knowledge?”
Those of us who had made presentations the day before also participated in the knowledge café, moving from table to table along with all the managers. After six rounds of the knowledge café, with managers listening to and building on the ideas of other managers from different parts of Ecopetrol, the group began to coalesce around twelve knowledge areas and had also developed ideas about what KM processes would be most useful.

The third day was Open Space where participants selected which of the twelve topic groups they wanted to join, based on their own expertise and interest. The goal of each group was to set up action plans for that critical knowledge area. By the end of the third day the Open Space groups had a plan to implement each of the initiatives they had agreed upon during the Knowledge Café discussions the day before.

Ecopetrol had a knowledge management strategy after three days of convening and conversation – one that the 200 top managers were committed to.

2 - Transparency
I have noted the way the Ecopetrol meeting involved the elements of convening and cognitive diversity. The meeting also incorporated the third element needed to solve complex issues, transparency. There are two issues connected to transparency, 1) the willingness to say, “I don’t know,” and 2) providing all the knowledge available about the issue under discussion

The willingness to say, "I don't know."
The President of Ecopetrol, Javier Gutiérrez, attended all three days of the meeting. During that time he never made a speech about the outcome he wanted. Rather he listened to the presentations on the first day and on the second day he moved from table to table in the knowledge café with the other 199 managers to think together about how to build a knowledge strategy. What he said through his actions was, ‘I don’t know how to build a knowledge strategy, but I'm confident we can figure it out if we use our collective knowledge.”

Over the last ten years, KM has been able to develop horizontal transparency in organizations through the implementation of communities. In many organizations it is now acceptable for a peer to say to others, “I don’t know how to do this, can anyone help?” However, KM has not addressed the issue of vertical transparency in either direction, neither from frontline to senior leadership, nor from senior leadership to the frontline. Yet, as KM Professionals, we are fully aware that transparency is necessary for leveraging the knowledge of the organization.

Providing all the knowledge available on the issue
The second part of transparency is providing all the knowledge. And this President Gutierrez did as well. Ecopetrol was considering becoming a publicly traded company and everyone in the room understood the implications of that action for Knowledge Management. There can be no integration of collective knowledge without transparency. Unless everyone who is jointly attempting to make sense of an adaptive challenge has access to all the available data, there is no way to successfully address the problem.

Transparency is two sided, leadership must be willing to reveal what they know that may impact the issue, and likewise, frontline employees must be willing to reveal the difficulties they anticipate facing. One of the benefits of using proven formats for convening, such as Knowledge Cafés, Open Space, Storytelling Circles, and Appreciative Inquiry, to name a few, is that these formats are designed to establish an environment conductive to trust and disclosure. More typical meetings like retreats and townhalls tend to discourage disclosure, because if participants have ideas to offer they must say those ideas in front of a large group. But participants are often unsure about how their ideas will be accepted by a large group. Small groups provide the advantage of, 1) being able to test an idea with peers before offering it more broadly and, 2) having a sense of where others stand on an issue before offering a new perspective.

Ecopetrol successfully implemented the strategy they put together five years ago. The meeting I described was not a one time event. It is the way Ecopetrol continues to manage its knowledge using Communities, Technology Forums, Expert meetings, Knowledge Cafés, Conversation Circles, and Open Space to create new knowledge. In both 2010 and 2011 Ecopetrol was nominated for the MAKE award. I predict in 2012 they will be a MAKE award winner.

3 - Cognitive Diversity
I have spoken about convening and transparency, the third element is cognitive diversity.

How to obtain cognitive diversity
There was a great book published in 2007 by Scott Page called, “The Difference.” Page reminds us that people can be diverse in many ways, race, gender, religion, etc. but Page's research shows that the kind of diversity that makes a difference in solving complex problems is a difference in the way people think, which he calls cognitive diversity. That includes the heuristics they use, their interpretations, problem solving strategies, and their prediction models. A physician thinks in a different way than an engineer and uses different strategies to tackle a problem.
A historian thinks in a different way than a mathematician – their training and experience provide them different approaches. When we convene the members of an organization to address a complex problem, we are not so much drawing on the knowledge they use in their job, as we are seeking the diversity in how they think about issues. Research that Page quotes in his book, shows that bringing diversity into the conversation increases the possibility that a group will generate new and more creative ideas.

A number of organizations have taken this idea of cognitive diversity very seriously. The Intelligence Cells in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, are US joint knowledge production efforts to address a specific intelligence challenge. The makeup of a cell is multi-INT (i.e. SIGINT, HUMINT, IMINT). A cross section of disciplines (e.g. analysis, collection, legal, enterprise architecture, technology development) are also represented in each cell, as well as, government, industry, and academia. To address the very difficult intelligence issues about terrorists, requires more than spies, intercepted signals and picture taking drones, it requires a conversation among people who think in diverse ways.

Who needs to be invited
When I am asked by an organization to convene a meeting to address a complex issue, I bring the whole system into the meeting. That doesn’t mean every employee, but it does mean representatives from every part of the organization as well as from every level. And often it also means involving outsiders, customers or suppliers who bring a different perspective on the issue we are addressing.

Teams, departments and divisions can face complex issues, as well as issues that impact the whole organization. For example, a Director, in a government organization I was working with, came to me with a problem. He said, “My office chiefs don’t collaborate. They don’t think about what is good for the whole organization, they are just each out for themselves.” I had worked with many of his direct reports and I knew them to be well meaning people that did have the good of whole organization in mind. So I knew the answer lay somewhere other than the poor motivations of his direct reports.

I asked if I might observe several of his staff meetings, which he regularly held on Tuesday morning. What I saw happening was a very typical staff meeting - the Director started off with announcements, sometimes followed by a presentation from some part of the organization that wanted to get their ideas in front of the Office Chiefs. The largest part of the meeting involved the Director asking each Office Chief in turn for an update of what was happening in his or her area. There was very little conversation between Office Chiefs. Almost all of the talk was aimed at the Director – he talked to each in turn and each in turn responded to him.

The next time I met with the Director I asked him if there were any complex issues that he was dealing with but had not yet been able to find a solution for. He assured me there were a great many and named several. I suggested that he 1) devote one staff meeting a month to asking the group of Office Chiefs to help him address one of those issues, 2) that he think carefully about how to frame the question for them so as not to bias the answers they might come up with, 3) that he provide them with all the information he had on the issue, preferably ahead of time so they would be prepared, 4) that he have them work on the issues in small groups for an hour, and 5) that for the last hour he bring them together to have a large group discussion about their ideas.

Some times we held those small group conversations in a knowledge café format, sometimes in an interview format, sometimes we invited in someone who had a particular expertise. After about six months the group had begun to learn how each other thought. They had started talking with each other outside the meetings on other issues, and they had produced thinking on several issues that the Director could not have come up with by himself. The Director was pleased with what he saw as the Office Chiefs collaborating. For me the most significant move toward collaboration was on the part of the Director himself, he was willing to say, ”I don’t know,” and to draw on the collective knowledge of his very diverse and very capable team to address some very complex issues.

Conclusion
It is possible to think about convening conversations as an event – something to do once in a while to change things up. But from my perspective convening conversations to address complex issues is a new way of thinking about knowledge. KM professionals experienced a shift in how they thought about knowledge around 2005 when they expanded their definition of knowledge from explicit knowledge in a repository, to the realization that much of the important knowledge was in people’s heads and could not be captured. To make that shift a reality KM Professionals had to put new processes into play, like communities and peer assists that supported knowledge flow. As KM professionals we are again on the cusp of broadening how we think about knowledge. The shift is from limiting ourselves to drawing on the knowledge that organizational members possess, to also drawing on their sensemaking capability – their ability to bring heuristics, interpretation and perspectives to critical organizational challenges.

Guidelines for Leveraging Collective Knowledge and Insight

Knowledge workers in any organization have a wealth of insights that are available to their organization to address the difficult issues the organization is facing. Drawing out those insights requires bringing knowledge workers together in meetings that are expressly designed to take advantage of collective knowledge. Over the years, as I have designed such meetings, I have come to rely on seven principles that work together to make the most of collective knowledge in conference settings as well as in-house meetings. The principles have been assembled from the work of many researchers and thought leaders. Where possible I have identified the sources.

1. Connection before content
Knowledge workers attending a meeting or conference need to get connected to each other before they try to construct new ideas together (Peter Block). In order to work effectively with others, they need to know:
a. who is in the room
b. what knowledge others have
c. how others think about the issue of the meeting, and
d. the group’s strengths and weaknesses

In a business context, connecting is best accomplished by engaging knowledge workers in small group conversations about strategic organizational issues. To build connections, those conversations have to be structured in a way that allows knowledge workers to frame themselves in a positive light, relative to their experience and successes. Icebreaker type exercises are less useful when the intent is to leverage collective knowledge because they do not provide adequate understanding of others’ knowledge and experience.

When a group has come together many times, the period of connecting can be brief, but not neglected altogether. Just as two friends typically engage in “small talk” for a few minutes each time they meet, any group that comes together regularly also needs a brief period of re-connecting before turning to content. In both situations the “small talk” affirms the relationship and the readiness to engage the topic.

2. Circles connect
Circles represent unity. They help individuals in the group view themselves as part of the whole. For example, the UN meeting hall is designed in concentric circles to provide a visual representation of what the UN stands for – unity among nations.

I was reminded of the benefits of seeing oneself, and being seen, as a part of a whole, when I conducted an exit interview with Lieutenant General Maples, then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He told me that one of his first actions as Director had been to remove the large rectangular conference table in his office and have it replaced with a round table. He very clearly understood the difference a circle would make to the many, very difficult conversations he would have in the coming years.

It is a useful symbolism to begin and end meetings with chairs in a circle. It can be a big circle of 30+ or many small circles of 5. Ideally it is a circle of just chairs, without a table. Knowledge workers have a profoundly different experience when they converse in a group, absent a table.

3. Learn in small groups – integrate knowledge in large groups
We learn and create new ideas through our conversation with others in small groups. A small group is 3-5 members. This is the size that produces the richest and most in-depth thinking. It is large enough to contain diverse views yet small enough for members to engage each other.

Engaging each other means asking questions to clarify the meaning another has expressed and it means challenging as well as building on others’ ideas. The give and take of the small group serves to exchange existing knowledge as well as generate new knowledge.

In meetings designed to draw on the organization’s collective knowledge, after small groups have been in conversation, their ideas are brought together in a large group setting to integrate their insights into the thinking of the whole. In a lengthy meeting, small and large group discussions regularly alternate.

4. Diverge then converge
Any meeting that is focused on collective knowledge must first diverge in order to draw new ideas out and to stimulate thinking. “Knowledge diversity facilitates the innovative process by enabling the individual to make novel associations and linkages” (Cohen and Levinthal). Meeting leaders who want to leverage collective knowledge, intentionally invite people from other disciplines, stakeholder groups, and outside experts to introduce that diversity.

Without time for divergence the many differences within a group are not expressed and without their expression they cannot be made use of by the group. It is in the critical space that lies between divergent ideas that innovation often emerges (Scott Page).

Knowledge workers are reluctant to turn their thinking to what they have in common until they have had an opportunity to give voice to their differences (Marvin Weisbord). The way the human brain works is to first recognize differences and only after those are clarified to focus on similarities.

The first part of a meeting, whether it is half a day or 3 days, is dedicated to divergence. The second part of a meeting converges to put those divergent ideas to work in terms of a complex issue that needs to be addressed.

5. Outside experts inform the thinking of others, not provide them answers
Bringing outside experts into a meeting can provide much needed cognitive diversity, but experts cannot provide solutions. It is the knowledge workers of an organization, who function within its context and who together understand the complexity of its issues, who are uniquely capable of developing workable solutions.

Experts can stimulate the thinking of knowledge workers by talking about what others have done in similar situations. But any practice from another organization or team always has to be adapted, not adopted. Even the best of examples have to be modified to fit a new context.

Fifteen minutes is adequate time for an expert to stimulate a group’s thinking. A presentation by an expert needs to be immediately followed by a period of time dedicated to participants connecting what the expert has said to their own knowledge and to thinking with others about how that knowledge can be used. Without committed time for processing, an expert’s ideas are forgotten within a couple of hours. Unfortunately, the ubiquitous Q&A does not provide the needed processing time; rather what is needed is time for colleagues to talk with each other in small groups.

6. Connect new ideas to what knowledge workers already know
Processing is about moving new ideas from short term to long-term memory by connecting the new ideas to knowledge worker’s existing knowledge. The term, absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal), references the ability of knowledge workers to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to their organization’s issues. An individual’s or an organization’s absorptive capacity, is a function of their prior knowledge. That means that without related knowledge to connect new ideas to, new knowledge will not be absorbed.

In meetings designed to exploit collective knowledge, a more robust environment for knowledge linkages to be made is provided when knowledge workers from varying disciplines are present. A knowledge worker from engineering, for example, will have different prior knowledge than one from R&D, and different yet from a knowledge worker from legal. The greater the cognitive diversity of prior knowledge in the room the more likely that new knowledge, from outside or internally, will be connected to prior knowledge which will spur insight. To process new knowledge, group discussion, made up diverse participants, is most effective. If the group is small (3-5 participants) each knowledge worker has enough airtime to put their ideas into words – which leads to the last principle.

7. We learn when we talk
This principle is central to leveraging the collective knowledge of a group. Listening provides us new ideas but as long as those ideas are just swimming around in our heads, they are neither fully formed nor implementable. It is only when a knowledge worker puts an idea together in a way that allows him or her to explain the idea to others, that the idea takes shape for the knowledge worker, as well as for the person the knowledge worker is talking with.

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Minnesota, have shown that we organize information in a different way when we are preparing to explain our thinking to others. The information not only becomes more logically organized, but new connections are made, often in the act of speaking. It is fair to say, “We don’t learn when we listen, we learn when we speak,” or write, or even create a visual representation of our understanding. Giving knowledge workers the time needed to put their thinking into words, not only shares the organization’s knowledge, but creates it.

Implementing these seven principles requires considerable change in how we design meetings and conferences - but then the idea of leveraging collective knowledge itself requires considerable change. More expansive thinking about who within the organization has valuable knowledge with which to address organizational issues, necessitates new approaches to how we meet and work together. These seven principles, tested through research and practice, provide a way to design those new approaches.

The Three Eras of Knowledge Management - Summary

I have posted lengthy descriptions of each of the three eras of knowledge management and here I have made a brief summary of all three. I have also made substantial changes to the third era in this post. If you would like to view each era in more detail just click on the heading of that era in this post.

Since the term “knowledge management” came into popular usage, there have been three significant changes in how organizations have thought about their knowledge. Each successive era has expanded the type of knowledge that organizations considered important without eliminating the need for and use of the previous type of knowledge.

Knowledge management began in the mid 1990’s. Before that time knowledge was typically considered the province of training and was thought of as an individual capability. However, in the mid-90s Peter Drucker began to write about “knowledge workers” and the “knowledge economy” and proposed the idea that knowledge was a critical organizational asset that was as important as capital or property.

Leveraging Explicit Knowledge
The initial idea of knowledge management was that an organization’s knowledge needed to be documented and then placed in a database where everyone could access it whenever they needed it - no longer would employees only be able to learn when attending a training class. Efforts were made to capture an organization’s best practices and lessons learned. Organizations spent large sums of money creating repositories and databases and employees were encouraged, sometimes even badgered, into contributing to them. The prevailing way of thinking about knowledge management was as a library or a warehouse with inputs and outputs, the more inputs the better.

By 2000 the limitations of content management were becoming evident:

1. Organizations found it difficult to get people to document their knowledge, and even more difficult to get others to make use of what had been documented and stored. Users found tools (checklists, steps in a process) useful as well as reusable documents (PP presentations, proposals) but lessons learned and best practices were largely ignored.

2. Organizations began to recognize that they had only been supporting explicit knowledge that could be written down - they had disregarded what might be the most critical knowledge to organizational success, tacit knowledge. Employees would not, and in fact could not, write all of their tacit knowledge down, first because the tacit knowledge that resides in an employee’s mind is immense and secondly because tacit knowledge is primarily useful in response to specific contexts, and much less useful when written as generalizations.

Leveraging Experiential Knowledge
Given the limitations of content management, by 2000 there began to be glimmers of a new perspective on knowledge within organizations. This new perspective held that:

1. much of an organization’s knowledge is in the heads of employees, with only a small percentage residing in documents, still recognizing that some explicit knowledge is needed and should be maintained

2. much of an organization’s knowledge is dynamic and rapidly changing so that what is “captured” is soon out-of-date

3. knowledge is essentially social and is developed and held by groups of people who engage together in a specific practice.

Etienne Wenger’s book Communities of Practice, that named and explained this phenomena, came out in 2000. Organizations began to support communities of peers, providing a way for them to ask for and receive knowledge on a just-in-time basis and thus keeping fast changing knowledge up-to-date. The Q&A that is ubiquitous in communities provided a way for employees to share their tacit knowledge in response to specific situations. By 2005 nearly every Fortune 500 Company had established Communities of Practice, acknowledging the growing understanding that knowledge is largely a property of groups of people.

My book Common Knowledge also came out in 2000 and talked about the knowledge management processes through which teams and projects could share their knowledge. Organizations put After Action Reviews into place to promote continuous learning in teams and projects so that what was being learned in the field could be continually updated. Expertise Locator systems helped employees draw on the knowledge of experts across an organization and Knowledge Harvesting helped to move knowledge from one team/project to another.

However by 2005 the limitations of even this expanded perspective on organizational knowledge began to be recognized:

1. It became obvious that knowledge was flowing primarily between peers and was largely limited to frontline employees. Senior and even middle management were supporters of knowledge management but not users of knowledge management processes.

2. Knowledge management was primarily dealing with existing knowledge, attempting to bring all units up to the best in class of the organization. But it did not help organizations create new knowledge or spur innovation.

3. The focus of knowledge management was tactical issues to the exclusion of strategic issues. Thus, although GM had an outstanding knowledge management program, that program did not address the difficult strategic issues that put GM into bankruptcy.

Leveraging Collective Knowledge
Although the first thinking about Leveraging Collective Knowledge began to appear around 2005, there are only a few leading edge organizations that have developed new practices for making use of their organization’s collective knowledge. Most organizations are still centered in the perspective of the second era and some, who have come late to knowledge management, are still struggling with getting good content management in place.

Those that are inventing processes for collective knowledge are finding ways to bring the whole organization to bear on strategic issues. Process like Knowledge Café’s, Appreciative Inquiry, and Search Conferences bring together all levels of the organization – the whole system in the room. The processes used to leverage collective knowledge are conversation based, alternating between small group and large group configurations. Even regularly held organizational meetings such as staff meetings, team, and project meetings in these organizations are turning to conversational forms to address their most difficult organizational issues. There is a growing understanding that in an age of increasingly complex organizational issues, leaders cannot be expected to have all the answers; rather the task of leaders becomes convening the conversations that can come up with new answers.

Leading edge organizations are taking advantage of Web 2.0 social media, building more user controlled platforms such as Wiki’s, blogs and social networking (e.g. Facebook) that bring with them greater organizational transparency and give rise to more diverse perspectives in the organizational conversation. The use of crowd sourcing, cognitive diversity, and predictive markets draw on a wider base of thinking, both internally and externally, that increases organizational innovation.

Over the three eras, each new set of knowledge management practices has been created in response to an ever-expanding understanding of 1) where knowledge lives within organizations and 2) what knowledge is important to organizational success. We can anticipate yet greater understanding as organizations move further into the third era.

Potentiation: Neurology and Knowledge Management

There is a wonderful term that cognitive neurologists use, “potentiation.” It’s a term that those of us that are involved in knowledge and learning could make great use of – no need for neurologist to have all the fun!

Here is what it means to a cognitive neurologist, as translated by an amateur with a few graduate courses in neurology. Information moves along neurons and when the information reaches an axon terminal, in order to go any further it has to jump the synaptic gap to the next neuron. It jumps the gap by producing a neurotransmitter that the next neuron picks up (neurologists say the neurotransmitter excites the next neuron) and off the information goes down the next neuron (and the next) until it gets to some important destination where the message tells your little finger to wiggle or you arrive at a brilliant new insight. Of course, it’s all a good deal more complex since that lone neuron is also exciting lots of other neurons and even turning some off – but for the purpose of thinking about how it impacts knowledge, lets stay simple.

Now it turns out that each time the neurotransmitter excites its neighboring neuron that pathway becomes stronger and can be more easily excited the next time. An example of a path that is very weak is that uncomfortable experience of meeting someone and ten minutes later not being able to remember her name. Each time the pathway is excited it becomes more potentiated, that is, more accessible the next time. Building the strength of synaptic communication is the neurological basis for learning.

Now here is the interesting part. The synaptic gap is excited, once, twice, three times, each time sending out one type of neurotransmitter. But if you really excite that next neuron over and over finally it releases a different kind of neurotransmitter, (one with a calcium base) and that type of neutrotransmiter has a hundred times more capability to excite the next neuron and produces Long Term Potentiation (LTP). It is not a linear progression- it is exponential. So an idea keeps exciting the next neuron gradually getting a little stronger each time, then there is a sudden burst and wham! the idea is now firmly fixed in your mind - LTP. Having achieved LTP the idea is easily brought to mind, the slightest hint or related idea will bring it to the fore. That makes it incredibly available for immediate use, like the expert chess players who with only a glance at the board can see potential patterns that might emerge during the game. Learning is not linear – it is exponential!

The first time we hear a very new idea serves as a kind of preparation for later understanding that idea; the connection is weak, but it’s there – potentiation has occurred. You may not even know its there but it is. Then we hear the idea again, a week or a month later and the connection gets a little stronger – it still may not be strong enough for you to recall the idea. But you might at least have recognition the next time you hear it as in, “Oh, yes, I do remember now that you mention that.”

I had that experience about three years ago when I was at a meeting where Bill Ives was speaking about Web 2.0. Now Bill is a guru of social media, so even back then he was talking about the value of blogs, wikis and rss feeds. I liked what he said and was intrigued about the idea of Web 2.0 – but by the time the meeting, and several other speakers, was over, my thinking about blogs was over as well. The idea was potentiated but not strong enough for me to give it much thought in the subsequent weeks and months.

But probably like you, over the next three years I kept hearing about blogs, in articles and presentations. Last month Dave Snowden and I were both speaking at KM Asia and Dave talked about blogs and the value they bring to his own learning and the idea went LTP! And I started blogging. Now, I don’t think it’s that Dave is a more convincing speaker than Bill, to the contrary, if I hadn’t heard Bill’s speech three years ago I don’t think Dave’s speech would have been able to trigger me to start writing a blog.

There are a number of implications that come to mind for me, two that explain some of difficulties people face, and several that have more positive aspects. The negative ones first-

• LTP explains how people can get an idea so firmly fixed in their minds – a connection that has long term potentiation - that it seems that no amount of new evidence will impact their thinking. For example, someone who bought a Toyota in 1975, that turned out to be a lemon, and will never buy another Toyota no mater what consumer reports says about its reliability in 2009.




• LTP also explains Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, when even the smallest reminder of a traumatic stress will trigger it again – so sensitized is the connection between those neurons.

But on the more positive side:

• Learning theorists know about potentiation – they call it “foreshadowing.” They advise teachers to introduce a concept before it comes up in the curriculum or lecture. Foreshadowing prepares the mind of the listener or the reader for an idea to come. In the vernacular it’s the familiar, “Tell ‘em what your going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. Not a bad way to strengthen potentiation any time we are introducing a new idea.




• I explain to a colleague just why it’s imperative that he support the redesign of the development process and I can tell he’s listening but I can also tell he isn’t getting it. I could walk away from that exchange thinking that he is just not a forward thinking individual, or any of a hundred other attributions we make about those that don’t immediately take to our ideas. Or I can assume, “it is early days;” I can say to myself, “He doesn’t get it yet but I have started the potentiation process.




• There is a great story about Rosa Parks that illustrates potentiation for all of us who facilitate workshops. Rosa Parks attended a workshop on school desegregation at Highlander in 1955. At the end of the workshop the Highlander staff asked, as we often do at the end of a workshop, "What are you going to do when you go back?" Many of the participants said, probably not much because they didn’t think the black community would stick together to fight segregation. Rosa’s response was, "Montgomery is the cradle of the confederacy. The white people won't let black people do anything." And she echoed the sentiment of the others, "Even if they did, I don't know whether we'd stick together or not." Then a few weeks later in Montgomery Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, triggering the Montgomery boycott that drew national attention to the civil-rights movement. At the end of their workshop the facilitators at Highlander must have felt a disappointment at the response to their question. Apparently they had changed few, if any, minds. Yet, there was potentiation occurring in that room. You wonder how many times those synaptic connections had to be strengthened for the Montgomery bus boycott to occur.

David Bohm, the great physicist and one of my heroes said, “When you listen to somebody else, whether you like it or not, what they say becomes part of you.”

Trust Versus Psychological Safety

We’re all aware of how heavily our KM work depends on trust. Amy Edmondson takes a deeper look at trust related to knowledge sharing. I always find her work insightful. This week I was re-reading her article “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams”, probably for the sixth or seventh time, and was struck again about how valuable it is to go beyond our simple understanding of trust and to think about the issue as psychological safety.

Perhaps I should start with what she means by psychological safety, it is “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” But that, of course, begs the question, because then we have to ask what exactly does “interpersonal risk taking” mean. Edmondson explains it is “a sense of confidence that others will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”

So Psychological Safety seems to go far beyond interpersonal trust to include, 1) respect for each other’s competence, 2) caring about each other as people and 3) trust in each other’s intentions.

It’s a group, rather an individual concept, thus a shared sense that is developed out of a shared experience. As an example of a shared experience, she explains that group members, “will conclude that making a mistake does not lead to rejection when they have had a team experience in which appreciation and interest are expressed in response to discussion of their own and others’ mistakes.” Such shared experiences, occurring over time, create the tacit belief that that the team is a psychologically safe place.

In fact, Edmondson says it does little to increase psychological trust for managers or team members to talk about the need for it or to urge others to trust, because it is the experience that teaches. I’m certain that’s true for me personally. Although I’ve been in countless situations where the leader has said something akin to, “I want this to be a place where everyone can speak their mind,” as far as I can remember, hearing that has never made me one wit more open or forthcoming. In those situations what I needed to know was how others in the room were going to regard what I had to say. Would they see me as “out of touch?” “outlandish?” “showing off?” “smart?” “interesting?” If I conclude from their response to a comment I make, that their view of me is more the latter, I’m more willing to share my thinking, even when it isn’t fully formed. But the clues I use to make that decision are subtle; a widening of the eyes, a follow-up inquiry to what I’ve said, nods of agreement, and probably many other clues I pick up on but couldn’t name. From my own experience, I can affirm, what Edmondson suggests, that a sense of psychological safety is tacit.

The central idea of her study was to see if there is a relationship between psychological safety and team learning. To find that out Edmondson studied 51 real work teams in a manufacturing company, some of which were product development teams and others project teams, some self-managed, and others leader-lead. Edmondson conducted extensive interviews with team members, observed them, and collected survey responses from them.

The major finding from the study was that, 1) if the group/team feels psychologically safe they will, 2) be more willing to ask for help, admit an error, seek feedback, etc. and those actions, 3) produce learning in the group which, 4) improves their performance. Written as a simple formula:

We Learn (When We Listen) When We Talk

The title is a bit of an exaggeration, but intended to make the point that contrary to common belief, our own articulation of an idea adds to our understanding of that idea. At face value that doesn’t make much sense, after all we must know what we think about an issue; how else are we able to talk about it? But the reality is that what we don’t necessarily know what we know. Has it happened to you that, as you begin to describe to another person a complex issue you want to ask them about, the answer pops into your mind before you finish the question? And you end up saying, somewhat sheepishly, “Nevermind, I think I’ve just realized what the answer is.” In trying to explain the situation, your mind has put the bits and pieces you know about the topic together in a new way and provided a new understanding.

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Michigan, who have conducted studies of conversations, explain it this way. “In these meetings individuals exchange their data, conclusions, reasoning and questions with others. Although the cognitive benefits to the receiver of such an exchange are apparent, there is evidence that it is the speaker who makes the greatest cognitive gains from the exchange. Individuals organize information differently if they are going to present it to others than if they are trying to understand it solely for their own use. It is in the act of speaking that people tend to organize cognitively what they know.” They learned when they talked!

This interesting phenomenon has a number of possible knowledge management implications for me:


It implies that if I am stating an argument to convince someone else of the reasonableness of my position, I would be wise to pause periodically to give the other person an opportunity to articulate his or her thinking on what I’ve said. Even if the other’s response is only to offer a counter argument, that person will learn something new about their own position by “the way they have organized information differently…. to present it.” 


It implies that if I deliver a presentation or a lecture it would be helpful to make time for those listening to have a conversation with each other – a way for them to make mental connections that otherwise might never be made. (This is a part of the rationale behind my rant on “Are There Any Questions”) 


It implies that if I want another team to learn from the lessons my team or project has garnered, the transfer would work better if I arrange a conversation between the two groups than as a document. The conversation would provide the opportunity for the recipient to think out loud about how the lessons relate to their own work. 



It implies that I read an great article I will incorporate the ideas more fully into my own cognitive map, if I tell a colleague what I have just read (or write a blog about it). 



It implies that in the debrief of that great project my team just accomplished, the team is more likely to be able to understand how they achieved that success, if I gather the group to talk to about what they learned. They will learn what they learned in the talking. 



What a wonderful phenomenon - we learn when we talk. It has all kinds of uses

Learning in Public

A wonderful thing has been happening in organizations about learning - the idea of learning is shifting from the tradition of “learning in private” to “learning in pubic”. Learning in private was what we all did in school; remember “don’t look at your neighbor’s paper, write your own essay, and no whispering during test taking.” Learning was seen as an individual pursuit, and that attitude carried over to how we thought about learning in the workplace. When employees are rewarded for their expertise there is some need to keep private those things that they do not know.

However that traditional idea is giving way to “learning in public.” In part, we can credit Web 2.0 and the general increase in transparency that it has engendered through social media like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

But learning in public is also coming about because of the work KM professionals have done in organizations. As KM professionals we have enabled transparency by implementing knowledge sharing processes like peer assist, collaborative workspaces, communities of practice, blogs and wikis. These have made it acceptable to say, “I don’t know” about an issue or problem and to ask others for help. When professionals acknowledge not knowing and reach out to a colleague, it not only opens the requester to learning, it signals to others that they can acknowledge that there are things they don’t know - it begins to change the culture. We see a willingness to “learn in public” among professionals, be they scientists, engineers, analysts, or physicians. We see teams and projects learning in public through AARS and Retrospects. We see whole systems learning in public through practices like appreciative inquiry, knowledge cafes and a host of other whole system processes.

We are also learning in pubic when we engage in in-depth conversation. Elsewhere I’ve defined conversation as: when each person is actively working to understand the meaning the other is trying to convey. To understand another’s meaning often requires us to ask questions about the other’s reasoning, ask for examples, and paraphrase what was said to check if we now “have it.” All of which takes time. So part of learning in public through conversation is a group’s willingness to make a time commitment in the interest of learning and understanding. That’s a change for many groups where the norm has been - when hearing an idea from a colleague, but not quite clear about what he/she is trying to say, just let it go and move on to the next statement. Increasingly I see a willingness to engage in the in-depth exchange that is necessary if we are to create new knowledge together. Conversation is a “learning in public” tool – maybe one of the best.