conversation matters

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.