Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Knowledge Cafes

Let me start by saying that David Gurteen is a good friend, and each time he passes through town, I try my best to meet up with him for a beer or a meal. On his recent trip over here, we sat down in a Chinese restuarant for lunch, and the topic progressed onto knowledge cafes. Mind you, David is the father of knowledge cafes - he has successfully extended the World Cafe concept started by Juanita Brown, into the KM arena.

I sat through a knowledge cafe that he ran some years ago. At our recent lunch, I shared some of my thoughts on its potency, and what I regarded were differences in the World Cafe setup. World Cafe requires a skilled facilitator to bring out the responses from the audience through a serious of carefully crafted questions, toggling between small and large group interactions. Without a doubt, it is a wonderful approach to getting people to share. However, this is only to the extent that they want to, and I cannot help but wonder how critical it would be for the facilitator to be skilled. In life, while we might aspire to be skill facilitators, in reality we struggle.

Enter Knowledge Cafes. The fundamental principle to me is conversations. Knowledge Cafes use some of the world cafe principles, except that it is led from within and not outside. The knowledge cafe format can be used by a leader from within the group, to get people talking and to build conversation flow. This is quite different from the World Cafe intent, which one can argue is most useful when soliticiting group feedback on a topic.

I like the knowledge cafe because by its very title it requires knowledge to be created - and this means that the leader who uses this format is quite like a jazz band lead - playing his own music while cueing the rest. There will be no scripts when this is done well - therefore knowledge cafes demand a certian sense of authenticity - a key principle for leadership practice.

World Cafes require facilitators to agrregate the responses and highlight the key ones through a practice of categorising and clustering. In the knowledge cafe however, the leader summarises as he paraphrases. Now I like that very much, as at the end of the conversations, we look for the true meaning behind what was discussed, instead of listing what was mostly discussed!

I am of the opinion that we have a lot more left to learn about knowledge cafes!

3 comments:

  1. i too echo your thoughts that we are just at the begining, maybe even the first 50 meters of the journey, after all the hunger for knowledge never ends and to fuel the fire is just one of the methods that i feel a Knowledge cafe aids in. As the gasoline type has evolved we too share ideas discover ideas and and simply make the begining of the learning journey easier with a higher octane boost. for when we have got our feet wet already the mind will tell the body to swim towards higher goals.thus generating newer discoveries and newer knowledge. if this is shared again in the cafe............wow imagine the possiilities of us developing ourselves and not rediscoverings setbacks and failures....remarkable indeed.......just need a ice cold beer to start !!!! thank you so much for sharing this mate

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  2. "...a certian sense of authenticity - a key principle for leadership practice."

    Indeed.

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  3. I very much enjoyed reading this post, and I have nothing but respect for Knowledge Cafes, David Gurteen, and the author, but I couldn't help but want to clarify some of the statements made about World Cafe.

    Specifically, that World Cafes are led by "skilled facilitators", when in truth we never use the term facilitation because that's not what we do. World Cafes are all about having authentic conversation; they are "hosted", not led, and certainly not scripted. Successful World Cafes are a result of authentic engagement on the part of everyone involved, and the host's work is mostly in creating the "hospitable space" that welcomes every voice and provides a safe container for truly authentic engagement.

    You're right that questions in the World Cafe are very important; they are chosen using Appreciative Inquiry principles and are designed to evoke collective wisdom and the capacity for shared meaning-making in order to bring forward what matters most to that particular group.

    What happens in a World Cafe harvest is that people share what they experienced as having meaning for them in their rounds of small group conversation. They are encouraged to notice the patterns and connections between what they heard in their conversations and in what they are hearing from others during the harvest and share anything they notice.

    Their words are summarized and reflected back to them by the host, as a graphic recording professional captures what is being said in visual form. Visual graphics are a valuable part of the World Cafe process (the Cafe tables are covered with newsprint so people can sketch and doodle during the rounds of small group conversation) and they bring another lens of understanding to what is gained in a World Cafe.

    To summarize, I have not yet experienced a Knowledge Cafe, but I don't think the differences between it and the World Cafe are necessarily those of value or authenticity ... from what I understand, they are merely two closely related but distinct processes for having authentic conversations about things that matter.

    Let a thousand flowers bloom!

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