Conversations

I was at KM UK last week where I spoke a little about Knowledge Creation. While in London, David Gurteen and I sat down for dinner in a wonderful little Italian restaurant off Regent Street, and that is where I started pondering over the whole idea of conversations, and the use of it for knowledge sharing.

Both David and I made the effort to have dinner together - and the fact that we are friends obviously helped. This is not my first, and will not be my last dinner with David - who as an individual I find extremely engaging and interesting. In the course of our dinner conversation, many ideas were surfaced, and the potency of conversation became apparent to me.

After dinner, it became increasingly clear to me that the modern organisation would need to consider reestablishing conversation as a knowledge sharing practice. Obviously this is easy to agree with, but rather difficult to implement. After all, conversation is inherently social, as it was with David and I, and requires commitment, trust and relationship. The question is, how might we introduce conversation between a supervisor and his subordinate, within an assigned power relationship, to be able to benefit from regularly conversing with one another?

From a philosophical point, we can all agree that a healthy organisation will promote people working with one another rather than doing things to people, as expounded by many including Alfie Kohn. However, business schools appear to think otherwise, with the whole notion of managing people to deliver. The Tayloristic foundations still dominate MBA education today, and the setting of work objectives is seen as a sure and safe way to ensure the optimal use of man-hours.

Organising meetings around agendas and discussions are productive, and the capture of minutes and action item registers focus manager attention. Such language and attitude cannot possibly promote conversation, unless for some reason or the other both the supervisor and his subordinate manage to develop relationship outside of work that is social in nature. Simply put, this means going to the pub together for a couple of pints after work, and not discussing the football game, but actually discussing work. Like the dinner with David, this can turn into conversation that is engaging if both the supervisor and his subordinate are authentic and genuinely interested in thinking together.

Another KM thought leader whom I first met in KM World 2009, Nancy Dixon, promotes conversation as the most effective tool for knowledge management. I will have to agree with her that the "words we choose, the questions we ask, and the metaphors we use to explain ourselves..." will be the determinants of knowledge creation. This means that while we may take to conversation like fish take to water when we meet up with friends for dinner, it might be well worth the effort to think about building conversation skills in both supervisors and subordinates at work, as a form of a communicating to influence competency.

Building the practice field for knowledge management will nclude getting people to learn how to build and participate in effective conversatons. This might come more naturally at dinner with friends like David, but even I might require some schema or structure on how to conduct myself in conversation at work.