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My co-Instructor David Gurteen's recent article (referenced here) beautifully reminds us that organizations don’t simply transfer knowledge,
they create the conditions for it to emerge through conversation. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s explore this even further.

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From an Organization Development (OD) and Gestalt perspective, knowledge doesn’t simply live in documents or even in conversations. It emerges in the relationships between people.

A conversation is not merely an exchange of information. It is an encounter. It is where people make meaning and sense together. What spreads is rarely just an idea; what spreads is confidence, trust, possibility, identity, and the willingness or opportunity to see a situation differently.

This is why “use of self” matters. Use of Self is conscious choice of who you are in any given situation.

Someone can ask you the exact same question on two different days and you’ll likely respond in two different ways depending on how you choose to show up in that moment. You might show up with curiosity one day and certainty the next day. Curiosity invites. Certainty closes. Presence creates safety. Judgment creates caution. Our awareness, our assumptions, our emotional state, and even our body language become part of the knowledge-sharing system.

In Gestalt we often say that awareness is curative. I believe awareness is also generative. The more aware we become of ourselves and one another and our emergent situation, the greater our capacity is to notice opportunities that previously remained invisible. In KM we mention serendipity quite a bit. Serendipity is not simply luck, it is often heightened awareness meeting meaningful connection.

This also shifts the role of leadership.

Leaders are not simply people with a certain job title. They are architects of conversational spaces and they are participants in the relational field they create. Every interaction has the possibility to expand or contract the possibility for learning. Every response to a question informs people whether curiosity is welcome. Every reaction to uncertainty shapes whether people will bring forward unfinished ideas or keep them hidden.

That is why psychological safety and psychological courage is not a training program. It is something continuously co-created in thousands of everyday interactions.

I also appreciate David’s reference to “way shaping.” In OD we often describe this as designing conditions rather than designing outcomes. We cannot manufacture innovation, trust, or learning, but we can cultivate environments where they become more likely to emerge.

Perhaps the next evolution of this conversation is moving beyond individual conversations toward a newer concept currently being called “communityship.”

Communityship asks us to stop thinking primarily about individual leaders and begin thinking about collective responsibility. Knowledge does not belong to experts. It is a temporary gift to them. Expertise belongs to communities that continually create, refine, challenge, and apply it together.

When communities become healthy, knowledge flows almost effortlessly because people rarely ask, “who owns this?” Rather, they more often ask, “how can we make each other more successful?”

In that sense, Communities of Practice, Knowledge Cafés, peer assists, after-action reviews, and informal conversations are not simply KM techniques. They are practices that strengthen the relational fabric of an organization.

Perhaps that is the real competitive advantage, not having more knowledge than everyone else (not to be confused with all the information that AI “has”), but having stronger relationships through which knowledge can continually emerge and evolve.

As AI accelerates the creation and distribution of explicit knowledge (aka information), the uniquely human advantage becomes even more valuable. AI can generate information at extraordinary speed. It cannot replace the lived experience of making meaning together, sensing what matters in context, building trust, or helping another person discover something for themselves.

The future of KM may therefore be less about managing knowledge and more about convening conversations where awareness, conversation, and relationships enable knowledge to flow naturally.

Because in the end, conversations don’t just spread knowledge, they create the people and communities capable of generating it.

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Organizations invest heavily in formal knowledge sharing methods. Yet many of the most valuable insights spread through informal conversation. By creating the conditions for people to meet, talk, and exchange ideas, we increase the chances that knowledge findsthe person who needs it, when they need it.

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We often assume that knowledge spreads best through formal channels. We create training programmes, publish documents, build knowledge bases, and schedule presentations. All of these have their place, but they are only part of the picture.

Much of what we really know is shared in conversation.

A passing remark over coffee. A question asked after a meeting. An unexpected discussion between people from different teams. These are often the moments when a useful idea connects with a real problem.

Knowledge rarely moves in a straight line. It spreads through networks of relationships and conversations. The more opportunities people have to interact across teams, disciplines, and levels within an organization, the more likely valuable knowledge will reach the people who can use it.

This idea has echoes of James G. March's Garbage Can Model of organizational decision making. Under conditions of uncertainty, problems, solutions, people, and opportunities often come together in ways that cannot be planned. Chance plays a larger role than we sometimes like to admit.

Creating the Conditions for Serendipity

Good management cannot create serendipity on demand, but it can make it more likely. It can create opportunities for people to meet, encourage curiosity, make it safe to ask questions, and leave enoughspace for conversation rather than filling every minute with planned activity.

Artificial intelligence is a particularly good example. The technology is developing so quickly that no single person can keep up. Most of us learn about new tools, useful prompts, unexpected applications, and practical limitations from colleagues rather than from formal training. One person's small discovery can solve another person's immediate problem, but only if the conversation happens.

Creating More Opportunities for Conversation

If valuable knowledge often spreads through unexpected conversations, the obvious question is how organizations can create more opportunities for those conversations to happen.

The answer is probably less about introducing new knowledge management systems and more about paying attention to the everyday conversational life of the organization. Do people from different teams regularly meet? Is there time for informal discussion before and after meetings? Are new joiners quickly connected to networks beyond their immediate colleagues? Are people encouraged to ask questions, share half formed ideas, and admit what they do not know?

Some organizations deliberately create these opportunities through communities of practice, cross functional projects, lunch and learn sessions, or simple conversation spaces. A Knowledge Café, for example, brings people together to explore a topic such as AI, not to reach a decision or produce a report, but to share experiences, ask questions, and think together. These conversations are planned, but what emerges from them isnot. Their purpose is not to control the outcome but to increase the likelihood that people, ideas, and problems will connect in useful ways.

Way Shaping Rather Than Directing

This is where the idea of way shaping becomes important. Rather than trying to direct how knowledge should spread, leaders shape the conditions in which it can spread more naturally. They pay attentionto relationships, trust, curiosity, diversity of connections, and opportunities for people to interact across organizational boundaries.

None of this guarantees that a valuable conversation will happen. Serendipity cannot be managed. But it can be mademore likely. By shaping the environment rather than directing the outcome, organizations increase the chances that the right conversation will happen atthe right moment between the right people. That is where some of an organization's most valuable learning takes place.

If we want knowledge to spread more freely, we should spend less time trying to control it and moret ime shaping the conditions in which good conversations can happen. We cannot plan every valuable exchange, but we can make it far more likely that the right people meet, talk, and learn from one another.

Note: This post The Power of Random Conversations first appeared in my online blook on Conversational Leadership.

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Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organizations handle information and influence decisions. Many treat it as a replacement for Knowledge Management, assuming better answers will follow.

The real challenge is how people think, question, and decide together with AI, which makes Conversational Leadership a practical discipline for responsible judgement and action.

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Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organizations handle information and what we often call knowledge. It is tempting to see it as a replacement for Knowledge Management, a more capable system that finally delivers what earlier approaches struggled to achieve. In one sense, that is understandable. AI can capture, retrieve, and synthesize information at a scale and speed that traditional repositories, taxonomies, and search tools never managed.

But if that is all we mean by Knowledge Management, then we have reduced it to something quite limited.

The deeper ambition was never just better storage or faster access. It was always about better judgment, better learning, and better decisions in situations that are often messy and uncertain. The challenge was never simply information. It was how we make sense of it together.

AI changes the terrain. It does not just store or retrieve information; it can participate in our flow of thinking. It can reframe questions, suggest connections, and influence what we notice. When we begin to think with AI rather than only use it as a tool, the line between information and knowledge becomes less clear.

AI works with representations of the past. It does not experience the present as we do, and it does not bear responsibility for what follows. That remains with us.

This matters because AI outputs often feel fluent and convincing. The risk is not that we know too little, but that we accept too quickly. We may find ourselves agreeing without fully examining what is being suggested or overlooking what is missing.

As AI strengthens the informational backbone of organizations, the real work shifts. It moves toward interpretation, alignment, and responsible action. It asks more of us in how we question what we see, how we surface assumptions, and how willing we are to stay with uncertainty rather than close things down too quickly.

Conversation becomes central here, but not just any conversation. Many organizational conversations reinforce existing patterns, avoid challenge, or defer to authority. For conversation to be useful in this context, the conditions need to support curiosity, allow for doubt, and enable thinking things through together without rushing to agreement.

This is where Conversational Leadership comes in, not as a role or a position, but as a practice. It is about creating the conditions in which people can think together more carefully, especially when the issues are complex and the answers are not obvious.

In the age of AI, that practice extends to how we engage with the technology itself. If AI becomes part of how thinking happens in organizations, then it also becomes part of the conversation. It needs to be questioned, tested, and worked with, not simply accepted.

Seen this way, AI is not an oracle that provides answers, but a participant in a broader system of sense making. It can extend our thinking, but it does not replace our responsibility for judgment, ethics, or action.

So, the question is less about what AI can do, and more about how we respond to it. Knowledge Management, in this light, becomes less about systems and more about our collective ability to make sense of things together in environments where AI is always present.

The tools will continue to evolve. The need to think well together, and to take responsibility for what we decide and do, remains a human concern.

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For decades, Knowledge Management (KM) has helped organizations answer a vital question: How do we know what we know?

Through lessons learned, Communities of Practice, taxonomies, collaboration technology, expertise location, and countless more approaches, KM has strengthened how knowledge flows around organizations. Long-time KM practitioners have shown how to design ecosystems that prevent reinvention and enable expertise to travel across boundaries.

But today, a deeper question is emerging:

How do we work together when what we already know is not enough?

This is where Conversational Leadership enters, not as a replacement for KM, but as its expansion.

From Knowledge Assets to Knowledge Flow

Traditional KM often emphasizes artifacts: documents, playbooks, databases, dashboards. These are essential. They stabilize information and extend organizational memory. Fully enhanced KM adds culture and process improvement aspects to KM.

Yet any knowledge is deeply contextual. What one person “knows” cannot be fully captured or transferred as static content. Something always remains tacit, embedded in experience, judgment, intuition, and interpretation.

Tacit knowledge does not travel well in files. It travels in conversation.

KM practices such as Peer Assists, Knowledge Cafés, After Action Reviews, and Communities of Practice succeed not because they produce documentation, but because they create dialogue. The real value is not the report; it is the reasoning, sense-making, and meaning-making that unfolds between people.

Conversational Leadership builds on this insight. It shifts attention from managing knowledge as content to cultivating knowledge as a relational, emergent flow.

The Flow of Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge includes pattern recognition, ethical stance, cultural awareness, emotional intelligence, practical wisdom and often exists in networks as much as it exists in an individual. It is the individual and collective lived dimension of knowing.

Tacit knowledge flows when people:

• Trust one another
• Listen deeply
• Ask deep questions
• Surface assumptions
• Engage in heightened dialogue

Conversational Leadership treats conversation not merely as a channel for sharing knowledge, but as the medium through which collective intelligence forms.

In complex environments, no individual holds the full answer. Meaning emerges through interaction. People reason together. They test interpretations. They challenge and refine assumptions. Through conversation, shared understanding has the potential to be created.

Knowledge is not only transferred—it is generated. And it is not only generated, it is relational and pressure tested. It is ever evolving.

Collective Reasoning and Sensemaking

Modern organizations operate in conditions of ambiguity and interdependence. Under these conditions, stored knowledge alone is insufficient.

KM provides an environment for organizational memory. Conversational Leadership provides adaptive capacity for deep organizational learning, sense-making, and meaning-making.

When teams face novel challenges, they cannot simply retrieve a best practice or even a novel practice. They must interpret signals, weigh competing perspectives, surface unspoken concerns, and decide together.

This is collective sensemaking.

Conversational skill becomes a strategic capability. The quality of reasoning in an organization depends on:

• How safely dissent can be voiced
• How rigorously assumptions are examined
• How clearly distinctions are made
• How aware people are of power, group dynamics, and conversational dynamics

Poor conversational habits distort knowledge flow. Unchecked power can silence insight. Speed can override reflection. Data and information too often substitute for understanding.

Conversational Leadership strengthens the micro-skills that enable better macro-decisions. It develops environments where thinking is visible and meaning can evolve.

The Next Horizon for KM

If early KM focused on repositories, and later KM emphasized networks and collaboration, the next horizon may be conversational awareness and skills.

KM practitioners are uniquely positioned to lead this shift. You already understand knowledge flows, barriers to sharing, and the importance of trust. You’ve worked hard to learn how to get buy-in and measure the immeasurable. Conversational Leadership furthers this momentum by focusing on how people reason together in real time. How people truly move things forward at the speed of need and understanding.

In an era shaped by rapid change and AI-enabled information abundance, the differentiator is not access to data. It is the ability to make sense of it together and take action from there.

The future of KM is not less human. It is more conversational.

Conversational Leadership does not replace Knowledge Management. It animates it, ensuring that knowledge remains alive, relational, and capable of guiding wise collective action.

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1. What Is Conversational Leadership?

Conversational Leadership is about how people think together, not simply how they talk.

In many organisations, conversation is treated as a way of exchanging information. Updates are given, reports are presented, and decisions are announced. Yet the real issue is whether those conversations are improving the quality of collective thinking.

Conversational Leadership focuses on the space between people. It pays attention to how questions are explored, how assumptions are surfaced, and how differences are handled. It treats conversation as the place where judgement is formed and direction is shaped.

In simple terms, it is the practice of strengthening how groups reason and decide together.

In simple terms, what makes it different from traditional leadership development?

Most leadership development programmes focus on the individual leader. They concentrate on personal skills, behaviours, or competencies.

Conversational Leadership shifts attention to the relational space. It asks how people influence the quality of thinking in the meetings and decisions they are part of. Leadership becomes less about authority and more about shared responsibility for how dialogue unfolds.

For those familiar with classical Knowledge Management, this represents a move away from treating knowledge as content to be managed and toward recognising knowledge as something enacted through interaction.

2. Why It Matters Now

Organisations are operating in conditions of uncertainty and complexity. No single person has a complete view of the situation, and information alone does not resolve ambiguity.

What is needed is the capacity to interpret and decide together in real time. That requires the ability to explore different perspectives without rushing to premature certainty.

Conversational Leadership strengthens this capacity. It encourages habits of inquiry, reflection, and collective responsibility for judgement.

Why should someone working in Knowledge Management care about this now?

Classical Knowledge Management focuses largely on organising, storing, and sharing information. That work remains valuable. However, access to information does not guarantee sound decisions.

Many KM initiatives fall short not because the knowledge is missing, but because the conversations around it are superficial or constrained. Lessons may be recorded, yet not deeply examined.

Conversational Leadership extends KM by strengthening the quality of engagement with knowledge. It supports the reasoning processes that turn information into effective action.

How does Conversational Leadership strengthen Knowledge Management in practice?

KM practices such as after action reviews, peer assists, and communities of practice rely on honest reflection and open dialogue. Without the right conversational conditions, they can become routine exercises.

Conversational Leadership focuses on those conditions. Are people able to speak candidly? Are questions genuinely exploratory? Is disagreement treated as a resource rather than a threat?

By improving how people engage with one another, these practices become more meaningful and more likely to influence future behaviour.

What role does AI and increasing uncertainty play in making this work more urgent?

AI is increasingly capable of managing and analysing information at scale. It can summarise, identify patterns, and support decision processes.

What it cannot replace is human judgement, ethical responsibility, and shared meaning making. As technology takes on more informational tasks, the human challenge becomes clearer.

The faster information moves, the more important it becomes to pause, reflect, and interpret together. In that sense, the rise of AI makes thoughtful dialogue more necessary, not less.

3. The Experience and the Impact

The workshop is participative and practical. Participants do not simply hear about conversation; they experience what it feels like to think together with greater care.

As the sessions unfold, people begin to notice their own patterns of interaction. They observe how quickly certainty arises, how hierarchy shapes participation, and how certain voices dominate or withdraw.

This awareness creates space for experimentation. Small adjustments in how questions are framed or how responses are given can noticeably shift the quality of dialogue.

What actually happens in the room? What will participants experience?

The format includes structured conversations, small group dialogues, reflection, and practical exercises. Participants work with real questions drawn from their own professional contexts.

The emphasis is on practice rather than theory. Rather than relying on extended presentations, the workshop creates opportunities to engage directly in dialogue and reflect on what is happening in real time.

The learning comes through experience, observation, and shared reflection.

From your experience, what do people tend to walk away with?

Participants often leave with a different understanding of leadership. They become more attentive to how conversations shape outcomes and culture.

Many report greater awareness of how meetings are framed, how questions are posed, and how disagreement is handled. They begin to see that small shifts in conversational practice can influence decision quality.

The outcome is not a single technique but a developing practice of paying attention to dialogue.

What kind of person will get the most value from this?

Those who are curious and open to examining their own assumptions tend to benefit most.

The work is especially relevant for people operating across organisational boundaries or dealing with complex and ambiguous issues.

Anyone who recognises that better conversations lead to better decisions, and who is willing to reflect on their own role in shaping those conversations, is likely to find the workshop valuable.

Shared Reflection

Over many years of working with groups, a clear pattern has emerged. The quality of conversation shapes the quality of collective action. That observation is what first drew us to this work.

Both of us (David and John) have seen capable, intelligent people struggle to make good decisions, not because they lacked information, but because the conversation closed down too quickly or became defensive. We have also seen ordinary groups produce thoughtful and balanced outcomes when they created the right conditions for dialogue.

What keeps us committed is the fact that the shift is often subtle yet powerful. A different way of framing a question. A pause before responding. An invitation that brings a quieter voice into the discussion. These small changes can alter the direction of a meeting and, over time, the culture of a team.

In a world of increasing complexity, pressure, and technological acceleration, the ability to think carefully together feels more important than ever. That continuing relevance, and the practical difference it can make, sustains our commitment to this work.

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