Extracted from Radical Knowledge Management: using lessons learned from artists to create sustainable workplaces, in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: AI in Business, Knowledge and Innovation Management Section.

Next Creative KM Certification class is coming up: Oct 15, 17, 22, 24, 2024 (half days, 9am-12:30pm EST).  Based on the "Radical KM" methodology and taught by the author of the program, Stephanie Barnes. Details here...

What is Radical KM?

Radical KM is a call to action for knowledge management to step outside the box and consider the needs of knowledge workers. What do knowledge workers need in order to be successful in the 21st century? What will help them deal with the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) of our organisations and economic systems.

While a balanced approach to people, process, and technology are what make knowledge management successful, technology, is, at best, an enabler, not the end point or even the point of knowledge management. Knowledge management is about connecting people to the knowledge they need to do their jobs. In the past this has been about processes to extract and share knowledge and the technology to store and facilitate knowledge transfer. It has been about stores of knowledge; however, the further society moves into the knowledge and digital age the less it needs stores of knowledge. Stores of knowledge maximized efficiency and effectiveness but minimized creativity and innovation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) drives this even further by being able to learn and perform human-like tasks.

One of the things that differentiates humans from AI is our creativity and yet, this is the very thing that has been educated out of us in our focus to be efficient and effective. It is knowledge management’s job to bring it back, to facilitate it within our organisations, this is the knowledge that people need in order to do their jobs in the 21st century. In the age of AI people will do the things that AI is not good at: creativity.

(Figure 1: Radical Knowledge Management)

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Why consider Conversational Leadership?
Our world has notable peace and turmoil. We can see peace between countries that were at war just a few decades ago. And we can see peace in communities and families that have worked through their challenges. Alongside this peace, we can also see turmoil in countries, communities, and families.

Peace and turmoil exist within each of us as individuals also. I can experience moments of happiness, joy, calm, and contentment within myself, and I can also feel moments of anger, disappointment, confusion, and strife within myself.

There are many ways to look at peace and turmoil. We can look at them through a technological lens. For example, we’ve seen technology expand from audio to video, to automation, to prediction and beyond. We can also look at peace and turmoil through a leadership lens. For example, we’ve seen leadership expand from styles of directive, to supportive, to coaching, to delegation, and to collaborative.

How does this relate to KM?
Knowledge Management has progressed collaboration and the flow of knowledge for several decades now. We’ve seen KM expand from within a single organization or community or nation to more and more examples of “external-facing” KM.

Given your specific purpose and objective of KM, we’ve collectively seen quite a bit of KM technology. For example, the “Conversation Prism” offers hundreds of techniques to serve specific collaboration needs. We’ve also seen many KM processes. For example, Knowledge Transfer processes, Expertise Location processes, Knowledge Café processes, etc.

Conversational Leadership has the potential to be another expansion of KM culture, processes, and tools. Especially from a cultural perspective, it is quite often that we hear about the challenges of “buy-in for KM” and “barriers to knowledge sharing.” Most organizations are hierarchical in their design, and so we often hear about “top-down” or “bottom-up” or even “peer-to-peer” patterns of influence and decision making. What if the concept of leadership was based on both your position and your leadership skills? What if we reminded ourselves of the difference between leaders and leadership, and more purposefully balanced the individual and collective aspects of leadership?

As KM continues to grow and expand from information management to experience management, to idea management, to collective leadership and beyond, we have an opportunity to develop from collaboration, innovation, and decision making to complexity, sensemaking, and Conversational Leadership.

Patricia Shaw, a former professor at the Business School at the University of Hertfordshire and founder of the Complexity and Management Centre, says,

“One of the ways of thinking about leadership, is thinking about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise.”

We often provide KM tools and techniques as broad solutions to challenges, similar to how engineers apply engineering tools and techniques to problems. Most of us think that we’re defining the challenge as best we can, and thinking as broadly as we can about the solutions. What if it were less about defining the problem, even less about the answers, and more about skillfully creating and contributing to an environment where conversations can flourish? Maybe that’s similar to one of the KM definitions of “creating an environment in which unique and critical knowledge can flow?" Notice the focus on conversation and leadership in this case.

What is Conversational Leadership?
Conversational Leadership is about appreciating the extraordinary but underutilized power of conversation, recognizing that we can all lead, and adopting a conversational approach to the way in which we live and work together in an increasingly complex world.

It is a relationship-building and community-building vehicle. It helps us to understand each other better and, in doing so, better understand ourselves. Furthermore, it is a collective sensemaking tool that helps us make better sense of the world and thus improve our decision making by bringing different perspectives to bear on an issue.

How to learn more
David Gurteen and I are running a Conversational Leadership workshop in the UK from 3-7 August 2020.

You will spend much of your time in conversation during the workshop:

• First, to make sense of the Conversational Leadership concept and its principles
• Second, to practice and improve your conversational skills
• Third, to build strong relationships with the other participants and create a sense of community

You will learn about and experience two powerful conversational methods, the Knowledge Café and the C-group.

The Knowledge Café is a conversational process that brings a group of people together to make a better sense of a complex issue, share experiences, learn from each other, and build stronger relationships. Many of the sessions will take the format of a talk followed by a Knowledge Café to allow you to fully engage with each other and make better sense of the material.

The C-group is an experiential and transformative learning methodology that enables a small group of people to practice and develop their interpersonal and conversational skills. You will take part in several C-group sessions throughout the workshop.

Conclusion
Conversational Leadership may be an extension of KM, or it may become an entirely new discipline, or it may blur into a new discipline. What an exciting opportunity to learn and contribute to the emergence of a potentially new discipline. Let’s practice a way to continuously respond to these questions together:

• Are we having the conversation(s) we need to be having right now?
• Are we having those conversations in the way we need to be having them?
• In what ways are we building or breaking down our community through these conversations?

The essence of Conversational Leadership is to make sense of the complexity we face every day through conversations that have awareness and discussion similar to the questions above. The potential application of Conversational Leadership might be one aspect of the way to provide inner and outer peace for us all.

We're sharing with you here a series of short discussions captured on video between Stephanie Barnes and John Girard about the use of creativity in knowledge management. It came about because of the chapter that Stephanie wrote for the book John and JoAnn Girard created and edited called, Knowledge Management Matters: Words of Wisdom from Leading Practitioners. 

We seem to have spent so much time in the last 100+ years trying to drive efficiency and effectiveness into our processes. How to do things faster, with more quality, with better outcomes, reduce waste, reduce re-work. These are not bad things, but in our push to be effective and efficient many of our organisations have removed time for reflection, for questioning, for considering alternatives out of the process. These chats look at a different motivator for knowledge management: creativity and how it can be used to facilitate innovation. 

There are nine videos in the series and the topics range from how creativity, innovation, and knowledge management fit together to how to enable innovation through diversity and what organisational mindsets are helpful in when innovation is the goal.

We hope you enjoy the series as much as John and Stephanie enjoyed making it. You can see the full set of videos in this YouTube Playlist.  

For this first in a series of videos about knowledge management, creativity, and innovation Stephanie Barnes (www.realisation-of-potential.com) is interviewed by John Girard (www.johngirard.net) and shares her thoughts knowledge management’s challenges and the possible role creative leadership plays in creating a culture that supports organisational learning.

Click anywhere on Video image to launch.  A new window will open on YouTube.

What is KM about?

It depends on who you ask and what their experience is with it. Some people/organisations focus on technology, some on people, some on process, a very few recognise that it needs to be a balance among the three, and for good measure also create a strategy to support their plans and ideas and to ensure alignment with the organisation.

But beyond that, what is knowledge management about? Why do we/our organisations do it? 

For many organisations and people the answer, has to do with learning, and being able to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. I always liked to say it’s about giving people the knowledge they need to do their jobs, whatever form that knowledge took. But, what if it’s not quite that easy, especially as jobs, like life, are becoming ever more complex?

It’s really not enough to give people a database or app or platform to share knowledge. It’s not enough to implement a lessons learned process, or communities of practice. All good and noble pursuits, but what if that’s not enough to deal with the complexity?

The World Economic Forum’s most recent Future of Jobs Report, a summary of which you can read here, says we need to be life long learners. It also lists the top 3 skills that are growing in need/importance:

1. Analytical thinking, and innovation
2. Active learning, and learning strategies
3. Creativity, originality, and initiative

What struck me most about the #1 item on that list, is that is is both analytical and creative, it requires “both sides of your brain” (yes, I know that we have found that that’s not physically how the brain actually works, but I like the metaphor of it, so I’m using it anyway). But so for so many people their creativity was educated and socialised right out of them. They needed to get good marks in school, do well at their jobs, etc. and so in order to fit in they learned to regurgitate facts and think like everyone else.

However, in today’s world, and in the world that is quickly coming at us, regurgitating facts and doing what we’re told, isn’t enough, doing the “same old, same old” isn’t enough. It’s time to look at things differently, to learn new ways of doing things, to re-learn our lost creativity. KM programs should be supporting that, after-all they are about organisational learning, creating new knowledge (which is innovation, by the way).

And, one of the best things about focusing on creativity and innovation is, people understand what those terms mean, no one understands what knowledge management is. Another great thing about creativity and innovation, is that there is lots of research that supports its importance to people and the workplace, something that can’t be said about KM (mostly because KM can’t decide what it is, not that it’s not useful).

So, for all you KM people out there, don’t you want to take your KM activities to the next level of organisational learning? Help make your organisations innovative and creative? Help them meet the challenges of the age we live in?

Let’s talk about helping people re-learn their creativity!

Note: this was originally posted at https://www.realisation-of-potential.com/creativity/taking-your-km-program-to-the-next-level/