In 2006, I ran a knowledge-sharing workshop for an international organization in Zurich. As part of the workshop, I ran a Knowledge Café. The experience transformed my understanding of the power of the Café process.
The Knowledge Café
In several of my early public Knowledge Cafés, I talked a little about knowledge sharing and posed the question:
“What are the barriers to knowledge sharing and how might you overcome them?”
This question always worked well, and people engaged with it. So, in this Café, I asked:
“What are the barriers to knowledge sharing in your organization and how might you overcome them?”
We had only got a few minutes into the small group conversations when one of the women managers stood up and said:
“David stop, stop, we have got to stop.”
I was a little surprised as I thought there was a severe problem. However, the manager explained that the conversations raised so many issues that she had to capture them.
The Lesson
Until then, I had never attempted to capture the outcomes of a Café.
And so we continued the Café, but the manager stood outside the Café circle and wrote the issues that surfaced on a flipchart.
I had not realized that there were three different departments in the room, and this was the first time they had ever talked to each other.
Thus, it was not surprising that the Café participants discovered so many issues in how they worked together.
The group surfaced three types of problems.
- The first category consisted of relatively simple issues that resulted mainly from people not talking to each other. They were easy to resolve by one person saying to the other: “Let’s meet for coffee tomorrow morning and discuss this.”
- The second category included issues where the individual needed permission from their manager to take action.
- Third, there were more complex issues that only senior management could address. These were captured for review and potential action.
By far, most of the issues fell into the first category, where I felt the real power of the Café came into play. Café conversations led to further discussions, deepening relationships, and new collaborative efforts.
The Magic
I also realized there was some magic going on. The small group conversations were surfacing issues that might otherwise have remained hidden.
As one person raised an issue, it triggered the memories and thinking of the others in the group, and they eagerly engaged.
As described in the quote below, there was a ‘cascading’ effect. The conversation took on a life of its own, scurrying between topics.
Listening to others’ verbalized experiences stimulates memories, ideas, and experiences in participants.
This is also known as the group effect where group members engage in “a kind of ‘chaining’ or ‘cascading’ effect; talk links to, or tumbles out of, the topics and expressions preceding it”
Feedback
A few months after the event, the manager who invited me to run the workshop wrote the following in an email.
Particular mention must be made to the concept of the “knowledge cafe”. As pioneered by David and taught to my staff, it has led to a dramatic improvement in terms of inter-team dialog, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Many internal work processes are now being overhauled for the better as a result of these knowledge cafes, and we have seen an explosion of new ideas and initiatives on the part of staff at all levels of the organization.
Simply put, the knowledge cafe format has empowered all our staff to speak up and take the initiative in ensuring the successful development of our organization.
This experience led me to create the Innovation Café a few years later.
This Café inspired me. I realized that people did not talk with each other in many organizations, resulting in many unseen problems and opportunities. The Knowledge Café was a potent conversational tool for surfacing these issues and generating the motivation to tackle them.
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