Equinor Management Training Cafés You learn when you converse

Background

At one time, the Norwegian oil company Statoil (now Equinor) innovatively employed the Knowledge Café in their management training. I find this application quite impactful and have outlined the process below.

They illustrated the use of the Café by aiding a group of young managers in comprehending the challenges of terminating an employee. A similar approach was applied to various other training exercises.

While I can’t recall their exact steps, I’d envision something along these lines if I designed a Café like this myself.

The Process

The room is set up in Café style. The young managers sit with a few more experienced managers at small tables in groups of three or four. As with any Café, this works best for between 12 and 24 people.

The speaker is a more experienced manager. She tells the story of when she was a younger manager and faced the difficult decision to fire an employee.

She completes the story, and without telling her decision, she asks the participants whether they think she should have fired the employee.

The group then goes into Café mode to discuss the question.

What is interesting about this setup is that we have a group of inexperienced managers. We also have a small number of more senior experienced managers in the room, and when they move tables, they make sure that there is not more than one senior manager at any table.

After the small group conversations, the group returns and forms the Café circle, and the conversation continues.

Next follows a round-robin where each person expresses their opinion on whether they would have fired the employee or taken alternative action.

Finally, the speaker reveals what she did at the time and why she made that decision. She also expresses her opinion about whether she would still decide the same given her experience today.

This way, the whole topic comes to life, and the room has tremendous engagement and learning.

HR procedures must be followed when considering firing or disciplining someone, so it still makes sense for somebody from HR to do a short, more traditional presentation explaining these procedures.

This is straightforward as it is relatively black-and-white and can be done as a separate session, ideally before the Café.

But the decision to fire somebody, discipline them, or take alternative action is not black-and-white – it is a complex, value-laden decision. This is where the value of the conversation comes in and the importance of exploring the different perspectives of the managers in the room.

This story is specific, but the principles can easily be applied to other training situations.

Questions for reflection

• Where and how could you adapt the Knowledge Café in your work to make a conventional training session or presentation more conversational and thus more engaging?