Gurteen Knowledge Letter December 2020 Issue 246

Gurteen Knowledge Letter – December 2020

Introduction

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year. I am hoping it will be a far better one than 2020.

And, here’s an interesting idea for 2021 to consider.

Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.

Credit: Tim O’Reilly

1. New blog and newsletter
   Moving from Lotus Notes to Wordpress
   
2. From Moral to Market Sentiments by Mark Carney
   Reith Lectures 2020 – How We Get What We Value
   
3. Would you rather be uninformed or misinformed?
   False quotations on the web
   
4. The Dialogic Mindset
   Leading Emergent Change in a Complex World
   
5. Is Bill Gates a force for good or evil?
   Bill Gates and conspiracy theories
   
6. Help Keep My Work Alive
7. Unsubscribe
8. Gurteen Knowledge Letter

You may have noticed something different about this month's newsletter. I have moved both my blog and my Knowledge Letter from my gurteen.com website to become part of my blook website conversational-leadership.net

The Gurteen website is over 20 years old and is based on an ancient version of Lotus Notes that is showing its age. Slowly, I plan to phase this site out and make conversational-leadership.net my main site. This is a WordPress site and should see me good for many years yet.

My work's focus has been transitioning slowly from Knowledge Management to Conversational Leadership, and with the new home for my blog and newsletter, this focus will intensify.

Here is my new blog and here you will eventually find all my future Knowledge Letters.

I hope you like the new format and content.

I caught this first Reith Lecture of 2020 From Moral to Market Sentiments by Mark Carney (former Bank of England governor) on Radio 4 this morning, where he reflects that whenever he could step back from what felt like daily crisis management, the same deeper issues loomed.

What is value? How does the way we assess value both shape our values and constrain our choices? How do the valuations of markets affect the values of our society?

What Mark has to say is a pleasant surprise coming from such a senior banker. The series is well worth the time to listen to.

I recently came across this quotation that I rather loved, supposedly from Mark Twain.

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed.

If you read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

I was a little suspicious of it as there are so many false quotes on the web, so I ran it past Quote Investigator.

Sure enough, Mark Twain never said this. I was misinformed. But as ever Quote Investigator has done a wonderful job in trying to track down the source.

If you are interested in dialogic OD and how leadership needs to adapt to better cope with our increasingly complex world, this paper from Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak should be of interest: The Dialogic Mindset: Leading Emergent Change in a Complex World.

In the paper, they make seven assumptions about a dialogic mindset for leaders.  This mindset has much in common with Conversational Leadership.

1. Reality and relationships are socially constructed.
2. Organizations are social networks of meaning-making.
3. Transformational leadership shapes how meaning is made and especially the narratives which guide people's experience.
4. Organizations are continuously changing, in both intended and unintended ways, with multiple changes occurring at various speeds.
5. Groups and organizations are inherently self-organizing, but disruption is required for transformational adaptation and change.
6. Adaptive challenges are too complex for anyone to analyze all the variables and know the correct answer in advance, so the answer is to use emergent change processes.
7. Leading emergent change requires mobilizing stakeholders to self-initiate action, then monitoring and embedding the most promising initiatives.

What people believe to be true, right, and important emerge through socialization and day-today conversations.

Credit: The Dialogic Mindset by Gervase Bushe & Robert Marshak

Several conspiracy theories are circulating about Bill Gates, such as the microchip conspiracy theory. Astonishingly, a YouGov poll of 1,640 people suggests that 28% of Americans believe that he wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people.

To gain some idea of the diversity of opinion about him - browse this Linkedin comment thread where Bill, Rashida Jones, and Yuval Noah Harari discuss COVID conspiracy theories.

Next, check out some of the amazing work he is doing at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and peruse his blog GatesNotes.

Finally, visit Exemplars in Global Health and explore their work:

Success at scale may have many origins.

The quickest path is to identify who else has done it, find out how they did it, and adapt their strategy to your own circumstances.

Exemplars in Global Health aims to help public health decision-makers around the world do exactly this.

This is quintessential Knowledge Management and an example, although not a perfect one, of Positive Deviance in action.

I find the negative opinions of Bill Gates disturbing but not too surprising given the peculiar attraction of conspiracy theories.

For almost 25 years, I've been sharing the Gurteen Knowledge Letter each month, and many of you have been reading it for five years or more. My Knowledge Café also reached a milestone, celebrating its 20th anniversary in September 2022.

If my work has made a difference to you, I'd be grateful if you could consider supporting it. A small monthly donation or any one-off contribution would greatly help cover some of my website hosting costs.

Thank you to the 50+ patrons who have already supported me - your generosity means a great deal.

If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please reply to this email with "no newsletter" in the subject line. I'll be sorry to see you go.

The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a free monthly email newsletter designed to inspire thinking around Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management. You can explore the archive of past issues here.

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Feel free to share, copy, or reprint any part of this newsletter with friends, colleagues, or clients, as long as it's not for resale or profit and includes proper attribution. If you have any questions, please contact me.

David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom

Gurteen Knowledge Letter March 2026

Gurteen Knowledge Letter January 2021