Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 262 – April 2022
My new series of online Conversational Leadership Cafés are off to a good start. I have run two so far: the first on The Knowledge Delusion, the second on Disagree Constructively, and the third coming up later this month on Why is respect important in society?
What I love about these Cafés is their global nature. My last Café had over 80 people registered from 23 countries though only half that number showed up on the day.
I think this ability to converse globally through technologies such as Zoom will, over time, have an immense impact on the world.
And don’t forget John Hovell, Donita Volkwijn, Saule Menane, and I are running our Conversational Leadership workshop as a short course with the Project Management Center for Excellence at the University of Maryland as one of their Executive Project Management programs in May.
Contents
- The Journey
The remarkable friendship between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness - The tragic death of Michel de Montaigne
The most fruitful and natural play of the mind is in conversation - Scribbled sentences
A writing lesson from Charles Darwin - Two Interesting Theories of Reason
Social reasoning and the narrative paradigm - Help Keep My Work Alive
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The Journey
The remarkable friendship between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness
The film drama The Journey is a fictional account of the true story of how Northern Ireland's political enemies, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, formed an unlikely political alliance.
You can watch a clip from the start of the film and a clip from the end of the film, and if you have access to Amazon Prime, you can watch the entire movie here.
I am sure you are familiar with the troubles in Northern Ireland that lasted about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998, but here is a short video of the life of Ian Paisley that summarizes the Troubles and the eventual Good Friday Agreement.
I am well aware that the story of the journey is fictitious, as this article in the Guardian makes clear. Still, the two men did strike up a remarkable friendship, given their political views were so polarised.
Despite the fiction, I still enjoyed the story, as it is a beautiful example of what conversation across divides has the potential to achieve.
The tragic death of Michel de Montaigne
The most fruitful and natural play of the mind is in conversation
Michele Montaigne was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. I have long admired him and love quotations from his work, especially those relating to conversation.
I just learned on Wikipedia that he died of quinsy at the age of 59 in 1592 at the Château de Montaigne. The disease paralyzed his tongue - a tragic end to his life, given he once said:
In my opinion, the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is in conversation.
I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice.
Scribbled sentences
A writing lesson from Charles Darwin
I recently came across this quotation from Charles Darwin, and it immediately resonated with me.
There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement or proposition in a wrong or awkward form.
Formerly I used to think about my sentences before writing them down; but for several years I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile hand whole pages as quickly as I possibly can, contracting half the words; and then correct deliberately.
Sentences thus scribbled down are often better ones than I could have written deliberately.
My best writing, at least in my opinion, is when I dictate a stream of words into a little app called Captio on my iPhone to be turned into text and emailed into Evernote. Later, I will come back and clean up the text, often using Grammarly to pick up and correct my lousy punctuation and grammatical habits.
The process works beautifully for me, and like Darwin, I think what I write in this way comes out far better than if I had written it deliberately in a more traditional manner.
You will find more about Darwin's information collecting and writing habits in this blog post.
Two Interesting Theories of Reason
Social reasoning and the narrative paradigm
I have been working in the Knowledge Management field for over twenty years, and I am still amazed when I stumble over theories and ideas I should have learned about years ago.
Last year, I uncovered The Argumentive Theory of Human Reasoning - a theory proposed by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier in 2010 that argues that we evolved to reason socially, not as individuals.
And then, only last week, while digging deeper into the concept of narrative, I came across Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm, which posits that all meaningful communication occurs via storytelling or reporting of events. The theory further claims that stories are more persuasive than arguments.
In some ways, this is not new to me; Dave Snowden, Steve Denning, and many others have been talking and writing about storytelling and narrative for many years, but strangely, I never heard them mention the Narrative Paradigm and Walter Fischer.
These two theories, if valid, totally reconceptualize how we reason and are already making an impact on how I think about Conversational Leadership.
Help Keep My Work Alive
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 already support me – your generosity means a lot.
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Gurteen Knowledge Letter
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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David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom
