Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 316 – October 2026
Increasingly, I find myself spending my time exploring and developing the ideas behind Conversational Leadership, and writing about them in my online blook. Much of that thinking comes from conversation.
This year I have been running regular Knowledge Cafés, including three recent Cafés exploring the impact of AI on conversation. I have also been working closely with my good friend and colleague John Hovell, exchanging ideas with people around the world, and learning from the comments and challenges I receive through my blog and this Knowledge Letter. All of these conversations feed back into my thinking and writing.
Alongside this, I coach and am increasingly invited to give short talks and webinars on Conversational Leadership and related topics. Recently these have included conversations with business students in Singapore and India, university students in Uganda, and a network of lawyers in London.
I would like to do more of this. So if Conversational Leadership interests you, or you think a talk, Knowledge Café, coaching conversation, or simple exchange of ideas might be useful for your organization, university, network, or community, please get in touch. I am always happy to explore possibilities.
Contents
- Does It Matter How We Talk to AI?
Our conversational habits with AI may carry over into how we talk with others - Knowledge Management at the Scale of Society
Exploring Jonathan Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge - We Have More Freedom Than We Think
Practising Conversational Leadership when our freedom is limited - Quote of the Month
October 2026 - Reading Worth Your Time
Curated links, October 2026 - Events
Talks, Knowledge Cafés and Workshops - Keep My Work Alive Sustaining 25 Years of shared learning and conversation
- Coaching Bringing Conversational Leadership into your daily practice
- Unsubscribe Unsubscribe to the Knowledge-Letter
- Gurteen Knowledge Letter A monthly reflection on Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management
Does It Matter How We Talk to AI?
Our conversational habits with AI may carry over into how we talk with others
A week or so ago, I hosted a Knowledge Café exploring the impact of anthropomorphising AI: what happens when we start to interact with an AI as if it were another person?
It was a fascinating conversation. We explored how anthropomorphism can make interaction with AI feel more natural, while also encouraging us to attribute understanding, feelings and agency to systems that do not possess them.
I have now added a summary of the Café conversation, based on the transcript, to the event page. It captures many of the different perspectives that emerged, as well as some of the questions that remained unresolved.
Since then, I came across an interesting article in Psyche, The way we talk to bots matters even if they aren’t conscious. It adds another dimension to the conversation.
The argument is not that an AI deserves our politeness because it has feelings. It is that how we talk to AI may affect us.
Research described in the article suggests that our interactions with artificial agents can spill over into subsequent interactions with humans. In one series of experiments involving more than 4,000 participants, people who first interacted with a bot subsequently behaved less cooperatively towards a human than those who had initially interacted with another person. The researchers found evidence that reduced empathy played a part.
These are early findings, but they raise an intriguing possibility. If we repeatedly practise being impatient, abrupt or dismissive with AI, perhaps we are rehearsing conversational habits that do not remain neatly confined to our interactions with machines.
Perhaps every conversation is, in some small way, practice for the next one.
We don't have to believe that an AI has feelings to care about how we speak to it. The more interesting question may be what our conversations with AI are teaching us about how to converse.
Knowledge Management at the Scale of Society
Exploring Jonathan Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge
I have spent much of my recent working life in and around Knowledge Management. But I have never thought of it as being solely about how organizations manage their knowledge. A much bigger question is this: how do we, as a society, create knowledge we can reasonably trust?
That question has been on my mind again since I discovered Jonathan Rauch and his book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.
Rauch uses the phrase “constitution of knowledge” for the norms, practices, people, and institutions through which societies establish what counts as reliable knowledge. No individual gets the final word. Claims are questioned, evidence examined, assumptions challenged, and errors corrected. Knowledge emerges from this continuing social process.
That immediately caught my attention. How do we collectively make sense of the world? How do we decide which claims deserve our trust? How do we disagree productively and correct ourselves when we get things wrong? These are Knowledge Management questions at the level of society and civilization.
They are also deeply conversational questions. We do not make sense of a complex world alone. We think together, question one another, disagree, reconsider and sometimes change our minds. Conversation is not merely a way of communicating knowledge. It is one of the ways through which knowledge comes into being.
I have created a book page for The Constitution of Knowledge where I have collected material that explores Rauch's thinking. It includes a short video review, a short video critique, and a longer interview with Rauch.
We Have More Freedom Than We Think
Practising Conversational Leadership when our freedom is limited
I give quite a few talks, webinars, and Knowledge Cafés on Conversational Leadership, and one question comes up again and again.
“What if I work in a command-and-control culture where I don't feel free to speak up or do things differently?”
Sometimes the concern goes further. People tell me that taking initiative could be seen as challenging authority or even put their job at risk. These are real constraints, and we should not underestimate them.
But having limited freedom is not the same as having no freedom at all. We can too easily move from “I can't do very much” to “I can't do anything.”
Conversational Leadership does not have to mean launching an initiative, convening a large group, or openly challenging the way things are done. It can be much quieter and more ordinary than that. We can ask a better question in a meeting, listen more carefully to a colleague, invite someone for coffee, make space for a different point of view, or introduce two people who might benefit from talking with each other.
None of this needs to be labeled Conversational Leadership. Often, we don't need anyone's permission. Nor does it need to threaten, undermine or bypass those with formal authority.
The question I increasingly encourage people to ask is not “What would I do if I had more freedom?” but:
“What conversational freedom do I have from where I am?”
The answer will be different for each of us. Sometimes that freedom may be quite limited. But there is usually some room to act, however small, and one conversation can sometimes open possibilities that were not visible before.
I explore this in more depth, including a story from my own time at Lotus Development when I had a great deal of responsibility but almost no formal authority, in Working with the Conversational Freedom We Have.
Quote of the Month
October 2026
Each month, I feature a quotation that I have found particularly thought-provoking. If you enjoy it, you might also like my Quote of the Day service, which delivers a carefully selected quotation by email at a frequency you choose. You can browse the collection and subscribe here:
One of the ways of thinking about leadership is thinking about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise.
Comment:
In complex situations, no one person can see the whole picture or know in advance what needs to be done. The work of leadership is often not to provide the answer, but to bring people together so that different perspectives can meet, assumptions can be questioned and a way forward can emerge.
Anyone can do this. Practising Conversational Leadership begins with noticing the conversation that is missing and taking responsibility for convening it.
Reading Worth Your Time
Curated links, October 2026
Each month, I share three articles that made me stop, think, and sometimes rethink my own assumptions. I hope they stimulate your thinking as much as they did mine.
Dartmouth Dialogues
Dartmouth College is making dialogue a deliberate part of university life. Dartmouth Dialogues aims to equip students, faculty and staff to engage across differences through respectful listening, open exchange and constructive dialogue. I was particularly struck by its emphasis on dialogue as something to practise, not simply learn about, and by the connection it makes between dialogue, relationships, collective responsibility and navigating complexity. Read the article
Why You Should Talk Before You Write
Rod Naquin explores a deceptively simple idea: conversation can do something that writing cannot. Drawing on Socrates and Cervantes, he argues that a written text cannot respond, clarify or change when questioned, while conversation can. His phrase “talk is upstream of text” particularly resonates with my own thinking about conversation as a way of thinking together. Read the article
Seven Rules of Good Conversation
Ian Leslie offers seven practical rules for avoiding bad conversation, from knowing when to stop talking to recognising that good conversation requires us to contribute as well as listen. What I like is his attention to conversation as a shared activity: neither dominating nor withdrawing, but taking some responsibility for making the encounter worthwhile. Read the article
Events
Talks, Knowledge Cafés and Workshops
I host regular Knowledge Cafés, both in person in London and online via Zoom. Open to all, they provide an opportunity for shared learning, reflection, and conversation.
My next Zoom Café, “Are we offloading our thinking to AI?”, takes place on Tuesday 3 November 2026, 14:00 to 15:30 GMT (London time). We will explore cognitive offloading: when AI helps us think more deeply, and when it may spare us the thinking through which we learn. Details and registration.
On Tuesday 8 December 2026, 14:00 to 18:00 GMT (London time), I will run an online Gurteen Knowledge Café Workshop, teaching you how to design and host your own Cafés, both face-to-face and online. The workshop is practical and conversational, with opportunities to experience the Café process for yourself. Details and registration.
I also run tailored Knowledge Cafés for organisations, networks, and professional societies. For more information, see here.
Keep My Work Alive
Sustaining 25 Years of shared learning and conversation
For 26 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.
Coaching
Bringing Conversational Leadership into your daily practice
If you're curious about how a more conversational approach might shift the way you work with others, whether in leading, learning, or collaborating, I offer one-to-one coaching tailored to your context.
We explore real challenges and possibilities through dialogue, helping you develop your own way of practicing Conversational Leadership in daily work.
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Gurteen Knowledge Letter
A monthly reflection on Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management
The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a free monthly email newsletter, in its 25th year, designed to inspire thinking on Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management. You can explore the archive of past issues and subscribe here.
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
