8 ■ Knowledge Café Environment for Dealing with Tough Conversations

8.1. “I DON’T SEE COLOR” IS NONSENSE: RACIAL RECONCILIATION THROUGH KNOWLEDGE CAFÉ DIALOGUE

I have called for a Knowledge Café to focus on the topic of understanding racial justice. Do you think you know the other race? Unapplied knowledge is useless. Applied knowledge is wisdom. With wisdom, you build a house that accommodates a family with different personalities. But the house will fall apart without understanding. You establish, rejuvenate, and freshen up the house—now home with knowledge.

One of the wisest men who ever lived, King Solomon said,

By wisdom, a house is built, and by understanding, it is established; by knowledge, the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.

—Proverbs 24:3–4 (NKJV, 1982)

The emphasis is on wisdom, knowledge, and specifically understanding as the sole tool to establish what we build. There is also righteousness and justice. They go together.

Everyone agrees that race is probably the most challenging conversation. That is because there is a right way and a wrong way to handle it. Some people respond to it from a righteousness perspective, especially whites, but black and brown people discuss it from the justice angle. Some people on both sides of the debate respond from a self-righteousness point of view. However, my call is to be a bridge-builder—a reconciler. From this vantage point, I have witnessed some people, quickly and simultaneously, go into their enclaves whenever there’s a discussion about race. Some keep silent, which is understandable because they don’t want to say the wrong thing and be bashed as racists.

Many honest white friends sincerely talk about race but don’t understand how the other side perceives their honesty. They think that they understand black and brown people so well that they often unintentionally make terrible and offensive comments. Some even believe that the more honest you are, the more politically correct you become, which is not true.

Some honest black and brown people make others feel guilty about their ancestors’ racial injustices, causing them to walk on eggshells for the rest of their lives. I’m afraid that’s not right either. Hence, the efficacy of understanding. I’ve brought people of all races together for the past 18 years to a café dialogue. Because of my café mindset, I believe that I understand and empathize with each side very well. There’s no such thing as “I don’t see color.” We all have biases and prejudices, but it doesn’t make all of us racists. We lack understanding. We lack action.

There are several ways that a community can begin this difficult dialogue, rather than just talking about it or taking sides. We need knowledge and wisdom, but the most important tool is understanding to tackle racism and its demons. Honesty. I know some guilty people who mask their real selves with bumper stickers and slogans and cannot come to the table. Knowledge leaders need to take the lead. Come to the table.

How many times have you kept quiet for fear of saying the wrong thing or becoming defensive, saying, “I’m not the problem”? In this instance, you better know what you are talking about or shut up! Others become a chameleon—fearful of revealing their true nature. The solution to bridging the breach between races can be as simple as stating, “I want to understand how people in your community feel, think, talk, and why.” Aha! You got it now. Now summon your courage. Challenge your fears. Accept the realities. We all see color, whether intentionally, unintentionally, or instinctively. Let’s have a café. Listen. Listen. Listen to each other. Ask questions, understand, dialogue—this café.

8.2. KNOWLEDGE CAFÉ, SECURITY IN THE RISE OF DEVSECOPS, AND AGILE/WATERFALL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

The cafés provide nonjudgmental spaces where we can voice crazy ideas, have others think about them, and test them out. Without space where we can take risks, innovation will not happen. You can also argue that a Knowledge Café is an “idea safe space” rather than just a place.

As stated earlier, the café is a simple mindset. This mindset can help to design a KM environment. With a café approach, any conversation in response to a complicated and challenging situation is possible. You can use this mindset and space to respond to security in the rise of software development and IT operations (DevSecOps).

In 2019, ransomware attacks on the City of Baltimore, ASCO Industries, and The Weather Channel were just a few issues dominating the headlines. According to Cybercrime Magazine (Morgan, 2017), ransomware is projected to attack one business every 14 seconds by the end of 2019, up from every 40 seconds in 2018; global ransomware damage costs is predicted to hit $11.5 billion by 2019. In 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic scrambled our health care systems, revealed our vulnerabilities, and shone a spotlight on health care research’s critical role in national security. Researchers across all industries are forced to adopt holistic security controls that hold device manufacturers accountable to security requirements, incentivize security by design, and train all personnel to be cyber hygienic by default and security conscious.

We shop, bank, and even find love online, and hackers are having a field day. Should security be left only for certain stakeholders like IT operations teams? Where is the interface of security in software development and IT operation (DevOps)? DevSecOps? Kanban (Just in Time) and Scrum Agile methods are DevOps friends that organizations can use to speed and improve development and product releases. So, how do we stay a step ahead of hackers?

How do you create champions between competing and diametrically opposite but complementary team approaches—DevOps or Waterfall/Agile? The waterfall is a traditional or structured project management methodology. Its outcomes are predictive and often very rigid. On the other hand, Agile is seen as a mindset based on an incremental, iterative approach, mostly for projects with unclear requirements like software development. Agile is a project methodology and approach that is derived using Lean thinking. Agile software development methodologies are open to changing requirements over time and encourage constant feedback from the end users.

My friends, you can create security champions on your company’s development team, Agile champions on a waterfall team, and project champions on an Operations team. For instance, IT security teams and software development teams share a common goal of putting quality code into production. However, how often do we see clan control, unrealistic expectations, and wars between them?

DevOps is a set of practices, mindsets, or cultures that combine software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the software development life cycle. Like other business ideologies, the goal of DevOps is to deliver features, fixes, and updates frequently with programming agility and customer-centricity. This brings post-implementation operations to the development life cycle early to ensure the new products and systems’ supportability. In the IT software development orbit, teams are challenged to work together more effectively and innovate more freely and collaboratively. As seen in figure 4, the DevOps life cycle is based on:

According to MarketsandMarkets (2018) research, “The DevOps market size is expected to grow from USD 2.90 Billion in 2017 to USD 10.31 Billion by 2023.”

BENEFITS OF DEVOPS

DevOps offers many benefits over a more traditional separation of development and operations. Hence, it provides many services, including

Agile and DevOps is the organic pairing that creates the framework, the right mindset, unified responsibility, culture, and an environment that facilitates innovation and digital transformation. Also, they provide greater visibility and more readily realized cost savings (or avoidance).

In today’s world, increasingly prevalent cyber threats and erudite hackers, whose tools and practices have grown increasingly sophisticated, are outplaying everyone and eating our lunches! Hackers have been very good at agile programming for a long time—much longer than mainstream software developers. Organizations and individuals now face unprecedented security vulnerabilities, even as applications are becoming more complex and organizations grow ever more entangled in the networks. In the knowledge economy, every area of our lives is going digital.

Why Not Hold a Café for Security within DevOps (DevSecOps)?

Without security woven throughout the process of DevOps, it’s a joke! Much of the IT operation works can be planned, such as moving between data centers, significant system release change, or performing system upgrades where you have the luxury of planning ahead of time. However, much of the work in operations is unplanned—we don’t have the luxury of time to prepare—when security has been compromised, there’s a system outage, or even performance spikes. These issues that demand immediate response can’t wait for the next sprint planning session or iteration. So, it’s time to embrace Patrick DuBois’ DevOps thinking that looks beyond Scrum to Kanban. DevOps helps the team track both kinds of work and helps them understand the interplay between them. According to Atlassian Agile coach Ian Buchanan (n.d.), the team may adopt a hybrid approach, often called Scrumban or Kaplan (kanban with a backlog).

The most common problems stem from the fact that there are uncertainties about dev and ops responsibilities. DevOps teams are under pressure to build and deploy software as quickly as possible. The proverbial goat jointly owned by multiple teams dies of hunger because each team expected the other team to feed it! Frankly, it’s easy for one faction of DevOps to think the other has completed the necessary security tasks. How much more effective would your software development be if your IT developers are also security champions advocating security mindfulness in their peers and promoting security knowledge across the enterprise?

A Knowledge Café brings teams into a fellowship or camaraderie for a deeper understanding and appreciation of each other’s demons—pressures, priorities, and competing interests—to say, “We are on the same team.” The job is easier for everyone when we understand each other’s roles. In the inexorable march to DevSecOps, we can use a Knowledge Café approach to push security into the development organization further and instill security earlier in the development cycle (Whitley, 2019). A Knowledge Café mindset to manage and leverage our collective knowledge will be a home run!

According to TechRepublic, 50 percent of companies are still in the process of implementing DevOps (Brown, 2017). According to Gartner (n.d.), 90 percent of organizations will have implemented DevOps by 2023, and 90 percent of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet expectations—not because of technical reasons entirely but due to leadership approaches’ limitations. Remember these knowledge management enablers: people, process, content, and technology/information. Any process, including DevOps, fails if people and culture are not upfront. Engage people in a Knowledge Café. Sort out people’s issues first to ensure a safe and secure foundation for success.

Security is the responsibility of all stakeholders. In project management, everyone is responsible for quality; in the organization, everyone is responsible for safety. We have moved from silos to cross-functional space, collaborative innovation, shared security responsibility, continuous integration, and continuous development (CI/CD). Compliance is being operationalized, and security is dashboarded. We are changing behavior on how we respond to time to market and risk reduction.

A Knowledge Café as the Space Where Security Meets DevOps

I’ll show you how a Knowledge Café mindset may be an answer. Developers must adapt to new incentives like enterprise-wide collaboration, branding, and metrics. A Knowledge Café mindset is a silo buster. Get all DevSecOps teams to the café today! A Knowledge Café brings different teams to a space where they will begin this discussion and leverage collective knowledge.

There is a difficult conversation. A Knowledge Café brings a Dev and Ops team to the café with the objective of putting security at the center. Here, there is an open, creative conversation on the topic of security, process improvement, speed to market, innovation, and so on. Security is a topic of mutual interest to everyone; their café is to uncover both groups’ collective knowledge, share ideas, and gain a deeper understanding of the issues involved. Everyone knows something, but knowledge resides in the network (café).

The café can connect employees, DevOps, Agile and Waterfall teams, and SMEs; improve interpersonal relationships; break down organizational silos, improve trust, idea generation, innovation, and engagement. This kind of Knowledge Café is driven by a robust question, like how do we move security to the left of development? Where is the interface of security in DevOps? Where is the interplay between DevOps? What does DevOps think that looks beyond Scrum to Kanban? Where is the place of the waterfall and Kanban, and so on?

How do you preserves the flow of natural conversation? The café is a dialogue—not a debate—that provides an ecosystem that eliminates fear and preconceived outcomes. The critical environmental factor is that everyone in this space has an equal voice and it’s a safe learning space: it should be as simple as walking into a café for a coffee or tea.

8.3. PRACTICE CAFÉ: RECOMMENDATIONS AND LESSONS LEARNED IN ACTION

In this practice café session, I would like you to be part of the exploration of the simplicity and agility of a café. Share the lessons you have learned as you compare them with mine.

8.4. KNOWLEDGE CAFÉ TO DEAL WITH THE PAIN ASSOCIATED WITH LOSS FROM CHANGE

You may ask where in the KM ecosystem is the place of “dealing with the pain associated with a change.” Deploying a café or any other KM element brings about change in an organization. Many changes have temporary or permanent discomfort as a side effect, and it is essential to understand how to deal with these pains. Different people handle changes differently. I remember working for an organization several years ago. There was a massive organizational change that had to do with a change in management. The number of retirements spiked by 42 percent. Several people left the organization for other jobs. Lessons learned from changes are an essential aspect of KM that must be explored. Here is how I used the café concept to deal with changes in a family and organizational setting.

We lived in this one-story house for 12 years. Two of my kids were born while we lived there. During that time, they had been admiring a two-story building all the while. In the fall of 2016, my kids objected, even resisted our selling the house for a bigger and better home in a better neighborhood. Since the kids don’t run the house (at least in mine), we made the strategic decision to move. The new neighborhood schools are the best in the county, both in academics and sports. A year later, my seventh grader’s girls’ volleyball and basketball teams were the teams to beat—they were almost undefeated and won all the regional championships. My eighth grader’s boys’ football team were also undefeated champions. The academic standard, compared with others in the region, was very impressive.

I know that my kids lost some of their friends when we moved, but now they confess to having lots of friends and enjoy the neighborhood. Our neighborhood now is more peaceful, with more amenities, and the list goes on. However, every time I drive past our old house with the kids, they are just melting down. In their minds, they still prefer our old house. They are still in pain from losing their childhood home. This is very emotional.

FAMILY CAFÉ

I can either tell my kids to suck it up—we live in a better place—which is appalling to do, or bring the kids to a Knowledge Café and do the following:

They say that if you can’t beat them, join them. However, joining them doesn’t mean that you have changed. Sometimes, change is just a locational move, yet our emotions and spiritual state are still stuck in the past. The fact that you have changed doesn’t mean that the pain associated with the change is gone. It may always be there, and you may live with it for a long time until you are healed from it. Obviously, we need the knowledge to deal with all the problematic situations in life.

A café mindset is an excellent prescription for demystifying complex and sticky issues like change and the painful residue it leaves behind. The attitude and atmosphere of a relational café provide the simplicity, passion, and the ecosystem to begin a discussion—investigate, share, and café. This applies to both our work and personal lives.

In this section, I want to concentrate on pain associated with the loss that people incur due to change. Make no mistake, change naturally leaves people bleeding, not just because of the change but because of what they have lost. The losses may be insignificant to you or me, but people may be dealing with the pain from those losses for a long time. So, even as we implement a knowledge-sharing culture, some people are simply wired to function within silos. The change will cause them to lose their silos, privacy, and emotional and spiritual attachments to things. If change and the possible painful outcome are discussed in the café KM program, it may become a white elephant project.

I happen to be a change champion for a $375 million campus consolidation project, where I shared some of these principles to other change champions—I thought that it was very effective. This consolidation would be a significant change to about 2,200 employees as the new campus will be a cutting-edge 21st-century work environment. While most of the employees are excited, there are still a few people who seem to be silently feeling some pain due to the impending changes.

LEARNING LESSONS AT THE CAFÉ

Engage stakeholders in a café style to discuss lessons we are learning for the change and hopefully avoid some of the change’s pains. Dr. Moses Adoko (2019a) calls it “lessons learning,” as opposed to lessons learned.

How Do People Handle the Pain from Change?

People of all tribes, races, gender, ethnicities, and economic classes go through change and pain, and everyone handles it differently. When people are in pain, it tends to manifest through their actions. Pain can lead to bitterness sometimes. People in pain can say some terrible things as a display of their internal frustrations. In popular culture, when some segments of our society (white suburban, neglected majority, middle class, minorities, or the disadvantaged) show signs of pain, the pundits quickly call them ugly names and school them to get in the game. Some people are gracious in their response to pain, while some are anything but graceful. Consider how people grieve when they lose a loved one, a pet, a job they have held for several years, a cubicle or an office space they loved so much, or even changing to a flexible work schedule when they telecommute. Some people become sick and depressed when they lose something or someone dear to them, especially if they have an emotional or spiritual attachment to what they lost.

No matter what the loss, we must be understanding with people if they are in pain. There are different types of pain. You would be amazed at what brings emotional and spiritual pain to people when change occurs. Don’t tell people to suck it up if they grieve for losing their pictures on the walls, old coffee pot, or individualized trash can and copier, even though the change may include a better and centralized copier, 21st-century office space, and more. For instance, Mag has worked an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. work schedule for 27 years, within a small personal space. Within that personal space were a coffee/tea kettle, individual trash can, family pictures, and memorabilia on the walls and tables. Now, we want her to consolidate, telecommute twice a week, share cubicles in a living workspace with not-so-fun and sometimes weird strangers, use a centralized copier and a centralized trash can, and—the most painful—accept the decoration in the new modern and sophisticated cubicles. Whoa! What a transformation! For some generations like the millennials, this is not a big deal, but it may be a significant concern and painful for older generations.

Mag feels that she has lost her identity, history, and freedom. She is now suffering internally because of the emotional attachments to her previous surroundings, team, and work schedule at the current workspace. We have to admit that this pain is real. My choice is to face the pain with her because I recognize it as genuine pain.

There is no better place to talk about pain and healing than in a community of others who are facing similar pains—a community of practice. There are several café events devoted to this kind of knowledge exchange and interaction.

8.5. PRACTICE CAFÉ: RECOMMENDATIONS AND LESSONS LEARNED FROM DEALING WITH PAIN FROM CHANGE

Here are some recommendations for coping with the pain of moving to a new location, a career change, losing a friend or a loved one, or pain associated with whatever you lost because of change.

The community of practice is one of the most effective ways of delivering a KM system because CoP is organic and not mandated. When they are learning and sharing culture, knowledge workers become passionate about sharing within the community. Hence, practitioners have fun sharing and will not feel overburdened.

8.6. CASE STUDY: KM IS ABOUT CONNECTING KNOWLEDGE BROKERS, SEARCHABILITY, AND FINDABILITY—AHMED ZOUHAI

This case study is from Ahmed Zouhai, PMP, a consultant with comprehensive global experience in project, program, and product management.

As a consultant, I have worked with many organizations. Most of these organizations do not have a formal knowledge Transfer Program. Some of the departments seemed to be very territorial. They don’t like the term “share, collaborate and or transfer” of information, especially when dealing with global organizations operating in the United States and vice versa. I must say, there are valid and legitimate reasons for not sharing some of the information because of the IP and so forth.

To my knowledge, I hardly heard the term KM used. But instead, we use SharePoint and/or network drive by the department. There was no one source of truth for knowledge and information. In terms of knowledge transfer, my challenges are based on our competitors’ use of the info if employees leave their current position. In retrospect, is there anything wrong with some Knowledge Transfer technology tools that don’t talk to each other? KM tools we used were internal, and most of them were not easy to use, and most of the employees didn’t like to have access to them, nor were they updated frequently with shared information. Companies seemed not wanting to spend money on these KM tools as well as training.

It could take minutes or hours to get the information you need to do your job, depending on the searched information, especially in a new technological context. Sharing my knowledge means time-saving, efficiency, and staying competitive.

KM is both a challenge and fun, depending on which department you work in. Sometimes, leadership makes it difficult to share information and sometimes more natural and more fun, especially for new employees.

Before Google and other search engines, it was virtually impossible to find and share knowledge management. Nowadays, most organizations realize the importance of ease in searchability and findability, connecting knowledge brokers, creators, and sharers. Many companies are raising their capabilities by making knowledge transfer less painful and more fun because they know that it increases efficiency and competitive advantage. It is important to remember that knowledge comes in different forms and shapes. People’s experiences, know-how is the most crucial aspect of knowledge. IT departments and project management teams are utilizing search function and face-to-face collaborations to advance projects and value. KM enables the contextualization of information. Employees spend much time searching the World Wide Web for information that may or may not be valid and accurate.

As Ahmed stated, context is the key to KM. Remember that knowledge is the information that has been contextualized. In today’s gig economy and project economy, many organizations are coming to grips with an efficient KM system’s efficacy. It’s a race to the finish as companies raise their capabilities by making knowledge transfer less painful and more fun. As Ahmed pointed out in his personal experience, a simpler KM system that connects people and systems increases efficiency and competitive advantage. Experiences and knowledge in knowledge creators and sharers’ heads is the most critical aspect of knowledge management.

In terms of one source of truth, some argue that there are precise models available, perhaps found in academic sources, that delineate the knowledge management landscape more broadly. For instance, the “information sciences” as an academic (graduate professional) degree is expanding, and the questions of knowledge management, archiving, retrieval, and making sense of information are well studied nowadays. Companies are actively studying knowledge management, and as pedagogy, the librarians of the past have now become knowledge managers. So, information architecture (IA) is the art and science of organizing or designing information to make it accessible, usable, and relevant to all end users. IA includes, but is not limited to, shared settings and methods of naming and arranging online communities, software, intranets, and websites to make them easier for users to access, retrieve, use, and reuse. Taxonomy is an aspect of IA that seeks to define relationships between components.

However, knowledge management is not information management because, while information is organized data, knowledge is information that has been given meaning or explained. Information sciences and information architecture can help to bring distinctions between codifiable and non-codifiable knowledge. Information science considers the relationships between people, places, and technology and data from those interactions. It is primarily concerned with analyzing, collecting, classifying, manipulating, storing, organizing, retrieving, moving, disseminating, and protecting this information.

Simple processes and interactions are critical to KET. Managing knowledge involves modeling empathy, which helps develop a growth mindset and a mindset of abundance—a café mindset of sharing.

Again, you can’t manage the process until you have managed people-knowledge. You need to learn from the people and the organization before you can manage and lead. Let’s assume that you just joined the organization. The next day, you are providing guidance and making intelligent suggestions on running things better? I’m sorry, but you don’t know what you are talking about. You need to understand the people, the culture, the organizational process Assets (OPA), Enterprise Environmental Factors (EEF), and then apply what you learned to the environment—and lead well. Every organization is different. What works for one may not work for another. I once worked for an organization where my office was involved in processing hundreds of millions of data bits. We used Mainframe. In my second week, my supervisor wanted me to provide feedback for their process since I had fresh eyes. I told her that I needed a few more weeks to learn the process and organizational culture. To be frank, I identified many gaps during my first week.

It’s appropriate to know before you lead. Here are some reasons why you shouldn’t be quick to jump into leadership before you acquire knowledge. If some people were born to lead, why didn’t you elect them to become your city mayor when they were in kindergarten—when they haven’t even learned to spell their names or write a letter? No. Instead, you wait for them to learn, acquire knowledge, make mistakes, and learn life lessons. Would you want to follow someone who hasn’t followed anyone? Every leader is, first, a follower. If you can’t follow, you cannot lead.

When you create a Knowledge Café environment, possibilities for free exchange and transfer of knowledge are endless.