Preface
My dad, Isaiah Anyacho Njoku, was a carpenter, a spiritual man with strong leadership skills. My mom still tells me about his shrewd knowledge today, around 50 years after his passing.
His carpentry was not the most sophisticated, but all of his works have a remarkably unique signature, witnessed in every door and every chair crafted by his capable hands. His pieces stirred my imagination and curiosity for knowledge transfer. One of my greatest regrets was not having the opportunity to cross-fertilize ideas, learn, and share knowledge with him because I was a baby when he passed on.
Like everyone on the planet, my father didn’t have control over his death. But, he most definitely had control over his knowledge.
Grasping this awareness inspired me to make knowledge exchange or transfer one of my career’s ethos (driving forces), and I’ve been walking on air since I came to this realization. I have set my face like a flint to share that all knowledge is useless if it goes to the grave unshared. In fact, most of the concepts I’m sharing in this book are what I have done or am currently doing daily. Knowledge must be managed and transferred to others like a priceless legacy—and live! In the most simplistic terms, shouldn’t knowledge exchange be like a father–son relationship, nonthreatening and congenial? Sure, journals and notes may be concise. However, what would you say if someone asked, “Do you want to read a book about Scotland, or would you prefer to meet someone from Scotland?”
A few conversations are best in a formal setting; the rest are possible in a café!
Managing knowledge begins with curiosity within human interactions, rather than being driven by process or technology. As important as technology is in knowledge management (KM), it would be useless without people and the right culture accelerators. Technology like AI should be given a seat at the table—and be managed as a stakeholder, because machine learning and AI will play a prominent role in the next knowledge-centric organization and human-machine collaborations will be key. People and conversation shall be the chief in all knowledge management and stewardship.
My emphasis shall rest on two cardinal points: simplicity and people side of KM enabler while recognizing process, technology, and content management enablers. Café conversation and mindset sit at the center of KM enablers. Human interaction is key in KM; conversation is king. The Knowledge Café paradigm is the people’s side and environment, with little emphasis on other enablers. The Knowledge Café mindset is an attitude of knowledge exchange or management that could be structured, but mostly unstructured, agile, and conversational.
In fact, some of the simplest ways to stir knowledge in an organization are to minimize knowledge transfer hierarchical structures—create Knowledge Cafés, pool and share every knowledge worker’s knowledge, and incentivize folks for sharing their knowledge.
The Knowledge Café construct is learning agile in knowledge management. The café can be a virtual or face-to-face gateway for conversation, knowledge transfer, and knowledge exchange. It fills our desire to connect and communicate with others and transcends IT tools, repositories, and complicated processes. Knowledge management is the responsibility of us all—and most importantly, people rather than machines. A café may be a one-off or a continuous event.
Two fundamental questions must be asked and answered about knowledge management: “Why is it needed?” and “How can an organization cultivate an environment in which it will thrive?” Café is all about asking questions.
To successfully answer these questions, you must first accept the uncomfortable truth that people cannot be forced to share their knowledge. Or better put: knowledge is value and people need an incentive to exchange it. To overcome this challenge or fear, an organization must build, espouse, and support an ecosystem in which all workplace stakeholders are invited to share their experience, skill, and wisdom joyfully. This will intentionally promote within the culture that knowledge transfer is welcomed and embedded into the organization’s culture.
When knowledge transfer is intentional, regularly implemented, and encouraged at every organization level, people take pride in transferring their professional knowledge. Knowledge is the principal capital of knowledge workers—all employees that think, solve problems with their knowledge, give meaning to information, and apply knowledge. They are the knowledge creators and sharers who champion the cause of knowledge management, thus improving an organization’s current practices and future processes. Organizations will experience the benefits of KM as more employees naturally rise to leadership roles and compete to share what they know. Rewarding knowledge exchange and the transfer encourages cultural transparency, increases trust, and reduces the frustration of those who have previously shouldered the bulk of the organization’s knowledge transfer and exchange. Practitioners in the Knowledge Café ecosystem naturally are supposed to share their knowledge and have fun doing it. “Aha!” moments happen at the café.
Knowledge transfer comes through genuine relationships where knowledge transfer and exchange become reciprocal, iterative, and interactive. A relationship is an incentive for the café construct.
The predominant aspect of knowledge is the intellectual capital in the minds of people. Understanding process and technology is not as complicated as understanding people. The minds of knowledge workers need to be ignited and not filled with more one-directional information. Winston Churchill said, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” The most significant knowledge transfer or exchange doesn’t happen in the classrooms or conference rooms but in conversation—in the café, the mind is ignited, and knowledge is transferred. In fact, classrooms are becoming experiments for a café style of learning.
Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
—Cory Doctorow, Canadian-British writer
Loss of employee knowledge through employee turnover and employee retirement is another reason to curate an atmosphere of knowledge sharing and transfer.
The Knowledge Café is the ecosystem in which everyone—educated or not, certified or not, experienced or not—can find common ground by exchanging information and brainstorming solutions. Imagine an environment in which new employees, and indeed every knowledge worker, have a common source of truth with easy access to indexed and searchable knowledge assets such as storytelling, oral history recordings of previous project stakeholders, knowledge interviews, and the café style processes. The Knowledge Café concept invites knowledge workers to willingly and comprehensively transfer crucial information and data to improve employee onboarding and project process development.
Whether an organization is expanding or contracting, scaling up or downsizing, business continuity, process improvement, performance, and knowledge innovation are the priorities. Organizations must focus on preserving critical and technical knowledge required to conduct business. When KM is part of the organization’s culture, performance improves, the competitive advantage accelerates, and competition becomes coopetition. Coopetition is cooperating with your competitors, building synergy so that everyone wins. The concept of coopetition will be discussed in detail in chapter 12. With increasingly constrained resources, a knowledge-sharing environment is required—Knowledge Café processes allow for unencumbered access—an open invitation for knowledge workers to unreservedly share their experience, skill, and wisdom—in the most current, highest-quality collaboration space a company has to offer.
You can’t manage knowledge—nobody can. What you can do is manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted, and applied.
—Collison & Parcell (2005)
While we do not have control over our employees’ heads, we do have control over the machines’ knowledge and their various formats. Most importantly, we control the knowledge transfer environment, the knowledge culture supported by a clear KM strategy and processes. A robust knowledge ecosystem requires organizational nourishment that fosters a knowledge-savvy workforce.
Here is a gentle caution: Your knowledge is not your job security. Your knowledge is your value—it only grows or generates a return when invested in the work and others, and when others invest in you.
In my experience, human beings and organizations don’t always gleefully embrace a system of knowledge management. In response to surveys and audience participation at conference presentations, results suggest that employees hoard their intellectual assets. The truth is that more people in the workplace see their knowledge as their job security. This information hoarding and knowledge silo is a significant challenge to implementing a culture of knowledge sharing.
I have carefully selected about a dozen knowledge brokers, creators, and sharers across cultures and nationalities to share their KM experiences in various work and project spaces. I will refer to these inclusions as Case Studies throughout the book—an indirect attribution of concepts to a third, albeit credentialed, party. These are ordinary people you can identify within their KM struggles, challenges, and experiences. I hope these KM stories, along with my analyses, intrigue you.
What are the gaps that prevent us from turning information into knowledge that becomes eternal wisdom? There is a simple, nonthreatening way for initiating and maturing knowledge transfer activities at home, in the workplace, and in the community. In this book, I present to you the Knowledge Café, a baby step toward knowledge management and a process as simple as walking into your favorite café for a cup of tea or coffee with friends to fill the knowledge gaps—and connect the dots between people and knowledge.
Curious yet? Novel hunter? I believe that miracle lies in the unknown. So, be fascinated by and attracted to the unknown—at the café. I am extending a personal invitation to join me inside the Knowledge Café, where we will freely sip, collaborate, converse, and become knowledge caffeinated. So, café conversations are the necessary antecedent to knowledge and wisdom. It connects the dots between people and knowledge. Throughout the ages, conversation, learning, and knowledge exchanges have taken place around saucers—in a café with a cup of tea or coffee without a mandate. The brew at the café creates a knowledge culture. If it’s noisy or too quiet at home or work, connect to the café. Sit with me in the Knowledge Café as we sip and collaborate—let the conversation begin!
Enjoy,
BCA