1 ■ Knowledge Curiosity

1.1. THE CURIOSITY OF THE CAFÉ-GOER

If you remember everything you learned in a day, you are not learning enough. Hence, we’ve got to learn agile.

Why do people go to the neighborhood café? Reasons I’ve heard include free Wi-Fi, caffeine or great beverages, a hit playlist, the arts, boardroom away from the office and home, unstructured, loud or quiet, location everyone agrees to, and so on. At the café, you can share conversation and ideas away from home or office—strategize and share big ideas, plan, draw inspiration, or simply catch up on your social media. Café-goers can caffeinate but also embrace curiosity-driven connections. It’s a sharing space to ask and answer questions and exchange knowledge. We want to make sense or meaning of our world, what we know, right? We want that “aha!” moment that doesn’t happen in instructions or one-dimensional settings. “Aha!” moments occurs in dialogue, conversation, and a peer-learning knowledge exchange environment. The café is the space for this.

THE RIGHT CONDITION AND ENVIRONMENT THAT ATTRACT PEOPLE TO THE KNOWLEDGE CAFÉ

Everyone will come to the café if the following takes place:

Why Curiosity?

The solution is yet to be discovered. There is no predefined outcome. We’re open to learning agility and designing something new. The idea of a Knowledge Café stirs our youthful curiosity. Can we take the concept of the neighborhood café and apply it to knowledge management (KM): sharing, exchange, transfer, and leadership?

It means that the Knowledge Café is a conversational process and a mindset that brings a group of people together to share experiences, test crazy ideas, learn from each other, make new acquaintances, build relationships and make a better sense of a rapidly changing, complex, less predictable world to improve decision making, innovation and the ways in which we work together.

It’s fair to say that I have utilized most of the principles of the Knowledge Café extensively since the late nineties, before I met David Gurteen a few years ago. Knowledge Café is the town square for knowledge exchange and stewardship. See the café as your civic knowledge center, market square, city/public square, urban square, or city gate for knowledge sharing and exchanges. Think of piazza, plaza, Utne Reader Salons, and town green to connect, learn, make sense, exchange knowledge, and exhilarate. The café concept is not just about knowledge exchange but making sense of our world, understanding, and making meaning—this is what makes the café different from other forms of conversational gathering and meetings (see table 2). If you have ever attended a brown-bag learning or brainstorming session, lesson learned and after-action events; arrangements like instructor-led, problem-solving, decision-making, status update, information sharing, team-building, and innovation meetings, networking, lunch-n-learn, town hall learning sessions, conferences, workshop and symposium, project stand-up/huddles meetings or gatherings, you probably utilized some of the concepts of the café. I’ll explain the difference more in chapter 2.3 and 2.6. There’ll be a café framework and step-by-step approach to be discussed in chapter 4.3.

As both a space and mindset, the café is an open knowledge space commonly found in the heart of a traditional knowledge exchange and transfer community. It’s high time we brought KM to the town square of the café! Everyone can’t afford the country club of KM. Every knowledge is not critical, but every knowledge is relevant. The café recognizes the relevance of every knowledge and idea. It’s the café mindset and infrastructure that brings this to reality. In a café, there’s a paradigm shift and learning agility—the way and where we learn changes. How we learn, gather to learn, share, and renew knowledge is entirely different and simplified.

WHAT HAPPENS AT A CAFÉ

In the café orbit, we are

Little has been written or said about the Knowledge Café. We can expand this concept to create a current, cross-generational, systematic environment designed to transfer, retain, and manage relevant knowledge. Coming to the Knowledge Café also stirs our curiosity. Greek biographer Plutarch said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” The knowledge fire at the café is kindled: new relationships and genuine connections begin, new knowledge is birthed, and innovation springs up. It’s a simple and unstructured (can also be structured) environment and a gateway to knowledge management that everyone can identify with.

As said in the preface, knowledge creation and transfer are incomplete without socialization and cross-pollination of knowledge from one state to another—when knowledge workers talk to each other and machines talk to each other and when knowledge constantly changes states.

Nonaka and Takeuchi introduced the SECI model (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1996), which has become the cornerstone of knowledge creation and transfer theory, and Nonaka (1994) identified four mechanisms for knowledge creation:

My goal is to stimulate the appetite and curiosity for knowledge culture in all types of organizations. I want to stir curiosity for knowledge stewardship. I want to advocate the institutionalization of a simple café format against cumbersome knowledge management concepts and present a sequel to Gurteen’s Knowledge Café.

We Are in a Knowledge Revolution!

A knowledge revolution surrounds us. Today, there are more than 50,000 free online books in every genre. According to the Association of American Publishers’ annual report in 2019, publishers of books in all formats made almost $26 billion in revenue in 2018 in the United States, $22.6 billion in printed books, and $2.04 billion in e-books. According to a Pew Research survey, one in every five Americans now listen to audiobooks (Perrin, 2019). There is an estimated 4.66 billion people (Datareportal, 2020) of the global population, more than 60 percent that have access to the Internet—probably one of the most transformative innovations in the last century. In the world today, there are more than 5 billion mobile devices, and over half of these connections are smartphones (Silver, 2019).

Old-style retrieval, capture, and information-sharing tools cannot keep up with the information explosion. The environment for capturing and sharing knowledge is being transformed in extraordinary ways. For example, bookless libraries are stored in the cloud and can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. Ever-increasing computer processing speeds, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and social media create virtual communities and the future’s social connectivity.

With all this emerging technology, how do we incorporate the vast amount of information with developing knowledge relevant to our organizations and our lives? If COVID-19 has shown us anything, it’s how indispensable technology is to modern life. Serendipitously, digital transformation has fallen on us. There was a poll on Twitter to survey who was instrumental to your company’s digital transformation: Your CEO, CIO, CTO, or COVID-19? The majority answered, COVID-19.

Science provides us data, information, technology, and knowledge, but we need wisdom that requires the interaction of social sciences and the application of knowledge and human insight. The curiosity, the quest for greater interaction, conversation, digital media, and face-to-face or virtual knowledge exchange, is more important than ever. Human interactions remain the greatest enabler for transferring all human core capabilities, aptitude and making knowledge transfer a reality. People are still searching for knowledge and wisdom. Human faces around a cup of tea or coffee are irreplaceable. With social distancing, virtual cafés accomplished the same. Connection and exchanging information and knowledge are essential to us as people. The emerging technologies enable these exchanges, both virtual and IRL (in real life).

Knowledge Café is a current, multigenerational, systematic concept designed to transfer, retain, and manage relevant knowledge. Retirements increased job mobility, and information silos create an inevitable “brain drain” and loss of an organization’s critical intellectual capital. Without the retention and application of the learned knowledge of those who came before us, our organizations will be poorly equipped to stay relevant in today’s constantly evolving environment of innovation.

The curiosity of the café-goer can be satisfied virtually and face-to-face. I hold a monthly virtual global Knowledge Café for project managers, and participants collaborate across the globe. The café can take place in the office space, online, or at an offsite location.

The keys are curiosity and a sustained attitude of learning. So, grab your laptop and a latte. Get comfy as you enjoy the delicacies and modern conveniences of this caffeinated knowledge sharing space. Share knowledge, connect, collaborate, cross-pollinate small and great ideas—and make them a reality, and reanimate knowledge.

1.2. FILLING THE KNOWLEDGE GAPS

Why are we devoting a book to the concept of a space to share and transfer knowledge? What is the relevance in today’s world?

Knowledge Is the New Factor of Production

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

—Hosea 4:6 (NASB, 1995)

One could argue that knowledge is the greatest enemy of sickness, disease, ignorance, poverty, and failure. We learned in Economics 101 about three factors of production—land, labor, and capital. Dr. Denise Bedford of Georgetown University and other knowledge thinkers like Baumol, Braunstein, Porat, and Nick Bontis contend that knowledge is an emerging source of wealth and a new primary factor of production—knowledge as capital is the dominant principle in the factor production. Knowledge is the most significant currency in the project economy. Everyone manages a project, program, or operation to solve problems and deliver results, whether at the office or in their personal lives. As a professional project manager, I manage complex and complicated projects with challenging stakeholder relationships. In more accurate words, I often manage projects and stakeholders from hell. My typical day involves someone’s pants on fire, and exceptions are my routine! Working in this environment means I need to learn fast, collaborate, preserve the context, or introduce more risk to my projects.

Knowledge is critical to our organizations and us. However, as a project manager, I have witnessed systems that do not talk to each other or share data, and groups and people who don’t converse and silo or hoard their knowledge. For me, the concept of a Knowledge Café helped fill the gaps (see figure 1). We are inundated with data and information. We need a context for this information to give it meaning and value to our organizations and us. In the knowledge economy, production and services are based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance and rapid obsolescence. Success depends on the accessibility of knowledge and skilled workers to add context and meaning. As organizations understand the magnitude of a potential loss of valuable intellect and skills in our knowledge economy, the demand for a simple analogy to implement knowledge management will be immediate. As you see in figure 1 on the next page, the Knowledge Café helps satisfy the need to share, reuse, bolster, and create innovation knowledge.

Data are just facts until they are organized and connected; information isn’t valuable without context that creates knowledge. Consider brokers or investors reading the stock page of a newspaper (acquiring information), but then turn and talk with their colleagues about their stocks (knowledge). Café is the space where this kind of exchange happens. Apply knowledge, and you have long-lasting wisdom. For example, data and information are readily available about the danger of behaviors such as texting and driving. We all have this information, but how often do we put ourselves into the situation to realize the knowledge of these destructive behaviors? We become wise only when we apply our knowledge.

KNOWLEDGE ASSUMPTIONS

Let’s test our assumptions about knowledge. Do you agree or disagree with these assumptions?

In my experience of asking these questions at conferences and at work, everyone agrees with these assumptions! Our curiosity toward knowledge, how we steward it, share it, innovate, and reuse it is critical. Will people who are not inclined to share ideas or ask for others’ ideas be “found in” or visit a café at all? Are they more likely to grab their coffee and run back to their isolated spaces? The environment will determine.

Lack of a single source of truth for café-goers led me to developing an enterprise wiki knowledge library and a Knowledge Café for all knowledge workers. I was looking for a knowledge-centric environment.

In fact, according to Jez Arroway, about 85 percent of our information, document, and knowledge repository are “ROT (Random, Obsolete, and Trivial); we spend 20% of time searching for something we have in-house, but we were just using the pantry” (Arroway, 2019). What’s radically absent is the interoperability of these systems. Today, there are countless effective knowledge-sharing tools out there.

My challenge was an absence of a Knowledge Library site or a complete enterprise search solution—one that gives us a single, personalized place to access all relevant information, insights, and knowledge wherever they live. A solution designed to quickly capture and share ideas by creating simple pages and linking them together, enabling the organization of ideas, knowledge, and documents into some logical and searchable repositories. Wiki knowledge library features could be used for various knowledge-sharing purposes. In my work and experience, there has been a need to get the café participation of multiple subject matter experts contributing content, updating FAQs, sharing new knowledge, and mentoring others in one interactive repository. I see the need to provide a single source of truth for scattered and disparate resources, files, knowledge, and know-how all over company repositories and websites. This is a challenge in both private and public-sector organizations. Version management: I want to see a link to manuals, processes, and regularly updated procedures, pulling the most recent version. Some of our café-goers tell me that they want to keep their SOPs alive, updated regularly, and not bury them in repositories. They want it to be a constant resource for project plans, training new employees, and a single-source lexicon for the project and program terminologies.

Today, as a result of Knowledge Café engagements with diverse knowledge workers and café-goers, we are developing an enterprise Wiki Knowledge Library (Wiki) for our knowledge café-goers, CoPs, and teams—a one-stop-shop for knowledge transfer and exchange.

A key tool for project managers is “lessons learned” from previous projects. However, when lessons learned are kept in repositories—not curated, not indexed, and unsearchable—that knowledge requires an awakening. I recommend living lessons. Every organization keeps a database of all the previously executed projects’ information and records, and this information may be stored in a central repository as part of the Organizational process Assets (OPA). So, OPA may include but is not limited to all the documents, templates, policies, procedures, plans, guidelines, lessons learned, historical data and information, earned value, estimating, risk, and so on. There should be a “living lesson learned.” Living lessons learned are those lessons learned that are documented throughout the five processes of the project management and during operations and program implementations. These are converted into existing processes and procedures, utilized during the same project, post-project, and project-postmodern. There has to be a deliberate process of knowledge transfer and management in the organization—and the creation of a knowledge culture, where no one will have to reinvent the wheel! The only reason why we reinvent the wheel is because of ignorance. Ignorance is a choice and an antithesis of Knowledge. Knowledge, if not managed, is lost forever! We all face similar challenges in our projects. What is a new demon to you may be a tired old demon to another person.

To satisfy my hunger for creating and sharing knowledge, I find myself using post-implementation reviews, informal networking, and customer outreach. Using a café environment for sharing and incorporating lessons learned could breathe new life into this process! We can embrace standard project information that is easy to find and access, shareable, and reusable rather than maintaining redundancy and reinventing the wheel.

Is the technology made to connect people, or does it replace people? I found technology becoming the virus injected into a system meant to heal it, but it eventually killed it . . .

My ideal landscape of technology and content enablers includes a fully integrated and centralized project portfolio management (PPM) platform; searchable lessons learned repositories; stories, oral history, and knowledge interviews; database inventory of knowledge assets; systems for tracking of competence, experience, assignments, and specific expertise; indexed online video collections for knowledge application; innovation registers; Yellow Pages or directory of subject matter experts; and other knowledge transfer-related software resources. Wouldn’t that be an efficient knowledge system?

These knowledge management gaps and tools fueled my curiosity, activated my adaptive thinking, and swelled my KM creative capabilities.

As I’m writing this book, the city of Tacoma, Washington, has created a digital permitting solution to change how its civic government interacts with its citizens. Tacoma residents now have 24/7 access to digital planning and permitting transactions, with complete visibility into their application status. Besides, the city has reduced labor for internal staff and cut the application processing time. How cool is that! KM simplified customer experience.

We cannot be more potent than our knowledge. Our victories and accomplishments are directly proportional to the depth of our knowledge. One might argue that our success is proportional to how well we can apply our knowledge to execute behaviors. People fail or succumb not because they are unlucky or weak but because of deficiency in knowledge or ignorance or not managing knowledge. When we stop growing in grace and knowledge in all societies or organizations, we become irrelevant; there will be no innovation. It takes knowledge leadership to grasp this.

Knowledge transfer or exchange doesn’t work until there’s knowledge leadership. I stand the risk of sounding poetic; however, knowledge transfer needs the right space because it is a flowing river. It’s iterative, progressive, continuous, deliberate, reciprocating, and rejuvenating. Knowledge is also transient.

We will address some of these challenges throughout the book.

1.3. MANAGING PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE

My purpose in writing this book is to stimulate our appetite for knowledge culture in all types of organizations—to stir our curiosity for knowledge and encourage knowledge management as part of all organizations’ discourse. First, we must look at how we manage our personal knowledge. Personal or explicit knowledge is both dynamic and challenging to classify. Every learning animal and curious knowledge exchanger comes to the café with their personal knowledge. It increases awareness and increases the likelihood that you’ll realize what you don’t know and think about spending more time in a “café-like environment.”

Knowledge is by its nature personal. Knowledge and knowledge management begins with the individual. Anyone who has ever said or done anything has knowledge. Before discussing organizational knowledge, I must first be curious about managing my personal knowledge. Harvard Business School professor Dr. Dorothy Leonard talks about “deep smarts,” the stuff that produces that mysterious quality: good judgment. Deep smarts represent the most in-depth knowledge and understanding possessed by specific experts within an organization (Leonard, 2017). I’ll call it accrued knowledge. Do I know what I know, and have I taken advantage of what I know?

What do you do with knowledge? It’s the means to an end. It’s the capital you use to innovate and solve problems. It’s the means that every other means relies upon. You create wealth with knowledge. New knowledge becomes an innovation. We solve problems with knowledge. Knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. It’s one of those necessary tools in your wisdom toolkits, like rationality, insight, and intelligence. Even though all of these are contextual, meaning that one can have knowledge in one subject or area and lack knowledge in another area, you could say that someone is wise but lacks insight, rationality, intelligence, and knowledge. Now, wear your curiosity belt, and let’s go!

Do you know how much you know? Do you know what you know? Do you know all that you know? Do you know where your knowledge banks are stored and how to access them? When was the last time you updated your ideas, innovation, dreams, and goals? At least, for those who are not self-employed, an updated résumé means that someone is updating their capabilities and achievements. When was the last time you documented what you know? When was the last time you updated your professional résumé? As seen in figure 2, I like to use the concept of known unknowns (things that are known by others—new learnings) versus unknown unknowns (things that no one knows and require curiosity, new learning, research/innovation to solve) to convey how we connect the known and the unknown at the café.

Imagine having in one place all your personal information: medical history, academic, fitness, financial, training, professional, business, and family records; all your lessons learned, accomplishments, successes, and failures at your fingertips. With one code or just one voice command, you could access them from a secure and encrypted place where they have been indexed, curated, analyzed, and saved securely. This would be the ultimate personal KM system. This scenario, however, does raise questions of security and privacy.

To assemble my knowledge assets at one location, I keep a personal knowledge register. I also keep a dream book and personal milestone register, where I record major personal and professional victories and successes. These are my personal KM systems.

Why a personal knowledge register? A personal knowledge register will make one café-ready at home or in your organization. I have accumulated so much knowledge over the years that I cannot recollect everything. My knowledge register fills in the gaps. Retention increases when you document your knowledge in a register, whether handwritten or typed; revision, addition, or rewriting and sharing your knowledge register and notes with family and friends enforces information and knowledge retention. We can separate manageable knowledge from supposed knowledge, preexisting knowledge, or new knowledge in a knowledge register.

According to Pam A. Mueller, Princeton University, and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, the University of California, “the pen is mightier than the keyboard” (2014). They maintain that students who take notes by hand learn more than those who take notes on a laptop. Writing and rewriting increases learning and internalization of learning. Research by Jeffrey D. Wammes and Melissa E. Meade, professors at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, shows that drawing to-be-learned information or depicting to-be-learned information via visuals enhances memory and boosts performance by encouraging the integration of semantic, visual, and motor aspects of memory (Wammes, Meade, & Fernandes, 2016). Adding graphics or drawings representing concepts, terms, and relationships to your knowledge register helps internalize your knowledge and improves memory and learning.

I document every training I have taken in my knowledge register, every new thing that I have learned, and every project that I have accomplished, including major tasks. I highlight the cost-saving I provided to my organization, efficiencies I helped to enhance. I record the number of people I mentored since one of my goals is to mentor one million knowledge leaders. I record lectures and presentations that I delivered, the number of hours I volunteered, projects at home that I have accomplished, reviews, lessons I have learned, the mistakes I have made, the significant choices I have made, and their outcomes.

A healthy knowledge culture must understand what it knows (skills, experiences, and expertise of the project team and other stakeholders), and what it needs to know (the known unknowns and unknown-unknown tacit knowledge in the minds of its employees).

Tacit knowledge is difficult to capture. As seen in figure 2, it dwells in the known unknowns. There are three simple ways to capture tacit knowledge: by creating a culture of knowledge-sharing to change ownership competition mindset, creating an incentive for sharing knowledge, and creating opportunities for sharing—the café responds to all three.

It needs to know where what is known and what it should know reside or are housed and how to make them easily accessible and transferable across projects and the enterprise. The Knowledge Café is the place to update our knowledge.

We use the known and sometimes documented knowledge as a segue to the known unknowns and then to discover the unknown unknowns. As seen in figure 2, with our personal knowledge, what we know, we can discover what others know and explore the unknowns. With what we know, curiosity to learn and research drives us to the café to meet the known and the unknown. All the known and unknown head to the café. We come to the café to share what we registered and learn what others registered. Some of the most popular questions I ask at a café are, “Share some things that stand out in your personal knowledge register. What did you know lately that you wished you’d known 10 years ago?”

Look at it this way: knowledge gains value through use and is of no value if it’s not used or reused.

Randy Hopmann, an engineer and former director of district operations at Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), told me, “You are not doing a thing if you have not made a mistake.” I bring to the fore new things I am supposed to have learned but just bumped into them—books I read, places I visited, valued connections I made in conferences or Knowledge Café events. These have helped me know what I know today. When I update my résumé, I take hold of my knowledge register, and I am always blown away by the things I didn’t know that I knew. During my career evaluation, I can use the things that I know to tell the story of what I know and have accomplished. When I go to a job interview, I can explain what I know I have done clearly and what I’m capable of doing. This is how I manage my knowledge—if you don’t capture it, you will lose it. The things I know become an inspiration. They activate my curiosity for innovation.

Personal Knowledge Register (PKR)

A knowledge register is more than a personal journal. A personal knowledge journal is also a personal knowledge portfolio. Just like you grow your financial portfolio, you should grow and cultivate your knowledge portfolio. Documentation is an essential process in knowledge transfer. So, journaling is part of PKR. I keep a Victory Register as part of my PKR. Here, I register all memorable knowledge, events, and milestones during the year. As seen in table 1, this is just a snapshot of hundreds of my PKR, without being too personal and detailed. It’s a treasure.

When I’m in a café event with others, we cross-pollinate ideas on our accomplishments and failures and demonstrate curiosity for new knowledge, which emerges from existing knowledge. Organizational knowledge management, as complicated as it can be, begins with curiosity and personal knowledge management. It starts with deep thinking, meditation, personal reflection, questions and answers, feedback, and teaching others, sharing what we know.

All these are attributes of personal knowledge management. This speaks to assistant professor of the Degroote Business School professor Nick Bontis’s Attitudes and Behaviors category, part of Human Capital, and highly undertreated in the KM literature. When we have these attributes and behaviors, can we say that we know what you know?

What do you do with what you know? How do you steward it? How do you make what you know accessible to you? Do you leave it to chance? You are truly responsible for managing your knowledge. You should know what you need to advance in your career. Know whom to connect with. Everyone cannot contribute to your knowledge and growth.

Life is like sitting in a café where you choose your own seat. You don’t wait for someone to choose for you. Similarly, if you expect your boss to manage your knowledge for you, you will be in for a long wait.

These are some of the essential features of a productive Knowledge Café. I’ve seen many really “wasted café” spaces—both virtual and physical—because there was no set of shared assumptions and beliefs about what would happen there and why you would “go there.” Know why you are going to the café. The café is for knowledge.

Take this opportunity to develop a knowledge register of your own (see table 1). Organize them, rank them, prioritize them, make them memorable, make them findable, and make them searchable in your mind. You are the only one who can identify what you need to know that is relevant for your growth and advancement. Take responsibility for managing what you know and how you apply what you know to your life. Is it beneficial to conduct a “SWOT” analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunity, Threats) of your knowledge register? With SWOT, one would know where they stand about their knowledge assets. Strengths are your personal mission-critical knowledge, something you can share, and the knowledge that makes you unique. Weaknesses are something where gaps exist in your knowledge base, and you need some input from your peers. Opportunity is where you can relate particular knowledge assets to your career growth, and the threat is where some knowledge can possibly harm or have ill effects on the community. For instance, in wireless technology, saving passwords is convenient but may be inviting more cyberattacks and identity thefts.

1.4. PEOPLE FIRST, THEN PROCESS OR TECHNOLOGY

If you have the guts to help people find their way and excel at what they do, wouldn’t you like to have a coffee with them? If you have the time to write a six-page process description, wouldn’t you have a need for 30 minutes to know more about the person you are helping? If you accompany someone through the process of whittling down complications while sharing what you know, wouldn’t you expect a thread of endearment? There’s no replacement for a personal touch.

So, don’t throw technology at people. It’s an enabler and a stakeholder.

Knowledge management rests on three enablers: people, process, and information/technology, and some may argue that the fourth leg is content. I’m puzzled because the predominant discussions about KM convey complicated processes and technology. The history of this three-legged stool is traceable back to the 1990s Ackoff model. KM was in progress for 30 years before we had affordable technology. It just helped us to popularize it. Now that it is a commonplace, it is reverting into the background. Technology is only an enabler, and it can also be a disabler! People become lost in a sea of complexity. Again, ignoring the knowledge transfer preferences of the knowledge creators and users is very rampant. What is missing are people and a mindset of simplicity—a simple and easy-to-use knowledge base and social collaboration space. How can you know the intellectual capital—the knowledge locked up in people’s minds and hearts—without knowing the people themselves? How can you know or learn from people without some relationship?

We genuinely look for relational as opposed to transactional learning. You don’t want to learn from or share knowledge with people you dislike. Café conversation and relationships are more natural and realistic than the mechanical transaction methods where people exchange knowledge because they feel there’s an obligation. How can there be a relationship with both virtual and face-to-face connections? One tenet of the Agile Manifesto is face-to-face conversations. How can there be a connection unless the process is simplified and there’s a place to meet? With the lessons from COVID-19, collaboration possibilities are limitless. Oprah Winfrey, in her Harvard commencement speech in 2013, said,

And even though this is the college where Facebook was born, my hope is that you would try to go out and have more face-to-face conversations with people you may disagree with. That you’ll have the courage to look them in the eye and hear their point of view. And help make sure that the speed and distance and anonymity of our world doesn’t cause us to lose our ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes and recognize all that we share as a people. This is imperative for you as an individual and for our success as a nation.

Most life problems can only be solved in a face-to-face format. A café mindset makes this possible.

There has to be some way that this darkness can be banished with light. It begins at the café. The café conversation is a panacea.

At the heart of people (the knowledge users and creators) lies the spirituality of knowledge. It occurs to me that we have missed the livewire or spirituality of knowledge, which is the people connection.

The real world has taught me that you don’t just manage projects; you lead people and integrate processes to achieve results. If you only manage projects, you can’t see the forest for the trees. Alexander Laufer, author and director of the Consortium for Project Leadership at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, contends, “The key is that projects must be led, not just managed. We need both leadership and management, but right now, the prevailing paradigm is that projects are managed—that planning and control can solve all the problems. My studies have shown me again and again that the best projects are, first of all, led and managed or led to be manageable. I found the traditional project management methodology was missing a formal ‘knowledge’ component—and need more of the people-leadership element” (Cohen, 2009). The “directing manager” should not turn the café into an old-style classroom and stop all that sharing before it begins. Café is currently taking place in several classrooms today.

Professional practitioners are the exclusive custodians of their own business knowledge. They need to recognize the benefits of sharing their knowledge. It’s debatable who owns the project or work knowledge, but you don’t own what you don’t know. Best practices for organizations require an environment where knowledge sharing not only exists but is nourished and rewarded. Rather than “them versus us,” see knowledge as jointly owned. My most innovative results occur when I exchange expertise, pollinate ideas, and aggressively share knowledge with all the project’s stakeholders. When knowledge is openly shared, it ignites new information. New information reliably begets innovation.

How do you know your organization’s critical knowledge, or, when, and how to share? Once the organization’s critical intellectual capital is identified, it needs to be captured, acquired, interpreted, analyzed, transformed, curated, and made available, findable for future stakeholders. Forums must be developed where knowledge workers can interact to share and broker their experience, resulting in new knowledge and innovation. I’ll discuss communities of practice in chapter 12.

I became disenchanted with the information silos that occur without some sort of knowledge sharing. We have several lessons-learned repositories, and nothing is learned! The right environment and the right mindset are critical for knowledge exchange to be possible. Knowledge must be contextualized or it’s nothing. I perpetually felt as if I was inefficiently reinventing the wheel each time I led a project—it was like chasing rainbows! Do we have a need for knowledge leadership? Yes. Knowledge leadership cafés provide oversight and governance to a knowledge system.

I have witnessed “brain drain” on my projects due to retirements, increased job mobility, and information silos. I was terrified by the number of valuable experts aging out of my professional environment. For instance, the surveyors and geomatics scientists’ community of practice at the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) participate in knowledge exchanges, fairs, and cafés because an average surveyor is 65 years old. TxDOT is the 12,000-employee flagship government agency in the United States. Even though the public face of the agency is generally associated with the construction and maintenance of the state’s immense state highway system—it has under its jurisdiction, 80,455 centerline miles and nearly 55,000 bridges. The agency is also responsible for overseeing aviation, rail, and public transportation systems in the state (TxDOT, 2019). With the looming apocalypse of brain drain, we must alter how we teach, learn, retain, and transfer knowledge from person to person and to systems. A wealth of knowledge was exiting my workplace. How can this exodus of knowledge be mitigated?

ANALYSIS OF THE AMERICAN WORKFORCE TODAY

For the first time in history, five different cohorts make up the American workforce:

The Silent Generation: Born between 1925 and 1946
Baby Boomers: Born between 1946 and 1964
Generation X: Born between 1965 and 1980
Generation Y/Millennials: Born between 1980 and 1995
Generation Z/Centennials: Born after 1996

Each generation is distinct in the way it assimilates information and explains it to become knowledge. By 2029, 76 million of these employees—specifically the baby boomers—will retire from the workforce at about 11,000 per day. An unsettling reality is that by 2030, an estimated 20 percent of Americans will be 65 or older (US Census Bureau, 2014). As these workers age out of the workforce, organizations are experiencing a loss of critical business knowledge, skills, and experience. In most larger organizations, hundreds of project and program managers are duplicating their efforts. Without managing business knowledge, there isn’t a method of capitalizing on previous projects’ intellectual capital. Work continues at warp speed from project to project without effective knowledge transfer and future business deficits. How can the numerous pockets of knowledge management activities be identified, explained, and recorded? Technology and machines have exploded, with intranets for storing captured knowledge. Do we have the right environment for knowledge sharing? Experts have developed many processes. Where is the standardization of this process? Are these enabling knowledge sharing? You can take a horse to the water, but you cannot force it to drink. The environment is the most significant opportunity enabler or threat for any grand concept, vision, or strategy.

In one of my cultural change projects at TxDOT in 2015, I identified, developed, and led 43 certified project management professionals (PMPs) to mentor dozens of other PMPs. Every participant in the two pilot projects I managed has a seasoned certified project manager as a mentor, who was a mentor and a coach who created café space for the prospective mentees to ask questions and for the free transfer of project knowledge. I also identified pockets of knowledge management activities in our organization, such as communities of practice, job shadowing, social media activation, team collaboration, data and information management, post-project interviews, team building boot camps, and so on.

With the help of subject matter experts (SMEs) with long institutional knowledge in areas like IT, HR, Communications, Research, Strategy and Innovation, Library and Information Management, Data Science, and so on, we scanned and ranked our organization’s KM elements. We identified dozens of elements based on their relevance and value they add toward knowledge identification, capture, sharing, reuse, and rejuvenation. This scan was a guide and roadmap when we developed an enterprise KM strategy.

In all this commotion, it became evident to me that something was missing. Where was the rallying point? As my project progressed in terms of time, resources, and sophistication, I saw the need for a “KM clearinghouse.” From a macro and managerial standpoint, there was a demand for a systematic way to procure information from subject matter experts. It was time to aggressively steer the crossenterprise knowledge workers toward a knowledge society.

There needs to be a conceptual “home base” for KM, and finding it should be as simple as running into a corner café. The café construct establishes the foundation to identify, capture, curate, share, and reuse vital business information and critical intellectual capital. Establish a café space for knowledge enthusiasts to gather, review, discuss, establish strategies and tools for knowledge, to share best practices, gather and address information on successful and innovative project practice, and explore resources for communities of practice. Knowledge Café is a serendipitous and organically grown invention. In my experience, the healthier KM ecosystems foster an interactive space of various interests and diverse patrons. The Knowledge Café brings different, but not necessarily random strangers into one location. The Knowledge Café is straight to the point and will be attractive to millennials responsible for keeping this knowledge transfer movement rolling forward.

I aspired to invite practitioners to a simple conversation space—a Knowledge Café—to brainstorm, investigate, aggregate, and optimize the multiple available knowledge levels. Café-goers are knowledge creators and users who are enthusiastic about knowledge creation, sharing, and velocity. When you have only information and process, knowledge management becomes mechanical and cosmetic. We need to interject a real relational café mindset with organizational learning. People. Relationship. Café. Knowledge.

I’ve learned more in the Knowledge Café setting throughout my career than in a traditional classroom or boring meetings. In hindsight, the best and the most significant people I’ve met were through volunteer opportunities—in a café kind of setting. I’ve harvested the best ideas from such café experiences and turned them into reality. Within the café environment, I let go of my greatest fears and met the best of friends. Learning happens in engaging environments. Information environments tend to be isolated, ingesting environments but not necessarily for deep understanding. And the best part is that we go beyond information at the café to explaining, sharing experiences, deep thinking—this is knowledge.

Knowledge Café is a gateway or introduction to knowledge management. It’s that relational mindset for the superiority of tools and space; it accelerates and scales casual conversations over those that focus on documents, artifacts, and cumbersome formality.

Call a knowledge fair and café to begin a knowledge management conversation! A knowledge fair showcases organizational knowledge assets and practices. It is an alternative to traditional presentations and is a more interactive experience. Because there is no one size fits all, I prefer to combine a Knowledge Café with a knowledge fair to add some level of formality. This combination gave me the liberty or leverage to escalate the outcome of a Knowledge Café to leadership café—the outcomes are considered fine-tuned for management policy, institutionalization, and KM implementation. I’ll discuss leadership café in chapter 11.

1.5. CASE STUDY: GENERATIONAL CHANGES—THERESA LUEBCKE

This case study by Theresa Luebcke is an indirect attribution of concepts to a third, albeit credentialed party. For context, the Project Management Institute (PMI) is the largest global professional organization for the professional project manager (PMP), one of the credentials offered by PMI. Certified PMPs manage projects in almost all industries, and PMP certification is recognized in every country of the world. PMI has more than 300 chapters with 10 regions. Theresa Luebcke, PMP, was the PMI Region 6 Mentor for 26 chapters in the south-central United States. You can agree with her when she talks about the experience and the efficacy of knowledge transfer. She thinks that you are a better leader, smarter, and even irreplaceable when you share your knowledge and allow knowledge transfer to thrive, and not the other way around. Amen!

Here’s Theresa’s story:

I began my work in mid-1985 as a supplier to a major manufacturing facility in the Midwest. I quickly learned the “old-timers” (those with 20+ years’ experience with the manufacturing company, or the “baby boomers”) were reluctant to “share” their knowledge. The mindset, at the time, was: “. . . if I share what I know, someone is going to take my job! If I keep my knowledge to myself, they (the company) cannot afford to get rid of me!” I saw a similar mindset in those who transitioned to the supplier (they had spent many years with the manufacturing company but became employees of the supplier company). They felt a person in management should have worked and therefore know every aspect of the business they were managing. They should not rely on someone they managed (or their “report”) to “know” more than they did! I experienced this thinking held true until some of these folks reached retirement age, and new blood began to fill these positions. There was no café or knowledge exchange culture in these environments.

In both situations—employees who remained with the company and those who left to work for the supplier—I did not feel there was a “formal” process to transfer knowledge or an expectation to do so. I saw the knowledge transfer become commonplace with the influx of newer employees wanting to move up (or move on), so they were more apt to share their knowledge with others, so they were not so “irreplaceable.”

I like listening to experienced project managers and knowledge brokers like Theresa. No one is irreplaceable, but you become your organization’s most critical asset if you are a knowledge broker who shares knowledge. Share your knowledge or become irrelevant!

1.6. CURIOSITY: IDEAS, TIPS, AND TRICKS

I’ve learned many tips and tricks over the years. I gladly share my ideas with you.

Personal and professional KM systems like Evernote, Google Keep, OneNote, and Google Drive can be used to track your personal knowledge. Enterprise access tools such as SharePoint also offer personal KM features. Some other knowledge capture tools for agile or waterfall teams are easy to use, available on your mobile phone, and can transcribe your notes. Examples are a voice recorder, Agile for Scrum, VersionOne, Jira Software, Audacity, Active Collab, Atlassian Jira + Agile, Cogi, and Otter.ai. The café is not the gathering of people who have stewarded some knowledge and want to know-how. Café is like a show-and-tell of your mental knowledge repository. The personal knowledge register in chapter 1.3 is an enabler. When you use these tools for personal knowledge inventory, you can also bring them to the café and share it with others.

Personal KM involves demonstrations, documentation, teaching others what you know, and social interactions. When you interact with others, it helps you to improve retention levels and capture the big picture. All of us can share what we know. Nobody will know what you know until you share it; both you and others learn better when knowledge is shared. It is when you share what you know that what you know is tested. What do you really know? Personal knowledge is your power, and you can never be smarter than what you know. So, how wise are you? Wisdom is applied knowledge—knowledge is of no value until it’s applied. Check what you know and how you use it. People are wise not because they know everything, but because they know what they know and activate it properly. When you know what you know, you will be a wise person.

Learning is supposed to imply knowledge—otherwise, it’s just information exposure. We use knowledge to manage projects, relationships, businesses, and innovations but do little or nothing to manage the knowledge itself. How many times have we made a mistake and made the same mistake repeatedly and do not learn from it? I can recollect being a victim of repeating my mistakes, occasionally, which is very sad. Managing my knowledge helps me not to go down the doggy trail of mistakes to really learn.

Café is about great questions, but don’t answer your own questions.

I’d rather be known as a learner than a teacher. It’s terrible to teach what you’ve not learned, and every great teacher is first a fantastic learner. I believe that every leader is a learner. Learners ask questions. When we stop learning, we start dying. We learn to share. We share to learn. Learn or become irrelevant. The best type of learning is conversational—that is where Knowledge Café comes in. Café is dialogue instead of debate, questions and answers. Leadership and management expert John Maxwell even wrote an entire book on the significance of questions in conversation, titled Good Leaders Ask Great Questions. He thinks that great questions are important because they unlock and open doors that would otherwise remain closed and are the most effective means of connecting people. The most effective way to connect with others is by asking questions, allowing us to build better ideas and give us a different perspective (Maxwell, 2014).

Café is cross-fertilization of the idea, curiosity for new knowledge, and the most important: making sense of what we know. Ask questions.

Is our brain wired to remember and avoid our last mistake because we’d rather subconsciously believe that it never happened? This is debatable. Memories have a structural component, but there are numerous other functions to the brain, such as perception and planning. Many components have little to do with memory (glia cells, myelin). Memory begins when we respond to outside stimuli and reinforcement compounds to rewire our brain. KM techniques like lessons learned or after-action reviews enable us to remember the last mistake and not make it again, learn and unlearn our past. A Knowledge Café can be organized specifically for this purpose.

There is a mad rush for new learning, new ideas, innovations, and new knowledge. How many people reflect, search, and learn from their mistakes? How many people have taken inventory of what they know? Build on it, sharpen it, and watch and see new knowledge and innovation erupt!

Is it possible to forget what we know? Absolutely. It is possible for us to forget what we know, and it’s possible to forget that we forgot. We can know what we forgot. This will happen if we activate our curiosity, cultivate our knowledge, steward what we know, and rekindle our knowledge. It is not how much we learned that matters. It is not how much we think we know, either. What matters is how much we know that we know and what we do with it. You can know one thing, and how you manage it triggers innovation and creativity. You can also learn a ton and feel good about it and not innovate because knowledge alone is not equivalent to innovation. Still, when the knowledge is managed, it produces new knowledge. The new knowledge leads to innovation, just like new research can lead to innovation and further research.