Introduction

A Knowledge Café is a mindset and an environment for engaging, discussing, and exchanging knowledge within a group, whether face-to-face or virtual. It’s a knowledge experimentation town square where it’s easier to share and reuse knowledge. Café is the environment that supports knowledge circulation and increases its velocity—“breeding” grounds for innovation. The café is in the digital discussion board, enterprise knowledge Wiki library, brown-bag lunch meetings, unstructured serendipitous exchanges, and watercooler conversations. Until now, there has never been a time when there was a need for increased knowledge flow, agility, simplicity, and relevance. Don’t you wish there was a space to bring ideas, including your crazy ones, for other caffeinated visitors to test them out? I’m talking about space, curiosity, and attitude for learning where reflective and generative dialogue and discourse are covenanted; debate and diatribe are intentional outside the ground rules. I started the Junior Debating Society in third grade (class 3). I understand the debate. A debate has its place but is not sustainable. Today’s toxic and hostile culture that prefers debate to dialogue calls us for dialogue—in a café.

The café space and mindset integrate face-to-face or virtual audio meetings with screen-sharing, whiteboarding/brainstorming, group chat for teams/projects, platforms for file sharing, social networking, collaborations, testing crazy ideas, idea generation, agile learning, honest questions, and answers.

In today’s world of breathtaking changes, where we drink from a fire hose of information, constant and quick learning of new things, openness to new ideas, and adaptation are not optional but necessary skills. Learn or become irrelevant. But learning is not enough. We want to make sense of what we know. We need that “aha!” moment that happens in a conversational setting that a café provides. Intangible resources or values like knowledge, people, expertise, loyalty, repeated business, and reputation are becoming increasingly valuable. Effective and managed communication is a prerequisite for collaboration, free flow of information, and addictive learning space. Learning agility, versatility, feedback, making meaning of our experience, and collaboration are woven into the fabric of high-performing organizations. The most difficult challenges and hard discussions in our society, like racial conflicts, can be unraveled with understanding, not just knowledge. Understanding has some elements of vulnerabilities. It means walking in peoples’ shoes through listening, dialogue, conversation—in a café way. Silence is not the answer. Learning and knowledge exchange should not be cumbersome but should be as simple as walking into a café. Have you desired your global team’s input, not just the people sitting in the next cubicle, office, or people you already knew?

We live in a knowledge economy, which depends on the quality, ease of access, findability, discoverability, usability, dependability of information, and conversion velocity to knowledge. Knowledge is the most significant currency in today’s project-driven world, yet the current knowledge of an organization or industry may be obsolete in two to five years. Immersing ourselves in new technologies and innovation is like running as fast as possible to stay in the same place without capturing and retaining enduring wisdom that can never be obsolete. The way we acquired and exchanged knowledge yesterday will not suffice today. The greatest ideas are made impotent by the wrong environment and destroyed by the wrong culture.

I’ll contend that human interactions are the most significant channels for transferring all human core capabilities like curiosity, imagination, social and emotional intelligence, teaming, empathy, resilience, creativity, sense-making, adaptive thinking, and critical thinking. There is a need for a nonjudgmental learning space where we can voice “crazy ideas,” unscripted knowledge, have others think about them, and test them out. That’s the “come, let’s reason together knowledge space.” We all have our prejudices and biases. Many people don’t want to say the wrong thing. We need a space where we can honestly bring our prejudices and biases to conversational dialogue, and it’s okay to say the wrong things in love, provided it’s for knowledge. The absence of a café means everyone retreats, there is silence, and knowledge is stifled. The ignorant and opportunists rule the day.

The knowledge environment and culture are inseparable. What’s trending is the environment where knowledge is stewarded. Café-style collaboration platforms enable more casual networking and “whatever you’d like—as long as it’s learning appropriate” conversations that spur understanding, connections, relationships, and new knowledge.

COVID-19 has scrambled everything and the way we learn to learn, learn, unlearn, share, and work. And the cry for social justice is reshaping the nature of our conversations and dialogues. Where do we exchange knowledge on exciting lessons learned from the disaster and disruptions, especially from large-scale remote work? Virtual Knowledge Café? How well can a virtual café present an opportunity? Could knowledge users access the data, information, and tools they needed?

Interaction and conversation are on the critical path of every knowledge management (KM) environment. The café is a safe place to exchange knowledge. It’s a safe to fail knowledge experimentation. It’s a current, cross-generational, systematic concept designed for a simple conversation to transfer, retain, and manage relevant knowledge. The café is the university of the future. We can only be as good as the environment we create. With Knowledge Café, we’ll be able to bust information and knowledge silos. Imagine an environment where conversation is king and where interactive displays, team-building days, huddle rooms, stand-ups, Kanban’s Trello boards, Google’s office collaborative tools, video conferencing, hot asking, and the like are the language of work.

Retirements, increased job mobility, and information silos create an inevitable “brain drain” and loss of an organization’s critical intellectual capital. But, the wisdom of an organization’s employees—aka knowledge workers—can potentially endure and curate a competitive edge in the project-driven workplace. In a world of daily disruptions, there is an urgency to capture, transfer, and retain an organization’s knowledge workers’ accrued knowledge. Without the retention and application of what we know and 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.

Information creates energy only when it is explained or brought into context. Knowledge does not manage itself—it is cultivated and activated by knowledge leaders. People are the creators of the environment where knowledge thrives in a conversational setting. There’s no best practice in a terrible environment. Innovation expert and entrepreneur Michael Schrage was right when he said, “Knowledge is not the power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is power. End of story” (Schrage, quoted in Gurteen, 2019). The power of knowledge is activated when it’s acted upon! Curiosity is the antecedent to discovering the power of knowledge and the wisdom it becomes. Schrage means that knowledge is power when it is applied.

Human knowledge is required for machine learning, and when we lose this critical business knowledge, we will be on the losing side of the next disruption. Resilience will be necessary to adapt to changing conditions and recover from incidents. The need for continuity of knowledge and operations is an integral part of ensuring a resilient organization. In the days ahead, disruptions, like COVID-19, may be a normal thing. Hence, resilience strategy will be required.

I have utilized the principles of the Knowledge Café since the late nineties. However, my friend, David Gurteen, coined the term “Knowledge Café” in 2002, a versatile conversational process to bring a group of people together to learn from each other and share the experience. We can expand on this concept of Knowledge Café as space and mindset to create a current, multigenerational, systematic environment designed to exchange, retain, and transfer institutional knowledge.

Knowledge Café is a technique used to surface a group’s collective knowledge, to learn from each other, share ideas and insights to gain a deeper understanding of topics, issues, and KM best practices.

—David Gurteen

The Knowledge Café is a collaborative, structured but mostly unstructured vehicle for knowledge transfer. As you would in a café, our minds are ignited and rejuvenated by sharing knowledge freely, and new creative ideas emerge. The Knowledge Café can be in person or virtual, in the office or somewhere else away from home and office. Four walls don’t make a café—only people, the knowledge, and ideas they bring to the café. At the café, you can discuss hard-to-solve project issues or resolve a family and community crisis. Rather than presentations and one-way knowledge transfer, in the café, everyone’s voice is heard and counts. Small groups discuss a question, topic, or issue and share their ideas with a larger group. The action is at the small-group level.

Knowledge Café creates a simple (agile), theoretical, collaborative space or system by which all generations of knowledge workers can impart and share critical business knowledge and build most in-depth knowledge—lacking in many settings in today’s organizations. It’s as simple as a corner café—an unstructured and interactive way to capture, share, and bolster knowledge. Knowledge Café advocate Dan Remenyi calls the café “do it yourself knowledge sharing” (Remenyi, 2004). Entering a Knowledge Café stirs our curiosity and allows for a seamless transfer from owned knowledge to shared knowledge.

Knowledge Café is one of several techniques for KM. It is simple, could be both structured and unstructured, is a gateway to other techniques, and interfaces with other KM techniques. The conversation at the café brings all knowledge workers to participate in the small-group discussions of knowledge exchange and transfer.

I want to stir and provoke your curiosity for new knowledge creation, transfer, and innovation. There’s a clarion call to capture, transfer, and retain the most-critical knowledge of the organization. If we’re going to be relevant, innovate, and become efficient and resilient, we must identify, capture, share, and reanimate knowledge and create new knowledge. Knowledge Café is an organic tool to achieve this. If you have a difficult conversation, if there are silos and uncertainties, if there’s a genuine hunger for new knowledge, if you want to cut through the clusters of formalities and espouse free and win-win exchange of ideas and knowledge, just café it! Could you take it to the café?

I intend to join other knowledge enthusiasts and tech industries to bring knowledge management from predominantly in the halls of academia to the center of national discourse with the simplicity and appeal that a café offers.

In this book, I shall use the café as a mindset, a space to create the environment for knowledge exchange, transfer, and management. We shall explore how to design an effective Knowledge Café; how the café interfaces with other KM methods and techniques; what to expect from disruptive technology and tendencies; how to share best practices, communicate with employees, and positively reinforce the knowledge-sharing behaviors and recognition schemes; spark innovation through knowledge exchange; how to create a leadership café; what a thriving knowledge management environment looks like; and finally, the value and fun of knowledge stewardship. In the café-saucer is a rare blend of hindsight, insight, and foresight of knowledge conversations.

Just café it!

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