11 ■ Knowledge Leadership Café

11.1. KNOWLEDGE LEADERSHIP CAFÉ ROADMAP

As seen in figure 6, the origin of most knowledge is from the physical dimensions of data—things we can count, measure, observe, and touch. From this domain, we derive information. We need more than data or facts. In the age of big data, the importance of organization, analysis, and data cannot be overemphasized. When data are given meaning—and made actionable—it becomes information; it still needs to be explained to become knowledge. The café can provide the vehicle and space for this metamorphosis of data to information knowledge and wisdom. When this information is married with experience and insight and is contextualized, it scales to the domain of abstract, as seen in figure 6. This is where these data and pieces of information can be used to make decisions. When we analyze and consume information regularly, this is a sphere of knowledge. When knowledge is applied, it becomes wisdom. A Leadership Café answers the question “what next” after the café.

Dr. Richard McDermott, a Visiting Academic Fellow at Henley Business School and an Associate of the Knowledge and Innovation Network sponsored by Warwick University, describes six characteristics of knowledge that distinguish it from information (McDermott, 1999, as cited in UKEssays, 2018):

Knowledge is a human act, a product of our thinking, and belongs to the community. It’s almost useless in a silo but can give birth to greatness when it is caféd.

A Leadership Café–like dinner took place in early 1969 among three men at the Three Threes Restaurant, a small, intimate gathering place just a few blocks from City Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This dinner was a continuation of several months of discussions and cross-fertilization of knowledge between two men, Jim Snyder and Gordon Davis. By the end of their knowledge exchange, it was decided that a new organization should be formed to provide a means for project managers to associate, share information and knowledge, and discuss common problems. Project Management Institute was born. Today, millions of project managers and professionals have been impacted around the world because of that Leadership Café.

Experts know how to get things done. Leadership is influence. High-impact leaders increase their influence by sharing what they know.

I intend to take a Knowledge Café to a new level—Knowledge Leadership Café—a framework, not a methodology or technique. Leadership Café becomes Knowledge Café 2.0 for validating the café experience, investing, formalizing or institutionalizing café practices, identifying appropriate KM strategy, and aligning it with the organization’s mission and goals. Café 2.0 is a sequel to Knowledge Café.

At work, I plan about one Leadership Café every other month to respond to our KM community’s needs and make recommendations to top management on KM. Leadership is a framework versus being a methodology. Café 2.0 is not prescriptive and is more strategic than other types of Knowledge Cafés. Café 2.0 convenes leaders to develop the strategy for a KM program.

You and I may be different in the way we see this concept, but I have developed a powerful framework for this. Café 2.0 is the café for the implementation of new knowledge. It is the formalization, “strategization,” and “politization” of the Knowledge Café mindset, conversational leadership, and World Café outcomes. Leadership Café converts ideas into reality, plans into policy, and advances newly created knowledge to top management in a café style. There is a feeling of disequilibrium regarding the formalization of knowledge within an organization. How formal can we get without creating more work for knowledge users and creators? Café 2.0 establishes the framework for formalizing KM in an organization without being too prescriptive and pedantic.

A framework provides structure and direction on a preferred way to do something without being too detailed or rigid. A framework provides guidance while being flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions or to be customized for your organization.

I report to senior leadership and an executive sponsor who wants to see numbers and results. After gathering 85 leaders across the enterprise for a four-hour Knowledge Café and fair event, there should be some tangible deliverables. I know that the outcome of the café is what attendees learned in their heads. I’m customizing these principles to enable me to gain higher management and stakeholder support. I’m hoping that we shall have a virgin café that will not have a knowledge fair attached to it in the future. By the way, I have had some executives attend my café events. Believe it or not, their presence didn’t stop café attendees from expressing their views or having positive and heated conversations because there was a ground rule that all attendees agreed to.

Another ground rule is that there are no preconceived outcomes. I usually have a live survey during my café events and have received tremendous feedback. We had 93 percent overall customer satisfaction. We take this feedback to the Leadership Café. In many organizational settings, you can’t get 80 middle-to-senior managers together for an unstructured conversation like a café.

The Knowledge Leadership Café comprises enterprise champions and KM strategists. You can call it a project or program planning enterprise team or committee. But this team is strategic. What differentiates this team from a committee is the café mindset and the ability to see the big picture and make recommendations to top management.

Just like in all projects, a KM program has more likelihood of success if it has an executive sponsor and management buy-in is secured. People at the top have “big picture” knowledge. . . . People at the bottom have the knowledge of how things work and how to get things done,” said Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992).

11.2. THE INTERSECTION OF KNOWLEDGE CAFÉ AND LEADERSHIP CAFÉ

I conduct knowledge fairs and café, incorporating about 60 percent of Gurteen’s Knowledge Café elements or principles. I believe in the simplicity and principles of a Knowledge Café mindset. Remember that the café is a KM technique used to surface a group’s collective knowledge, learn from each other, and share ideas and insights to gain a deeper understanding of topics, issues, and KM best practices. It’s a conceptual “home base” for KM, an unstructured and interactive ecosystem for exploring, sharing, and rejuvenating knowledge. The critical environmental factor is that everyone in this space has an equal voice and a safe learning space. It should be as simple as walking into a café for a coffee or tea.

The outcome of a Knowledge Café is what attendees learned from the café, but after the café, what next? What are the plans for institutionalization? Café should be the baseline for conversational leadership—Leadership Café. I have held multiple Austin citywide Leadership Cafés during the past years. They were electric and exciting! Attendees—leaders, project and portfolio managers, “Agilest,” and KM think tanks—brainstormed KM ideas using Knowledge Leadership Café as a framework. Attendees were mostly portfolio and project directors/managers in our region. Leadership café presentations were just about 15 percent of the time; the rest of the time was for questions, feedback, brainstorming, and conversations.

Why Is Knowledge Leadership Important? Because It Leads to Wisdom and Institutionalized Knowledge

Do you want knowledge or wisdom to be your identity? Do you want to be called a wise man or a wise lady? Whom do you identify with? We become identified with the things or people we identify with, and what we identify with becomes our identity. There is no wisdom without first having knowledge. Enlightenment, or perception of clarity, is the product of wisdom.

Knowledge is the new gold. Knowledge is the new beacon. Knowledge has become the most significant asset of an organization. Knowledge is today’s most essential resource of organizations and a prime factor of production. We are not just in an information economy; we are in a knowledge economy.

Knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. You cannot be more potent than your knowledge. Your conquests, victories, and accomplishments are directly proportional to the depth of your knowledge. People perish not because they are unlucky or weak but because of deficiency in knowledge or ignorance. In any society, when steadfast love, faithfulness, and knowledge exit, what will be left is anything but mercy. It’s impossible to have the former without the latter. Faith, belief, reason, and knowledge work together. In all spiritualities, both organizational and religious spiritualities, you grow in grace and knowledge or become irrelevant.

Like a project, knowledge doesn’t manage itself—knowledge needs to be managed. Beyond managing knowledge, knowledge leadership is required. Some persons or groups will have to provide leadership and guidance for knowledge to be identified, transferred, and reinvigorated in the organization. I want to emphasize my hunger and desire for KM’s simplicity for an average knowledge user and creator, and the emphasis on people, before process and technology.

According to International Data Corp. (IDC), a Framingham, Massachusetts-based market intelligence and advisory firm in the IT and telecommunications industries, Fortune 500 companies lose at least $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge (Babcock, 2004, p. 46). Knowledge Café is limited to providing this kind of measurement. Café 2.0 offers a maturity model to measure the KM activities in the organization.

As we have discussed throughout this book, Knowledge Café is my preferred technique or methodology to start the KM process—to bring people who know something and those who desire to know more to collaborate and broker intelligent ideas and share knowledge. My preferred tool is to engage knowledge creators to create new knowledge, replace obsolete knowledge, and innovate. When David Gurteen coined the term Knowledge Café, he had in mind that the café is a casual gathering to ask and answer questions. His expectations or prescription are 6 to 24 people in a café that last for about 1-½ hours. I told David that I had as many as 100 leaders in my café and that my café events last up to five hours. There’s not supposed to be any note-taking in the café, but I took notes because I saw the café as a kind of crowdsourcing for knowledge within an organization.

As a project manager, I always distribute a meeting agenda, including a column for action items. In the knowledge fair and café, there is so much feedback, learning, sharing, and reinvigoration that takes place. Café 2.0 is the next logical thing to do with the outcome of the café.

A Knowledge Café evolves to Leadership Café or Café 2.0. Contrary to the spirit of the Gurteen café, we take notes from the tables, summarize and distribute them to the café attendees, and subsequently try to curate and make these learning, ideas, and new knowledge accessible and findable by knowledge users. We have developed a knowledge Wiki to capture café lessons, knowledge, and wisdom. My favorite part is reporting the outcomes to my executive sponsor or top management. But the next part is the analysis that goes with the contents of the café that occurs after the café. The café enterprise team meets at another café-like meeting—a sequel to the café to intelligently analyze and synthesize the surveys and contributions for café attendees. I utilize live polls or surveys during the café to capture the knowledge creators’ and enthusiasts’ sentiments.

What Do I Do with the Notes Collected from the Café?

We take notes from the tables, analyze them, and distribute them among the attendees and other interested stakeholders. We analyze the deliberations, synthesize them, and use them to understand how to develop other KM methods in the organization.

I frequently use surveys in café meetings for decision-making. The Leadership Café is the framework to deploy strategies to respond to the outcome of the surveys. In terms of the discussions and summaries at the tables at the café, we listen to knowledge creators from different CoPs and disperse what we learned to all interested knowledge creators and users.

For example, during one of my café meetings, CoP participants shared collaboration technologies in their various CoPs. During the Leadership Café, we analyzed the comments from the participants. Some of the collaboration tools used by some CoPs were not safe—technology enablers with security risks associated with them—and have not been formally deployed for enterprise use. This made us develop plans to identify and promote technology tools ready and available across the enterprise. The Leadership Café responds to and provides guidance in this kind of situation. We developed a communication strategy for the CoP participants on the collaboration tools allowable across the enterprise. Plans were also created for how to move forward with other expected collaboration tools.

11.3. CAFÉ CHALLENGES

If you have ever used knowledge, you can create knowledge. I hope that the KM process is simplified and gives the reader concepts, principles, and frameworks to approach KM in all organizations. The role of the knowledge leader is to answer the big KM questions. How do you activate intentionality? How do you manage knowledge in the minds of people? How do you make KM an organizational strategy? Knowledge leadership provides the appropriate governance needed in the café space.

We understand things through our frame of reference. Many people are incapable of coming up with something that hasn’t existed. The new idea in your head may be an old idea in another knowledge leadership. Our knowledge capacities are boundless. Café surfaces what we know. Knowledge leaders or brokers are the gatekeepers of knowledge and provide appropriate leadership for KET.

Café 2.0 provides a maturity model to measure the KM activities in the organization. It applies lessons learned, makes self-adjustments, develops understanding, creates leverage, adds maturity to the process and product, and more.

11.4. MIDDLE MANAGERS FACILITATE KM PROGRAMS

In their book The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) contended that the “middle-up-down” model of organizational knowledge creation is a realistic and workable model KM. “Simply put, knowledge is created by middle managers, who are often leaders of a team or task force, through a spiral conversion process involving both the top and the front-line employees (i.e., bottom). The process puts middle managers at the intersection of the company’s vertical and horizontal flows of information.” They elaborated this concept with GE’s, 3M’s, and Canon’s case studies, drawing a contrast between top-down management and bottom-up management, proposing middle-up-down management as the best-case scenario.

“In the middle-up-down model, top management creates a vision or a dream, while middle management develops more concrete concepts that frontline employees can understand and implement. Middle managers try to solve the contradiction between what top management hopes to create and what exists in the real world” (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Top management sees the big picture. The analysis and synthesis of the KM process are too cumbersome for senior management. The topic of KM is too complicated for the frontline workers and project support team members to deal with.

Even if they are organizationally relevant, the authors argued that frontline employees who are mostly immersed in the day-to-day operations or work, from project support to project support, do not have the “big picture” advantage or are equipped to drive communication of the importance of their insights about KM. If the top-down approach is a bad idea and bottom-up is not workable, we are left with the middle-up-down approach. So, middle managers become the purveyors of the Knowledge Leadership Café—the facilitators of the unstructured plethora of insights toward an intentional knowledge creation organization.

There needs to be a KM facilitator who will bring like-minded knowledge workers to the café to begin the KM discussion. They are the firecrackers of the KM. Middle managers will be the evangelists of the sensible and realistic KM model and conceptual framework for the organization. If you have found something else that works, let me know. I successfully championed KM in my organization because, by the nature of my role as an operational excellence coordinator and senior project manager, I advise executives—helping them translate organizational strategies into reality. All my projects are involved in acquiring, developing, and managing enterprise project teams. I had the luxury of leading familiarity with top-middle-down.

Knowledge leaders validate the Knowledge Café outcomes. Knowledge Leadership Café is by invitation only. I’m blessed to have a knowledge leader in my organization who has a Ph.D. in knowledge management. When we developed the guidelines and templates for an enterprise knowledge Interview program, he was one of the knowledge leaders who validated the program before advancing to the top management.

Leadership Café sits in the middle, not the top, or down the chain of command. You can only make changes within a well-defined context. I have had several Knowledge Café and Knowledge Leadership Café events within and outside my organization. In each case, I sent out several surveys to know the leadership structure of a KM program. I have conducted independent research on this. There seems to be a consensus that a KM program would be a terrible idea if it had only a top-down KM approach. On the reverse, a bottom-up approach won’t work either—it dies before it gets to the middle.

Throughout this book, I have mentioned knowledge creators, knowledge workers, and knowledge users. Nonaka and Takeuchi emphasize that everyone is a knowledge creator in a knowledge-creating Company, whatever their position in the organization. I liked their categorization of knowledge users and creators:

Knowledge practitioners are responsible for accumulating and generating both tacit and explicit knowledge. Those who interface primarily with tacit knowledge are “knowledge operators,” while those who interface mostly with explicit knowledge are “knowledge specialists.”

Knowledge engineers are responsible for converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and vice versa, thereby facilitating what they describe in their book as four modes of knowledge creation, specifically socialization, externalization, internalization, and combination (also discussed in their organization science paper); I referenced this earlier.

Knowledge officers are responsible for managing the overall organizational knowledge-creation process at the corporate level.

I don’t think that one person can play these roles. I also do not believe that someone in the top management will be able to fulfill these roles of knowledge leaders. Hence, the enterprise management of KM is vested in the hands of a Knowledge Leadership Café.

Knowledge management is a vast ecosystem with several activities and techniques. There is no body of knowledge like PMBOK^® Guide that serves as a compendium of KM time-tested practices and methodologies. A unified theory of knowledge does not exist. Like projects, tools, techniques, methods, and KM activities are context-specific and located in open systems. Hence, the temptation for researchers is to toe the line of personal opinions. The need for a research roadmap for KM is a sine qua non for progress.

11.5. CASE STUDY: NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM MOVIE—KNOWLEDGE UNMANAGED

Watch this movie or the preambles on YouTube. If you are a knowledge project manager, conduct a knowledge gap analysis to identify an organization’s knowledge assets (see table 6), maturity level, and needs.

Background: Cecil Fredricks (Dick Van Dyke), an elderly night security guard about to retire from the American Museum of Natural History, hires Larry despite his unpromising résumé.

The museum, facing financial challenges, is rapidly losing money and plans to replace Cecil and two colleagues, Gus (Mickey Rooney) and Reginald (Bill Cobbs), with one guard. Cecil hands Larry an instruction manual on what to do in the museum on his first night, warning him that it can get a little spooky out here at night. Cecil gives Larry an instruction booklet on how to handle museum security, and advises Larry to leave some of the lights on, and warns him, “One thing you’ll have to remember is not to let anything in . . . or out.” Soon, Larry discovers that the gallery comes alive when the lights go out—an epic battleground fueled with nonstop action and adventure!

LEADERSHIP CAFÉ PROCESS

Call a few other managers who are knowledge creators and users to a Leadership Café.

KNOWLEDGE ASSETS

As seen in table 6, we can identify knowledge assets as:

The ultimate goal is Café 2.0, a Knowledge Leadership Café.

Knowledge Café is not the end, but a means to an end. The ultimate goal is the formalization of the process of KM; this could be done within the context of what I call Knowledge Leadership Café. Knowledge Leadership Café is a framework in the KM implementation continuum. It’s not a methodology. The knowledge exploration process may begin with a Knowledge Café method or technique. Still, at the Leadership Café, you bring structure, formal planning, and implementations of what was discussed at the café. Many KM programs are informal. Leadership Café brings the simplicity of the café into reality, where leaders analyze and explore methods within the framework of the organization’s preferences, culture, capacity, goals, and strategy, and then execution. You cannot drive a cultural change without a Leadership Café. While I had up to 100 knowledge managers at my Knowledge Cafés, the Leadership Café is just for a few strategic leaders who can design an enterprise KM architecture for the organization.

11.6. PRACTICE CAFÉ

Will I be able to understand maturity in my KM program? What will make me implement KM? Choose one or two tools and develop a workable model.

Knowledge is the decision driver. This chapter is not intended to provide you examples but instead shows a leadership framework for implementing KM in all organizations of all sizes. Knowledge guides how much we make, spend, and pay. During one of our Knowledge Leadership Cafés in Austin, the hotel attendant told us a story of the boxing legend who was having a one-man-show in New York. He asked us how much we think he was charged per month for the towels he used during his boxing activities? We all guessed and missed the answer. He said, “this boxer paid six figures per month for the towels he used,” which is insane. Knowledge is the driver for all decisions we make. Use knowledge; you’ll become wise!