Monday 20 June 2011

Knowledge Café Launch Starbucks Drive -Thru Manchester 28th June 6-9 pm


Knowledge Cafes have been successfully running in the North West of England for over 6 years. With an established Liverpool presence a Manchester launch has now been planned to be held on June 28th at Starbucks Trafford Park Manchester. The Café will start at 6pm with a coffee tasting session and nibbles provided by Starbucks. The programme will then begin at 6.30 and go on until 9pm.

Knowledge Cafes can be used to:

-          Give people a voice for them to feel heard, making them less cynical and more engaged in their work

-          As a stimulus for innovation by challenging people to reflect on their thinking; help them surface new ideas and make new connections

-          Breaks down organizational silos

-          As a sales tool to engage our customers in conversation and thus better understand their needs and for them to better understand our products or service 

-          Surface hidden problems and opportunities that exist in our organisation or in a department or project - especially ones caused by lack of communication.

This initial café will explain the background, format and purpose of the Knowledge Café concept. Following this will be specific question/s around the subject of knowledge cafes as an area of discussion for the rest of the evening.

For more information on how to register for this free event, please contact me directly via email or the phone on 07917 087856 or join the Knowledge Café 0151 Groupsite (also free to register) organised by Peter Bond HERE

Further information of the Knowledge Café concept can be found HERE 

And on my recent blog post HERE

Thursday 16 June 2011

Dear Boss, here’s why you should let me attend a Knowledge Café



I’ve always thought of you as a fair, supportive and trusting manager. That's why I was wondering how you’d feel about giving me a few hours away from work every couple of weeks to have a chat with my colleagues? While you’re at it would you mind paying for some coffee and cookies for us too? (Rob and me have a soft spot for the macadamia nut and white chocolate sort). Now before you call me a cheeky so and so, I think I better explain a little further.

Don’t get me wrong, I like working where I do and everyone’s really pleasant. But, it just feels awkward sometimes chatting with my colleague Louise when I need her opinion on something. I feel like I’m disturbing the quiet environment of the office.

I sometimes bump into Jim from Accounts at the water cooler. He’s a great sounding board and gives me some useful nuggets of advice about my work - except our conversations are never long enough. It’s a shame really, because I know he could help me with some of the tasks you give me and we never really get a chance to work together, walking in the different corridors that we do.

Then there’s people like Imran who I met at a local event. He’s not a member of our company, but maybe that’s not a bad thing? Imran looks at situations in a different way and uses his expertise to help me discover new ways of working. Perhaps we could sort a cup of Joe or two for him too?

If I’m honest I’ve asked around the business and most of us agree that it would be great to have access to a relaxed informal workshop away from work. It’s this type of environment that really helps encourage an open conversation around a particular business challenge we might have and I reckon it would also increase the collective knowledge of our company by sharing these ideas with others.

I’m rambling on now and I know you like me to explain my needs in easy to follow points with a sound business justification, so here goes…

Knowledge Cafes can be used for many business ends. Some specific examples might be to:

-         Surface hidden problems and opportunities that exist in our organisation or in a department or project - especially ones caused by lack of communication.

-         As a sales tool to engage our customers in conversation and thus better understand their needs and for them to better understand our products or service 

-          Break down our organizational silos so that I have a place to meet likeminded people like Jim more regularly.

-         Give people a voice for them to feel heard, making them less cynical and more engaged in their work

-          As a stimulus for innovation by challenging people to reflect on their thinking; help them surface new ideas and make new connections

-          An opportunity to eat some white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies. If you’ve tried them before you’d know where I was coming from.

Thanks in Advance,

Arshad Ahmed

-          NB There will be a Manchester Launch for Knowledge Café’s at the Starbucks Drive Thru in Trafford Park. It’s free to attend. For more information please join the Knowledge Café 0151 Groupsite (also free to register) organised by Peter Bond HERE

-          Further information of the Knowledge Café concept can be found HERE 

Wednesday 4 May 2011

Storytelling


April 19th 9.30 pm, I’m driving out of Liverpool having just attended a Knowledge Café on ‘Storytelling’. I’m feeling enlightened, excited and a little ashamed. Ashamed because of my somewhat unfeeling attitude towards the discipline prior to the event and this was despite reading several papers describing it as a tried and tested knowledge management practice.

One contention is that PowerPoint as a presentation tool simply doesn’t work. Having read a well-researched paper a former teaching colleague wrote about it I would have to agree. There had to be a better way and I guess the very phrase ‘Storytelling’ did at least sound a little more exciting than  Microsoft's offering or merely delivering a speech.

This particular Café was hosted by two delightful ladies, Elizabeth Gates and Lisa Rossetti, both professional coaches and expert storytellers. They began the event by explaining their profession and then asking the other café members of their experiences of the area. I was quick to admit that it wasn’t a concept I was familiar with and had therefore never used it. Or so I first thought. It then dawned on me that I had told my fair share of stories during my working life (the majority true may I add!). More recently I was encouraged to tell a story about my work experience in the form of a competency-based interview when being shortlisted for my current role. 

Likewise I remember explaining the concept of Communities of Practice to a senior management member by actually beginning my pitch with “can I tell you a little story?”

It actually went something like this…

“Workers in a factory would meet every Friday afternoon in a local coffee shop. Here they would spend time sharing their practices, insights and ideas about working on the production line that week. One day a new Operations Manager was appointed and asked where everyone was on a Friday afternoon. Upon hearing that they would take an early lunch he immediately banned these get togethers as an unproductive use of employee time. After all, that time could be better spent in the factory, increasing production and therefore profit for the company. The outcome was that staff morale dropped, as did new ideas and attrition rates also increased. The only thing that had changed were these Friday afternoon informal meetings…”

Admittedly I did feel a bit of a loon telling it at the time, except it seemed to describe a business justification for Communities of Practice in an extremely compelling and effective way. I suspect the story listener, (an intelligent and respected senior manager) would have no-doubt used his own experiences to fill in the gaps on what the factory workers looked like or the industry they belonged to. Surprisingly though he didn’t feel the need to ask me to for any supporting evidence or where I'd actually heard the story from. I guess it really didn’t matter as he just seemed to ‘get it’.

Elizabeth described how Alice in Wonderland was one of the most cited books in Management talks.

‘In our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’ ‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’

The same concept applies in business. In today’s competitive business environment only continual improvement can keep you on par with the competition and getting ahead can sometimes take a truly huge effort.

Lisa mentioned how one speech she delivered in the form of a story was commented on by ‘those in the know’ felt that technically speaking its structure wasn’t the best. Yet everyone in the room was gripped by it and several had tears in their eyes. I can believe this too. A good story has a way of capturing a persons attention in a way that conventional presenting could only hope to.

So I’m not going to start turning up to work with a long robe on or start every sentence with “Once upon a time…” and finish with “and they lived happily ever after…” I’m also not suggesting that conventional presentations don’t serve a purpose. I am now however of the firm belief that storytelling could and should be utilised as a method to embody and transfer knowledge, build communities and enhance technologies in KM programmes, as well as being deployed as a communication technique within companies in general.
Having recently sat through two solid days of PowerPoint presentation after presentation it did become pretty painful at times - even with the most charismatic of speakers. At least there were enough coffee breaks and this of course gave us plenty of opportunities to share some stories…

For more information on attending North West England Knowledge Cafes, join the Knowledge Café 0151 Groupsite run by Peter Bond HERE

The End

Wednesday 20 April 2011

First Post

About time really, as I'm constantly having conversations with my own conscience with respect to knowledge related challenges. In the spirit of ‘2.0’ I’m going to now share these reflections more publicly and hopefully encourage some conversations/thoughts around my posts. At the very least they could strike a chord and help someone, somewhere in their own knowledge management world in what I’m finding to be an exciting, motivating and a sometimes lonely and confusing journey. Let the blogging begin!