3. The Knowledge Café
• The purpose of the Café is to bring a group of people together to have
a conversation on a topic of mutual interest
• The aims include:
– the surfacing of the group's collective knowledge
– learning from each other
– sharing ideas and insights
– gaining a deeper understanding of the topic & the issues involved
– and exploring possibilities
• It also helps:
– connect people
– improve inter-personal relationships
– breaks down organisational silos
– improves trust and engagement
• It is a social face to face process
4. The Knowledge Café Process
• Speed Networking
• Speaker makes short presentation
• Poses question
• Small group conversations at tables
• Three rounds of conversation
• Whole group conversation in a circle
• Share actionable insights
• Approx two hours in total
17. These traits are dominant in SE Asian Cultures
but also exist in our Western Cultures
Barriers
1. Poor English
2. Loss of face
3. Causing someone
else to lose face
4. Deference to
authority
5. Humility
6. Culture
19. Why is conversation easy?
• Presenting & listening to speeches should be more
straightforward than holding a conversation
• This is clearly not the case
• Conversation is easy because of an interactive
processing mechanism that leads to the alignment of
linguistic representations between partners
• Humans are ‘designed’ for dialogue rather than
monologue
Why is conversation so easy?
Simon Garrod; Martin J. Pickering
The reason I started
my Knowledge Cafés
20. Influence of group size
• In large, 10-person groups, communication is like
monologue
– members are influenced most by the dominant speaker
• In small, 5-person groups, communication is like
dialogue
– members are influenced most by those with whom they
interact in the discussion
Group Discussion as Interactive Dialogue or as Serial Monologue: The Influence of Group Size
Nicolas Fay; Simon Garrod; Jean Carletta
The size of my
small Café groups
21. Friends with cognitive benefits
• Talking with other people in a friendly way can make it
easier to solve common problems
• Conversations that are competitive in tone, rather than
cooperative, have no cognitive benefits
• Executive function: working memory, self-monitoring and focus
• Skills that are critical to problem solving
Friends (and Sometimes Enemies) With Cognitive Benefits
Oscar Ybarra, Piotr Winkielman, Irene Yeh, Eugene Burnstein, Liam Kavanagh
Speed Networking
22. Social sensitivity
• Group intelligence relates to HOW members of a
team talk to each other
• Depends on social sensitivity of the group members
• Readiness of group to allow members to take equal
turns in the conversation
• Groups where one person dominates are less
collectively intelligent than in groups where the
conversational turns are more evenly distributed
Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups
Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alexander Pentland, Nada Hashmi,Thomas W. Malone
No Café table leaders
24. Café Principles
• Relaxed, non-threatening, open conversation
– Close to a pub or café conversation
• Everyone equal; no table leaders or report back
• No one forced to do anything
– OK to just listen
• Trust people to talk about what is important
– OK to go off-topic
• No capture of outcomes
– Outcomes are what people take
away in their heads
1. No fear
2. No coercion
3. No leaders
4. No hierarchy
5. No capture
6. No control
25. So what does this mean for online
discussion forums & a potential virtual
knowledge cafe?
26. Properties of many Forums
• English is the lingua franca
• Large number of people
• Open to anyone
• No idea who is in the forum
• Do not know the people
• No idea of the authority figures
• No idea of the trolls
• Everything is recorded
• 90:9:1 law
Barriers
1. Poor English
2. Loss of face
3. Causing someone
else to lose face
4. Deference to
authority
5. Humility
6. Culture
27. Nature of many Forum Conversations
• Posts tend to be monologues
• Posts often very lengthy
• Grandstanding
• Responses carefully thought through
• More debate/argument than dialogue
• Trolls & “intellectual trolls” thrive
• Easy to misunderstand someone
• Not easy to correct misunderstandings
Barriers
1. Poor English
2. Loss of face
3. Causing someone
else to lose face
4. Deference to
authority
5. Humility
6. Culture
29. Some Ideas?
• Specific language forums
• Peers only
• Clear who is in the forum
• Ability to edit/delete posts
• Do not store threads for long
• Small groups (3 or 4 people)
• Permission to join conversations
• Limit size of posts
• Real time discussions
Café Principles
1. Small groups
2. Socialization
3. No fear
4. No coercion
5. No leaders
6. No hierarchy
7. No capture
8. No control
Barriers
1. Poor English
2. Loss of face
3. Causing someone else
to lose face
4. Deference to authority
5. Humility
6. Culture
30. Randomised Coffee Trials
• In large organizations not easy for
people to connect & build relationships
• RCTs pair people at random for coffee
once a week
• Bank of England connects 4 people &
call it “Coffee Fours”
• SABMiller have “Randomized Beer
Collaborations”!
• Nesta
• Cabinet Office
• Mars
• RSA
• KHDA (Dubai)
• DfE
• Scottish Government
Can be done virtually over Skype or Google
Hangouts