Here's a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, 'knowledge worker'. A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.

The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: they're unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they're interested in. The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don't have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the organization chart at least for a little while.

If you think about the aim of Knowledge Management as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that's not what Knowledge Management is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway

The first features a guy who learnt how to move huge stones using small ones. He shows how, on his own, he can move a one-ton block 300 feet per hour. Then he shows how he can move a whole barn using the same principles or lift a massive block up high. Remarkable. As I say to Chris in our chat, it rehabilitates the whole of idea of leverage in organisations.

He says that "gravity is my favourite tool" and I love the notion of using the least effort to achieve a result. What a great video - I'd think of showing it to a group of people trying to tackle a challenge as a bit of inspiration.

Chris other choices are equally engaging, and if you listen to the podcast, see if you get as seduced by Chris' worldview as I always do.

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Annette has posted it on her blog and I'm repeating here for regular listeners.

Annette's done some good show notes which I'm just copying and pasting them here to save time. Obviously these are a rough guide so don't take them too literally.

Thanks to Annette and Matt for a good conversation.

Disclaimer: These are a rough summary of the conversation accompanied by flexible/rough timings.

0.0 Annette
How important is confidentiality at work? and how much of my product offering as a consultant is the guarantee that whatever is told to me will be held in confidence? Are consultants professional secret keepers? and how much of our work is containing and sanitising misdemeanours offering them back as palatable organisational learnings? What or whom are we minding?

Introductions

How important is confidentiality at work?

0.50 Johnnie
It’s ‘very important’. It means different things to different people at different times – is it a way of addressing status – I had to sign an NDA etc. Sometimes it’s a status play. It is a way of entrapping the other person in something – am I doing you a favour or am I inviting you into a trap? It’s complex isn’t it?

2.08 Annette
How much of the conversation around confidentiality is in fact a seduction – around secrets?

2.18 Matt
One way of taking someone into your confidence is to offer them a secret and that has all kinds of levels and layers – does it happen once? Several times? And what happens when you break that trust?

Matt talks about his role as an internal consultant and how people entrust him with their secrets and the complexity of the messages and seductions contained within those secrets.

5.18 Annette
Annette notes that both Matt and Johnnie are talking about ‘intimacy’ and asks how we set up the conditions for that to take place. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips talks about how we can set up the conditions for romance but there’s no guarantee that romance will happen – what kinds of ploys do Matt and Johnnie use to set up the romantic conditions for intimacy in the workplace?

6.32 Johnnie
Johnnie professes his interest in intimacy and his interest in web tools which foster intimacy.

Johnnie talks about the shift from confidentiality as control to a more open sharing of information via Open Space and other similar processes. He talks about relinquishing his role as ‘consultant confessor’ which has become an uncomfortable role. Am I getting in the way by holding a secret?

9.19 Annette
What burden is placed on someone designated as ‘knowledge manager’ to manage hidden knowledge – how does Matt manage the externalised ‘known knowledge’ with the internalised ‘unknown’?

9.41 Matt
Matt admits to being a hypocrite! The official versus the ‘real’ version of events often conflict. Matt then goes on to say how hypocrisy works in practice – including sanitising stories; the pleasure of being taken into someone’s confidence; the manufacture of intimacy and how hypocrisy functions as a social lubrication.

13.13 Annette
Consultants are also politicians in organisations and are we talking here about the context we create (or wish to create) rather than the content of what people are saying?

13.40 Johnnie
Creating explicitly ‘confident’ scenarios aren’t particularly enjoyable and neither do they work. Johnnie talks about how this works in practice.

15.43 Annette
There is often an assumption that the stories revealed in confidence have more truth than those revealed in public and also we are not capable of hearing or speaking truth in organisations. Does being an internal consultant add another layer to that mix?

16.23 Matt
Openness versus closedness is an interesting concept – we need to keep some things private. Matt is often asked to take sides – to join a tribe - and secrets are a way of extending this invitation. Matt talks about respecting the invitation while not getting pulled in..

19.15 Annette
Scepticism is useful – our relationship with secrets and confidences is influenced by splits good/bad; useful/unhelpful – can we strike a balance between them? Respecting what this intervention has to offer for this system?

20.12 Johnnie
Explicit confidentiality agreements can serve to shut down the sharing of confidences and sensitive information – the opposite is often the case. The paradox here is that less is shared when the discussion is explicit – when it becomes ritualised it becomes less effective. Johnnie talks about the difference between hard and soft trust.

22.07 Annette
There is a dance in negotiating confidence – in removing that dance we give a message that there is apart of me or thoughts I want to share that are unacceptable.

22.48 Johnnie
Johnnie asks about what that negotiation means – is it explicit? Is it implicit? What does it look like?

23.21 Annette
Annette talks about unconscious and non verbal negotiations that invite revelation – seeking permission to inquire about someone’s personal story.

23.50 Matt
We prefer to have soft trust – informal trust but we fall back on hard trust and the rules when that isn’t guaranteed and when there are issues of power and status at play. If you are genuinely sharing yourself you make yourself vulnerable and organisations are treacherous places…

25.07 Johnnie
Perhaps it’s our job to be the ones who are willing to be vulnerable – it’s easy to revert to rules but it’s useful to talk about our own vulnerabilities as it gives permission to those we work with to talk about theirs.

26.16 Annette
We have all kinds of things in our consultancy toolkits but feelings are the primary ones that I draw on

26.30 Johnnie
Suggests pausing the conversation there for now..

27.07 Annette
Thanks to Matt and Johnnie for sharing their thoughts.

He takes a look at how insights are generated. He cites evidence that we're not terribly good at explaining where our insights come from, partly because we don't consciously notice the triggers. An experimenter set up two ropes hanging from a ceiling. They are far enough apart that one person can't reach out to be able to bring the two ends together.

One person is then (surprise, surprise) asked to bring the two ends together. After some stretching and struggling, they realise this won't work. Will they make the leap of insight to the solution? (There's a pair of pliers in the room too. If you tie the pliers to the end of one rope and swing it like a pendulum, you can go grab the other rope and then catch the swinging rope as it comes to you. Job done.)

People found it hard to reach this solution. But the experimenter sometimes helped them by wandering across the room on some pretext and "accidentally" hitting one of the ropes, making it swing. After that, lots of people were able to solve it.

Here's the best bit though: they didn't actually acknowledge the role of the experimenter's actions in reaching the solution. They come up with stories about how this insight occurred to them, but didn't seem to have noticed the action that really triggered it. (Sawyer elaborates with a nice yarn about Coleridge confabulating the origins of his Kubla Khan epic, disguising the detailed preparations that went into it).

A lot of folks are quite uppity about "owning" ideas "they thought of". Maybe they're just falling into this cognitive error that seems to blind us to the outside stimulii that are at work?

Learning from puzzles, not statements

The solution is that the man is a clergyman. The interesting thing is that experimenters primed their subjects in two different ways. The first group, sometime prior to being given the puzzle are given the declarative statement, "It made the clergyman happy to marry several people each week." It seems they forget this input when they get to the puzzle and still struggle.

The second group are given something different in advance. They're given the statement, "The man married several people a week because it made him happy." Then a few seconds later they are given the word "clergyman". This group then go on the main test and don't struggle. By having a practice at solving the problem, they get better. Sawyer comments

What's happening is, you store information in a different way when you solve a problem than when you passively receive information.

Have you ever wondered why so often you tell people how to do something and they still don't get it? Maybe you've run foul of this psychological phenomenon then: there's more learning in working on a puzzle than in being given the answer. And then folks can map that learning across to puzzles of similar structure.

Collaborative ideas

1. That we're blocked from creativity by our past experiences. Experiments suggest that simply eliminating false assumptions makes puzzles only slightly easier. (In the puzzle of joining nine dots set out in a square with just four lines, telling people they can draw outside the square doesn't, apparently, help much. So much for "getting outside the box"!)

2. When you break the fixation, the answer will come in a flash of insight. No, apparently not. What you need is experience in the new problem-solving domain.

3. Insight solutions are independent of prior knowledge. In reality, training in similar problems makes a big difference.

Sawyer summarises:

Creativity isn't about rejecting convention and forgetting what we know. Instead it's based on past experience and existing concepts. And the most important past experiences are in social groups filled with collaboration.

The second is that the stories that are revealed “in confidence” are perceived to contain the “truth” of the organisation – those stories revealed openly as part of the lived experience of clients are merely one level of engagement.

It's a funny word, organisation, and it's a bit misleading. It seems to imply a solidity to what are really emerging patterns. When we call Shell an organisation we make it more solid than it really is. It sounds odd to call Shell an organising but it might be more accurate, and place it a little more on a level with the humble little gatherings us mortals are organising all the time, of which Shell is really just a rather large scale iteration.

He talks about a spatula game. He noticed that if a mother placed a spatula near the child, and waited, it was very likely the child would become curious about this new object and play with it. If, however, the mother tried to get the child to play with the spatula, the child was likely either to reluctantly play along, developing a passive kind of engagement. Alternatively, the child would react against this intrusion and become healthily defensive.

There's all sorts of implications for those into psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, but I was thinking more mundanely about marketing. Especially as I stood on my cold doorstep while some unfortunate representative of Southern Electricity tried to lead me on an elaborate dance to do with changing my phone company.

For myself, I'd like to experiment a lot more with the careful placing of spatulas than shoving them in people's faces and expecting them to play. Oh, and noticing more of the pleasant spatulas placed in my path and spending less time grappling with those of the spatula-shoving school.