Food for thought

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending Ark Group’s KCUK event in London – and it was nice to see a few law firms represented among the delegates!

Chaired by KM ‘guru’ and knowledge café enthusiast David Gurteen, the conference featured presentations from heavyweights such as Dave Snowden and Richard McDermott, with topics covered including storytelling, intranet management, training, communities of practice and – of course – Web 2.0. In fact, many of the attendees spent a significant amount of time updating Twitter, which led to some interesting conversations around the room and also enabled the producer to do lots of brainstorming for next year’s event.

There was quite an interesting split among the delegates, with relative newcomers to KM scribbling away furiously throughout, while more ‘seasoned’ knowledge workers debated the demise of ‘KM 1.0’ and attempted to pinpoint its failings.

One interesting theme that came out of a highly motivational speech by storytelling consultant Tony Quinlan, was that of best practice. Namely, how can following ‘best practice’ inspire learning and innovation? As he put it (somewhat more eloquently than I am about to), surely the most useful lessons that we learn are those that follow failure – an understanding of what went wrong, why, and how to prevent it in the future? All thought-provoking stuff, and I would be interested to hear some of your views on the subject.

For me, another great presentation was delivered by Nick Davies of the Really Great Training Company (some of you may recognise the name from his work as a barrister, stand-up comedian and presenter – although he doesn’t do golf, apparently). In some ways, Nick drew the short straw – delivering his presentation in the final time slot of the second day, as delegates prepared themselves for the inevitably horrific journey home thanks to the Tube strike.

Thankfully, this didn’t put him off. Instead he made us all shuffle to the front of the room and provided some insights into effective training that truly engages people. His advice: don’t use PowerPoint; make training personal; get emotionally connected to your audience; leverage the pitch, tone and pace of your voice; and, once you’ve turned on the mic or stepped up to the front, it’s your responsibility to ?be engaging’ and motivational – not your people’s to ?be engaged’. Plenty of food for thought, and it’s been great reconnecting with people following on from the event. I look forward to 2010!

As always, do get in touch if you would like to write for the magazine, or have any feedback. In the meantime, I hope that you enjoy this issue.

Kate Clifton
Head of Editorial