About this Episode

David Gurteen is a writer, speaker, and conversational facilitator.

The focus of his work is Conversational Leadership – a style of working where we appreciate the power of conversation and take a conversational approach to how we connect, relate, learn, and work with each other.

He is the creator of the Gurteen Knowledge Café – a conversational process to bring a group of people together to learn from each other, build relationships and make a better sense of a rapidly changing, complex, less predictable world. He has facilitated hundreds of Knowledge Cafés and workshops in over 30 countries worldwide over the past 20 years.

He is also the founder of the Gurteen Knowledge Community – a global network of over 20,000 people in 160 countries.

He is currently writing an online blook (a cross between a blog and a book) on Conversational Leadership.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:45  Welcome, David. 

David Gurteen  1:37  

It's a pleasure to be here, Katherine. 

Katherine Ann Byam  1:40  

Wonderful. David, we met in February 2020. Do you remember exactly?

David Gurteen  1:44  

I remember. 

Katherine Ann Byam  1:46  

But this was a knowledge cafe that you were hosting at Regent University and the central topic was about whether or not universities remain relevant to preparing students for work. It was my first knowledge cafe and I loved the format. Please tell our listeners about knowledge cafes and why you created it.

David Gurteen  2:03  

Okay, we've got to go back a few years. We got to go back I guess probably to the turn of the millennium. I used to get involved in a lot of knowledge management conferences and other conferences. I guess throughout my lifetime, a lot of other conferences and workshops. And I was just really concerned that there were very many presentations. They would give a talk in short events. I was particularly concerned about knowledge management conferences because they were about learning, informal learning, about trends as a practice.

When you have a whole series of speakers on stage just talking about the audience, running over time, not giving opportunities for questions, that it was possible to go to a conference for the whole day other than luncheon breaks, not to get to talk to anybody. And I just thought this was crazy. It just didn't seem to make sense that we were still working in that old format. So I wanted to create a process of methods and events that was fundamentally conversational. So I spent quite a long time thinking about that.

And in September 2002, I ran my first circle knowledge cafe at the Strand Palace Hotel in Central London just a few 100 yards from Trafalgar square. And the idea of the cafe is really a very simple one -that's like an evening talk, typically lasts an hour or maybe two. There would still be a speaker, there will still be a topic but the speaker would only get to speak for maybe five minutes, ten minutes at the very most twenty minutes if it is an interesting content, because the whole idea of the cafe was for it to be about conversation, not about the speaker. And so the speaker would speak for a short while, pose a question to the group, and the people would be sitting in small groups of threes or fours, ideally at round tables. Those were not always available.

There would be no host facilitating the conversations at the table. I wanted everybody to maybe not have an equal voice. Because in many circumstances, people don't have an equal voice but an equal opportunity to speak. I didn't want anybody to be in control of the conversation, but I often used to say at the side I want the conversation a little bit like the one you might have done in a pub or in a cafe, a free-flowing conversation. 

Katherine Ann Byam  4:23  

There's a rumor that that's where Adam Smith came up with his best work, right?

David Gurteen  4:26  

A lot of people probably came up with the best work down the pub. People will speak. We'll have a conversation for maybe 15 minutes. Then, I'll simply ask a few people to change tables. And again, the whole essence of the cafe was informality so I didn't want some sort of contrived instructions as to how to move. I'd simply say, for a few people to move tables. You experienced this back at Regent University.

So few people move tables and we continue the conversation, same question, same topic. And we do that, typically three times, typically about 15 minutes, and at the end, we bring people together to have a whole group conversation. In the early days, I used to let them stay wherever they were. They tried to have a whole group conversation with people scattered around the room. And I soon realized that didn't work terribly well because a lot of people that are attached to each other will come to each other.

And I realized that it was not that difficult to tell people just to push the tables to one side, and to form a circle with the chance. And the great thing about that circle is everyone's equal, everyone's on the same level. I'm in the circles I'm hosting in the circle with them. I'm not standing out somewhere at the front of the room. Everyone can see and hear each other. It takes a few minutes to form a circle. And then what I didn't want was like so many workshops, people reporting back, somebody standing up, basically given a summary of what was discussed in their group. I wanted it to be as best they could have a larger group in conversation.

I very lightly facilitate that conversation. And I'm not there to add my voice, or to control the outcome. I'm just there to make sure, really everybody who wants to speak gets to speak. So we have that whole conversation, and we draw to a close because the usual question people say well, "what are the outcomes?" And I simply say the outcome is what people take away in their heads, which is actually no different to a conference. The knowledge cafe isn't the workshop for making decisions or whatever. It's for engaging in conversation, to learn more about a topic and make better sense of the world, to build relationships and a whole load of things that are usually seen as safe. It's not about making decisions but about having interesting conversations. So that's the very essence of the cafe.

Katherine Ann Byam  6:47  

I love this and what I found interesting about this particular cafe that I attended was that the audience were officially authorities right. Most of them were authors. They will actually want those papers or books of great content. so they are actually authorities in the space of education, but they all seem that (maybe that's unfair to say) as if they weren't comfortable with were going, where things were trending in terms of education, and the sort of informal learning that has been cropping up, not just in terms of your cafes, but even social learning online in different formats. So it was quite interesting to see the kind of fear as well, that what they had built no longer stood on strong footing. I don't know if you felt that nervousness.

David Gurteen  7:34  

I've learned not to feel nervous in the cafe. I haven't said in the cafes, it's the conversation that's in charge. Let the conversation take people where the conversation wants to take them. So I'm not necessarily looking for any particular outcome. I think with that particular cafe and lots of cafes, there's a vast range of opinions, and there's a lot of differences.

And it's interesting because people say to me "Well, what happens if things get argumentative, and people start to fight?" And if you noticed, in that particular cafe, at times there was a little bit of tension, but it never gets out of hand, I've never had to become some sort of authority facilitator to keep things under control. There is a little tension but it's not a great deal. And that's good because I want people's ideas to be challenged gently enough that they will stop and listen and not so aggressively when they're gonna get angry and dig their heels in.

So it's about dialogue. It's about learning from each other. It's about listening more than it is talking. And that wasn't a particularly good evening because remember, there were lots of different opinions. It's an interesting group because there were part of the academics there from the university, and then there were a lot of people from outside the university, and we were talking about education but everyone has enjoyed education. That evening did make for some very interesting conversation.

Katherine Ann Byam  9:06  

I think I'm going to take us now to a question I wanted to ask you last but I'm gonna ask it to you now, which is "how do you go about holding space for conversations with people who are diametrically opposed in their ideas and their opinions? We're going to touch on something that happened last week but before we even go there, how would you go about approaching that as a participant?

Unknown Speaker  9:30  

I mean, this is something that I've given a lot of thought over this last year or so. I should've given it a lot of thought over many years. But maybe this last year or so, I've made a little bit of progress in my understanding and my thinking about it because in some ways it's not much about the conversation, it's about people's beliefs and how people form their beliefs.

David Gurteen  9:57  

So we got somebody on the one side, who's hard left and somebody on the other side who's hard right. They have these fixed beliefs and they do battle in conversation. And so the question is, how do people form their beliefs? How do people come to beliefs that by any rational measure, don't make too much sense? And we tend to think human beings are rational creatures. The one thing I learned from experience, but also from other meetings this last year or so is that we're anything but rational creatures; the way we form our beliefs is something I've been looking for and just the nature of knowledge. So this is a bit of a long talk.

Katherine Ann Byam  10:39  

It's fine. 

David Gurteen  10:41  

We'll get there in a minute. I'm sure you believe that the earth circles the sun. I hope you do. Most people do. I think about 24% of Americans believe that the sun circles the earth so it's not everyone. But think about it. You believe it. I believe it. I believe it's counterintuitive. The sun rises in the East; it sets in the West. I said No, no, no. It's all an illusion. The earth is in fact, spinning and the earth is circling the sun.

Surely you say, "Rubbish!" The earth is spinning, I can feel it spinning. It goes against rationality in a way. But we know from our science and from the facts that it is indeed true. So how do we know that the earth circles the sun? If I don't have a degree in physics, I probably couldn't convince you from the basics that the earth circles the sun. If  I can't convince myself of the evidence, I would have difficulty.

We "know" that the earth circles the sun because somebody told us. We read it somewhere as a child. Somebody in authority, maybe a parent, maybe a teacher, somebody who we trust (that is the keyword, "trust") told it to us and we accepted it relatively blindly. And so this is a piece of knowledge that we claim to have, "I know the earth circles the sun." We don't know it at all. We simply trust somebody who thinks they know it. So that's the first little piece of that. Now think of human-made global warming, anthropogenic global warming. I believe it. Do you believe it? 

Absolutely.

Greta Thunberg believes it. I haven't read the scientific papers, I'm sure you haven't and probably Greta hasn't. If we read the scientific papers, could we make sense of  them? Have we read the papers by scientists to hold comfy, comfy beliefs? No. Do we know ourselves in a deeper sense that global warming exists?  No, we don't. Who do we trust? We trust the scientific community. Now, people like to say Donald Trump, and a lot of other people do not trust the scientific community. In fact they positively distrust the scientific community. Some of them probably fear experiments for very good reasons. So our beliefs are not founded on knowing. They're founded on trust. So that's the first one.

Katherine Ann Byam  13:24  

This is the fundamentals of the knowledge delusion

David Gurteen  13:27  

It's the fundamental of knowledge delusion. More people call it knowledge illusion but the more I think about it, it's a delusion rather than an illusion. If you stop and think about this, we know we don't know this stuff. You know it's a delusion. It's not just an illusion. And the other piece to this. So, this is true of our knowledge - most of our knowledge hasn't been gained empirically through experience.

 It's been handed to us, mainly through our education system. So we don't actually know this stuff yet start to look at people who've got these beliefs and how they formed those beliefs. Maybe have those beliefs questioned. [And a lot of the time, if people because of certain erroneous beliefs - maybe nonetheless seek erroneous beliefs and the answer is in a lot of the media] We need to give them better evidence. And our education system needs to educate them better in critical thinking.

That's so often the response, the interest to see what I've been looking at is because this is such a deep problem. I've been looking at it and questioning all of this and looking at the psychological research. The psychological research says, "No, if you give people evidence, and you train them to be better critical thinkers, they double down on their erroneous beliefs. It doesn't work.

 And as a law professor of cognitive psychology at Yale University, Dan Kahan, has done a whole lot of interesting research. But basically, I won't go into the depths of this. It's a little bit complex, but he's basically showing this clearly (politically with all sorts of views,) but the one main study was political beliefs. He's shown how someone's political beliefs will, shall we say, won't corrupt the numerical reasoning ability.

 And he's showing quite clearly that, the more capable somebody is in critical thinking, the more capable they are of cherry-picking the evidence that they need to support that pre-existing belief and building a strong case for it. So if you're on the left, you're going to cherry-pick the information that you want and build your belief. If you're on the right, you're going to cherry-pick different data and create different concepts.

And so, evidence and critical thinking I guess some of the time will work. But for other people, they will just double down on their beliefs. So you start to realize with those two little insights if you're willing to, the way that we form our beliefs or the way we defend our belief. There's a lot of common sense thinking that what we've lived for most of our lives is nonsense.

Katherine Ann Byam  16:20  

It's scary but it's actually evident in many different things, right? We talk about education on this topic and knowledge. But this is also evident in terms of whether you feel like you have more rights to live in a place than another person, or whether you have more privilege and all of this. It also gets into all of those decisions right. I was looking at some research done by a university where they gave two players a roll of the dice to face a team of monopoly. And the guy who won the first roll of the dice would get double the benefit and double the support of the one who lost that roll of the dice.

 And by the end of the game when they played that player who got the advantage at the beginning, he became more arrogant. He became more self-assured. He became stronger in his will and stronger in his imposition on the other player. And by the end of the game, he said that he won because he made better decisions not because he had an advantage. You see even in the game scenario where people know that it's rigged, they still cannot separate themselves from this feeling of "having all this knowledge" that they are somehow better than someone. So, this permeates all our society.

David Gurteen  17:34  

I think it's one of the things that we need to be taught. Somehow we need to come to the realization that we're not rational human beings. We are simply not rational. So for me, going back to your question about difficult conversations. It seems to me that before you can really have a difficult or sometimes impossible conversation across a device, I've got this list up here on my wall to remind me there are a few things that we need to accept. And, I'm not saying these are easy things for everyone to accept.

The first thing is we need to be prepared to question and revise our beliefs. We need to understand what I've just been talking about and be prepared to say, "Okay, maybe, after all, I don't understand this stuff. Maybe some of my beliefs about the world are erroneous." I'm more than happy to have a conversation to learn more or maybe help you talk and to learn more." So that's the first thing. Once you get to that stage, I did a couple of zoom knowledge cafes at the end of last year called "We must not be enemies. We are friends, not enemies." Because once you realize how we formed our beliefs, we shouldn't be fighting over some of our beliefs because quite simply, we got two ignorant people arguing over ignorance.

 And another very difficult pill to swallow, but if we can just suspend our beliefs for a while. Okay, let's talk about it. So we need to stop seeing each other as enemies. Two things we can do in our heads. And then we need to be prepared to actually talk before we disagree. So these are my prerequisites. We need to do it in good faith. So this isn't about trying to convince the other person, either directly or through subterfuge that you're right. It's about agreeing to come together in dialogue to search for, say the truth for want of a better word, for a better answer, for something that we both feel is maybe somewhat different to our polarized beliefs but we can both engage in. If we can do those things, we stand the chance of having a productive conversation.

 The problem is the prerequisites are pretty high hurdles. When it comes to a productive conversation, we need some rules when it comes to conversation. And we need some techniques, we need some guidelines as to how to engage in those conversations. Because if you've got two people with very conflicting beliefs, you can very quickly get into a fight. You need some rules upfront and I've created it with a friend in Canada, a guy called David Creelman in Toronto. We've put together a conversation covenant. It's just a fancy name for the simple set of rules and guidelines that people need to agree to adopt if they come to a difficult conversation.

Katherine Ann Byam  21:07  

I wanted to ask a final question, and it's probably more involved than the previous two that we had. But when we talk about the internet and all of the opportunities it has unlocked. I know that in the academic space, and over time knowledge practitioners as well have been excited by this idea of democratising knowledge, disseminating knowledge at a massive scale.

And now we're in a situation where at times this can be perceived as being counterproductive. So we've seen last week in the US, that a lot of (not that everybody knows what's the truth but) supposed misinformation coming out, invoking people to take certain actions. And then, as a repercussion of those actions censorship comes from social media houses. So what has happened and what can we do to continue to facilitate the conversation because if we shut down the conversation, we're not having it. Are we? So what do we do?

David Gurteen  22:17  

I think it's one of the biggest challenges if not the biggest challenge that we face right now in the world and the last question. We're living in a very complex world. In the last 75 years really, the world has become a far more interconnected complex place than it's ever been. We haven't really kept up with it as human beings. There were a few things that have happened that were not anticipated.

Everyone's heard of so-called filter bubbles and epistemic bubbles, and echo chambers. The filter bubble is where applications like Facebook and Google feed you the stuff that you like. The more it only gives you the stuff that you like, the more you search for stuff that you like, the more it doesn't give you the opposite points of view. So those algorithms are kind of working against you. So that's the circle filter bubble. How to avoid that? The other is the so-called epistemic bubble.

 And this is where we choose our social group, whether it's online or whether it's face-to-face. And when we tend to socialize with people like ourselves, and maybe similar education, similar backgrounds, similar jobs. We tend to have similar political and religious views. So that's a little knowledge bubble, if you will, but we're living in both of those bubbles cutting us out from some aspects of the outside world. We're not seeing everything. And then the other one which is a little bit confusing is the so-called echo chamber that often gets conflated with the concept of the filter bubble.

But if you go back and look at the original use of the word, the filter bubble, also the echo chamber is basically a phenomenon where other people discredit experts. So they cause you to lose your trust in things we believe we've gained from people that we trust. So if you want to change someone's mind if you're actually engaging in a sort of information warfare rather than try to discredit the evidence, discredit the person who's presenting the evidence. So an example of that would be trying to discredit Greta Thunberg to claim that there's a whole lot of money behind trying to influence the world to waste its time trying to make a woman.

So you ridicule her. Trump is pretty good at ridiculing people. He does it brilliantly, so it's "crooked Hillary" and "sleepy Joe Biden" and "Pocahontas." Just by labelling people with a little dog with a word or phrase. He's destroying a degree of trust in people. So this is information warfare. And I think this is the key to what's happened. We haven't realized that the web, Facebook, Twitter, what have you are the potential weapons of information warfare, we thought they were potential forces for good that we can share knowledge where we could connect with people. You can learn more about the world.

 But what we didn't realize was that a lot of people would see them as information weapons, a means of dissemination of false information, and a means of discrediting experts. And when you come to think about it now in the world, (I break the world into three groups) I think there's a large bunch in the middle who want a peaceful world.

This is where this thing goes back from left to right, there's a bunch in the middle, hopefully the majority who wants to see a peaceful world and feel that we can progress through full conversation through peaceful means. You then got a pretty large group on the other side, left or right, we're engaged in information warfare. They're playing by different rules. They're not looking for dialogue, they're looking for debates, they're looking to destroy the enemy through the publication of disinformation.

And then right at the fringes, you've got people who are more interested in what's increasingly called kinetic warfare, traditional warfare, they're the ones that want to go out and burn buildings down and shoot people. I hope these two fringes are really small, but there's a huge number in the middle there who are information warfare warriors. They think they can change the world by defeating their opponents through disinformation. And the problem is, as human beings, we're vulnerable to it.

Katherine Ann Byam  27:06  

I think one of the things I've taken away from history, from reading, from going through the archives of possibly what I learned growing up and what I learned when I became British, for example, and the difference is in the way the story is told, this was an example. That story is actually the most powerful force for any human, right? - the power of the story that was passed down from your ancestors, the power of the story you hear in school, the power of the story that's written in the textbook that's written by someone who wants to emphasize a particular point.

 Even with science, if you have certain people funding that science, that will also influence the story that that science tells. So the power of the story has become abundantly clear. And I guess the question I will take away from the session that we've had and my ongoing look into this topic is how do we create a shared story that we all feel that we can subscribe to? Your thoughts?

David Gurteen  28:09  

That's a good question, and then because we thought so far a lot about the problems and the issues and how do we move forward. I think, unfortunately, there was no silver bullet. And how old is Facebook? I think it was two thousand four - that's sixteen years. And I think there are two and a half billion people on Facebook. With almost 8 billion people in the world. Wow, that's 25%, isn't it?

I'm searching for (I won't say - "the answer"). Well in context, there isn't an answer, there's a response. There's a way forward. There's a direction. And at  the moment, we need to change the direction of our travel. We need to stop seeing (I think fundamentally) we need to stop seeing each other as enemies and start realizing that if we're going to create a better world, we need to be talking more and fighting less, whether it's information warfare or kinetic warfare. We need to be talking more about and understanding each other and reconciling our differences. We probably also need to be thinking about democracy and possibly rethinking democracy.

There's a lot of work going on with this so-called participative democracy where people are more engaged with the political process. Now this bigger part of the problem, both in this country with Brexit and in the States, the war is now between the left and the right. People have lost a lot of faith in democracy. So how do we address that? At the end of the day, it has got to do with conversation. That's the clue. Quite how we do it is another matter. Are you familiar with the concept of oracy? You come across that word, oracy? Not a few people have. Not too surprising. I can't remember, but the word was only invented in the 60s.

 I can't quite remember who invented it. We talk all the time in the education system about literacy and numeracy and how important they are. Numeracy, the ability to manipulate numbers. Literacy is the ability to read and write. We never talked about oracy, the ability to listen and the ability to converse, it's not on the school curriculum. It's just taken for granted that we're gonna pick it up along the way.

Now that there are a few schools actually in London that are teaching oracy.  They are teaching children how to think more practically, how to engage in dialogue, how to engage in debate to have constructive conversations with their fundamental teaching. So I think that's probably part of the answer (but of course, if we start teaching that in schools now) that's not gonna be a bit through for another 10-20 years or so. What can we do with us adults we're pretty much set in their ways. Do you have any ideas? Do you have any other thoughts around this?

Katherine Ann Byam  31:13  

I believe that there is no easy answer to this is one of the reasons we have this conversation. But the idea that I have is to keep putting it at the front of people's minds that they need to think differently from how they have in the past. So I see my role as a speaker, someone creating a podcast or someone, producing content for the Internet as a kind of provocative, as someone who puts new ideas, new proposed ways of thinking in front of other people.

And I've taken up this role, probably because my own story has been so diverse and so mixed, and I've had the ability to learn and appreciate different cultures from my own and have suspended my beliefs in order to learn what I needed to learn to adapt to different cultures, and I see it as my role to this experience to others. This is the only step I think I can take.

David Gurteen  32:10  

And I'm doing something very similar. We've held cafes that are face -to-face whether they are online or through the circle “blook” that I'm writing off the conversation leadership. It's all about trying to influence people who are prepared to be influenced and to start to think a little differently. But I suspect that's not enough. How do we get up and get on the hardlines? I think, you and I here, we're not necessarily pushing left or right agendas.

When we want to bring people together, re-examine their beliefs to lead them to a conversation, to figure out how we can best structure organisations and societies and institutions to create a better world, and not fight. Whether we come out with a left-leaning government or right-leaning government, (and personally I don't care too much), we just want to be, as a society, as a global civilization, we need to be making better sense of the world, and we need to be making better decisions. And that's the challenge we have for the next 10 years at least.

Katherine Ann Byam  32:31  

Do you want to tell everyone about your bolok and how they can find out more about you before we leave the session?

David Gurteen  33:34  

Okay, very simply, five years ago, I started writing an online book on what I called "conversational leadership," I won't go into too much detail there but it's basically about conversations. Oh it's not conversations; it's about leadership. So it's about each and every one of us taking responsibility for creating a better world, to see leadership as a practice rather than position of authority, and how we can help make a better world through conversation.

So that's the essence of the book, I call it a “blook,” because it's online - it's a cross between a blog and a book. I've been updating it literally every day for the last five years, and it's always a work in progress. I'm doing something called "working out loud," and I want people to give me feedback as I write my data to improve it. It's actually quite simple to find it. Just Google conversational leadership and you will find the book.

Go take a look. If you find things in there that you think I could be wrong, you find things in there that you think I could improve on, I'm looking for that feedback that's why I haven't written this as a conventional book. I want to engage with people. So that's fundamentally what it's about.

Katherine Ann Byam  34:50  

Thank you so much, David, for joining us. It's been a lovely conversation, as we would expect, and I hope to have you one time again in the future on our show.

David Gurteen  34:59  

I look forward to that and it's interesting to see how our views have changed, maybe in two years time.

Katherine Ann Byam  35:04  

Thank you, David, thank you very much. Enjoyed it. Thanks for listening.