KnowledgeBlog

Recently I attended a gathering of the Melbourne Knowledge Management Leadership Forum (http://www.melbournekmlf.org/) and heard a very interesting talk from Matt Steel, senior wine maker at Domain Chandon. The talk was about a workshop that members of the Victorian wine community conduct each year for the purpose of sharing their knowledge.

What was interesting were the differing techniques that had evolved (or were explicitly planned) to encourage the sharing of their ideas and information. These included:
1. The setting
The setting was explicitly far from the attendees day-to-day operations so that they could free their mind from distractions and get on with the workshop.

2. The culture
At the start of each workshop there was an explicit request to all attendees to leave their egos at the door. This is to encourage an open and honest environment where people communicate free of feelings (as far as it is possible) such as “Perhaps I shouldn’t suggest this idea because he may be offended” or “Am I about to ask a stupid question?”. The less on here is when sharing knowledge it is helpful to try and remove social impediments to open dialogue.

Another example of the culture was the habit of attendees removing their shoes. It was a strange one but again I believe it encourages some humility and some feeling of “we’re all in this together”.

3. Process
The process of wine tasting and attaining and distributing critical evaluations of the wine was well orchestrated. Not just a free-for-all. It included techniques such as selecting a different subset of attendees, for each wine, to state their critique. Once they have finished then all attendees could contribute. This meant that they are encouraging broad participation and for some individuals they will grow confidence in speaking in a group whereas if it had simply been “Who want’s to critique this wine?” each time you may end up with the same contributors over and over again. Further, by going to the floor at the end you haven’t necessarily shut off someone who does have something valuable to add to the assessment.

Matt’s talk is a great example of how good knowledge sharing doesn’t have to include some sort of Lotus Notes/Intranet/Wiki/Web 2.0 social media technical implementation. Often it’s just about the people and processes.