David Gurteen: Profiles in Knowledge

10 min readJul 23, 2020

Originally published July 23, 2020

This is the 58th article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. It is also my 700th blog post since I started blogging in 2006. David Gurteen is a conversational facilitator. Like me, he is a prolific creator and curator of knowledge management content. If you think I am well-connected, David is even more so, with many thousands of followers on LinkedIn and Twitter.

He is an advocate for improving the quality of conversation in people’s lives and the creator of the Gurteen Knowledge Café — a tool for bringing people together to have meaningful conversations. David is an advisor, speaker, and facilitator in the fields of knowledge management, organizational learning, and conversational leadership. He regularly gives keynote talks, run workshops and Gurteen Knowledge Cafés around the world.

David is the founder of the Gurteen Knowledge Community — a global network of more than 22,000 people in over 160 countries whose purpose is to connect its members with like-minded people, new ideas, and alternative ways of working. Members receive a monthly Knowledge-Letter. He curates Gurteen Knowledge — a resource website that contains book reviews, articles, people profiles, event calendars, inspirational quotations, and a blog on subjects that include knowledge management, informal learning, creativity, and innovation.

David has a degree in Physics and started his career as a computer-aided design engineer working for British Aerospace. He moved on later to work as a software development manager for Prime Computer where he designed and implemented early networking systems. Later David joined Lotus Development where as European Software Development Manager he managed the localization of Lotus 1–2–3.

His corporate career culminated in the position as International Czar for Lotus Development where he was responsible for ensuring that all software products were designed for the international marketplace. In 1993, David left Lotus to become an independent consultant, speaker, and facilitator.

Background

Experience

Gurteen Associates 1993; Gurteen Knowledge 1999-present
Knowledge Associates 1997–1999
The Performance Management Group 1995–1997
Lloyd McKenzie & Partners 1993–1997
Lotus Development Corporation

Service & Support Manager, Business Comms Group (UK) 1991–1992
“International Czar” (US) 1988–1991
European Product Manager, International HQ (UK) 1986–1988
European Development Manager, International HQ (UK) 1983–1986

Prime Computer Research And Development (UK) 1978–1983 — Software Development Manager
Hawker Siddeley Dynamics, Space Division (UK) 1971–1978 — CAD Engineer

Education

Coventry University — B.Sc., Applied Physics, 1972

Profiles

Gurteen.com

Content

Knowledge Café
Conversational Leadership
Gurteen Knowledge Blog
Gurteen Knowledge Letter — monthly newsletter
Gurteen Quote of the Day — a daily quote delivered by email
Gurteen Event Alert — a weekly alert to new events delivered by email
Gurteen Job Alert — a weekly alert to new KM jobs delivered by email
@gurteenquotes — Twitter quote of the day feed
@gurteennews — Twitter newsfeed from the website
London Knowledge Cafés — free face-to-face London Knowledge Cafés

Inside Knowledge Magazine: Ten Years in KM

The profile: David Gurteen
10 years in KM
Masterclass: Coffee and conversations The Gurteen Perspectives
What I learnt about KM as czar
Personally speaking
David — get a life
Life is political
Learning to share
Get found
Avoiding jargon
Café culture
Open and transparent
Get specific
Ducks in a row
World 2.0
KM 2.0 goes social
Mixing business with pleasure
Twittering
Enabling conversation
Think for yourself
(Not) in it for the money
What’s the problem?
Peer pressure

Articles

When I attend a conference, I look around the room to see how many people are making notes. Most people do not seem to take notes at all, while a few write on the hand-outs or on paper provided by the organizers. Some — often bloggers — use their laptops.

In the UK, they are frequently frowned upon, as others think it rude or assume the perpetrators are replying to their e-mail. It’s a very different story in the US, where far more people seem to blog events and where an open laptop at a conference is perfectly acceptable.

Personally, I love my old-fashioned ring-bound paper notebook. I take one everywhere with me and can add thoughts, ideas and observations to it at any time, with little trouble. Those who use laptops try to convince me to switch. They argue I can capture all my stuff in one place and search it easily. I have tried this several times over the years but always return to my notebooks.

The main reason is I find I can comfortably carry a notebook absolutely anywhere I go — it’s always in my man bag and always by the side of my bed at night.

I can also open it in circumstances where it might be difficult to use a laptop. Reading or jotting something down in a notebook looks a lot less like work, so it’s far more acceptable in company.

Coffee shops are great places to review notes and add to them and it has become a part of my reflection and informal learning process.

One point of interest is that if you saw me scribbling away during a conference, even in the most boring of talks, you might assume I was noting down things the speaker was saying but often I am not. The speaker is triggering my thinking processes and my creativity and it’s the triggered thoughts and ideas that I am capturing! The notes could relate to a previous speaker or someone I have been chatting with over coffee or a conversation with the conference organizer or indeed to anything. It’s a strange phenomenon but often I feel I am my most creative when sitting at the back of a conference making scribbling.

I have notebooks in my bookcase going back over many years. Often I will pull one out at random and browse it — taking me back to thoughts and ideas from the past. Some things, I am delighted to discover, I have taken action on and changed my life in some small way; others I have not and I can reflect why that was or copy them forward to my current notebook.

My notebooks are a ‘personal knowledge-management tool’ and are at the heart of how I manage my fragmented knowledge and my informal learning. They trigger new insights and help me make new connections. They are filed in chronological order — a paper blog of sorts — so it’s not so hard to find things. I just could not imagine being without them and I don’t understand why so few people seem to take and keep notes either in a traditional notebook or a laptop. What’s going on? Am I so different in my personal knowledge management habits or my needs?

Global Knowledge Review, November 2004

Taking Responsibility for Your Work

I was once asked at a conference to define a knowledge worker. I started by drawing the distinction between manual work, information work and knowledge work. Manual work was done mainly with the hands. It could be highly skilled, but it was often repetitious and gave little scope for the manual worker to take the initiative and work differently. I argued something similar for the information worker — the manual element had gone but many information-oriented jobs, although skilled were process driven. People tended to be limited in their creativity by the demands of the process. And then knowledge workers, it seemed to me, had the most freedom — they got to decide to some extent what they actually did and to a larger degree how they did it.

At KM Asia last year, Tom Stewart gave his definition of a knowledge worker that was pretty close to my own of a few years before –“ Someone who gets to choose what he or she does in his or her job each morning.”

But for me, today, this is still not sufficient. Another person who has influenced my views on knowledge work is Michael Schrage — a few years ago he said this in an interview with CIO Magazine:

“I think ‘knowledge management’ is a bullshit issue. Let me tell you why. I can give you perfect information, I can give you perfect knowledge and it won’t change your behavior one iota. People choose not to change their behavior because the culture and the imperatives of the organization make it too difficult to act upon the knowledge. Knowledge is not the power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is power. Most people in most organizations do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess. End of story.”

The point here is that ‘the ability to act on knowledge is power’ which leads to my own definition of a knowledge worker:

“Knowledge workers are those people who have taken responsibility for their work lives. They continually strive to understand the world about them and modify their work practices and behaviors to better meet their personal and organizational objectives. No one tells them what to do. They do not take ‘No’ for an answer. They are self-motivated.”

The key is about taking responsibility. To my mind knowledge workers cannot be coerced, bribed, manipulated or rewarded, and no amount of money or fancy technology will ‘incentivize’ them to do a better job. Knowledge workers see the benefits of working differently for themselves. They are not ‘wage slaves’ — they take responsibility for their work including the whole and drive improvement.

What I like about this definition is that it is independent of your type of work — you can do predominately manual, information. or knowledge work in my original sense and still be a ‘knowledge worker’. So a question for you — to what extent do you think you are a knowledge worker by this definition?

As Quoted by Me

“KM in good times means ‘knowledge management’, in bad times it means ‘kill me’.”
“The main characteristic of a Knowledge Worker is that they get to decide each morning what their job is and how they are going to tackle it.”

Why KM Initiatives Fail! — There are a few fundamentals that you need to get right to ensure that your KM is initiative is not only sustained but has a marked impact on organizational performance:

Focus on business outcomes
Get specific
Use business language
Engage staff

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is about taking a personal or individual perspective to Knowledge Management rather than an organizational or corporate one. PKM is a smorgasbord of principles, concepts, disciplines and tools that we can all apply as knowledge workers in the new knowledge economy to help improve our ability to meet our personal and business objectives. In short — Personal Knowledge Management is taking responsibility for what you know, who you know — and what they know.