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My co-Instructor David Gurteen's recent article (referenced here) beautifully reminds us that organizations don’t simply transfer knowledge,
they create the conditions for it to emerge through conversation. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s explore this even further.

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From an Organization Development (OD) and Gestalt perspective, knowledge doesn’t simply live in documents or even in conversations. It emerges in the relationships between people.

A conversation is not merely an exchange of information. It is an encounter. It is where people make meaning and sense together. What spreads is rarely just an idea; what spreads is confidence, trust, possibility, identity, and the willingness or opportunity to see a situation differently.

This is why “use of self” matters. Use of Self is conscious choice of who you are in any given situation.

Someone can ask you the exact same question on two different days and you’ll likely respond in two different ways depending on how you choose to show up in that moment. You might show up with curiosity one day and certainty the next day. Curiosity invites. Certainty closes. Presence creates safety. Judgment creates caution. Our awareness, our assumptions, our emotional state, and even our body language become part of the knowledge-sharing system.

In Gestalt we often say that awareness is curative. I believe awareness is also generative. The more aware we become of ourselves and one another and our emergent situation, the greater our capacity is to notice opportunities that previously remained invisible. In KM we mention serendipity quite a bit. Serendipity is not simply luck, it is often heightened awareness meeting meaningful connection.

This also shifts the role of leadership.

Leaders are not simply people with a certain job title. They are architects of conversational spaces and they are participants in the relational field they create. Every interaction has the possibility to expand or contract the possibility for learning. Every response to a question informs people whether curiosity is welcome. Every reaction to uncertainty shapes whether people will bring forward unfinished ideas or keep them hidden.

That is why psychological safety and psychological courage is not a training program. It is something continuously co-created in thousands of everyday interactions.

I also appreciate David’s reference to “way shaping.” In OD we often describe this as designing conditions rather than designing outcomes. We cannot manufacture innovation, trust, or learning, but we can cultivate environments where they become more likely to emerge.

Perhaps the next evolution of this conversation is moving beyond individual conversations toward a newer concept currently being called “communityship.”

Communityship asks us to stop thinking primarily about individual leaders and begin thinking about collective responsibility. Knowledge does not belong to experts. It is a temporary gift to them. Expertise belongs to communities that continually create, refine, challenge, and apply it together.

When communities become healthy, knowledge flows almost effortlessly because people rarely ask, “who owns this?” Rather, they more often ask, “how can we make each other more successful?”

In that sense, Communities of Practice, Knowledge Cafés, peer assists, after-action reviews, and informal conversations are not simply KM techniques. They are practices that strengthen the relational fabric of an organization.

Perhaps that is the real competitive advantage, not having more knowledge than everyone else (not to be confused with all the information that AI “has”), but having stronger relationships through which knowledge can continually emerge and evolve.

As AI accelerates the creation and distribution of explicit knowledge (aka information), the uniquely human advantage becomes even more valuable. AI can generate information at extraordinary speed. It cannot replace the lived experience of making meaning together, sensing what matters in context, building trust, or helping another person discover something for themselves.

The future of KM may therefore be less about managing knowledge and more about convening conversations where awareness, conversation, and relationships enable knowledge to flow naturally.

Because in the end, conversations don’t just spread knowledge, they create the people and communities capable of generating it.

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