A “go‑bag “ is the pre-prepared emergency backpack you grab when everything goes sideways. It’s filled with water, documents, a flashlight, maybe a granola bar if you planned well. But what if one of the tools in your emergency kit was knowledge?

This was the premise of my presentation at the 2025 Knowledge Summit Dublin.

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During the session, I asked participants to reflect on their personal KM Go-Bag - what is the one thing they would want in their knowledge go-bag during a crisis? They broke into groups, discussed and chose one essential KM tool, (e.g., lessons learned database, community of practice, chatbot, playbook, etc.) to pitch back to the group.

What do you think the top tool was? Here’s a hint: it didn’t involve fancy technology.

One group suggested an AI chatbot. The others proposed establishing communities of practice or mapping expertise.

So when the proverbial chips were down, most people decided to reach for their experts. For connection and collaboration. For people.

I have three ideas as to why this might be:

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1️⃣ 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.

Ever wondered why your first reaction when faced with a problem is usually to “phone a friend”? Numerous studies have pointed to social connection being as critical to human survival as food, water, and shelter.

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2️⃣ 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁-𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲.

When budgets shrink and needs become greater, there’s often little appetite for splashy solutions. Launching and convening a community of practice or similar learning network is a no- or very-low cost intervention. Which is great considering #3…

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3️⃣ 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵 𝗥𝗢𝗜.

I’ve seen firsthand how powerful communities and people networks can be as catalysts for collaboration, especially across functions and regions. They’re spaces where learning is shared, where people connect, and where knowledge actually gets re-applied. They’re not a silver bullet, but when done well, they can move the needle in areas like knowledge retention, collaboration, visibility of expertise, even culture.

Leveraging our Knowledge Management go-bags as practitioners is increasingly a necessity and not an option, especially in the rapidly-changing international development space. Sharing insights and learning from each other has never been more critical. Technology still gets a lot of attention thanks to advancements in AI, and it’s true that technology can enhance our people networks. But in times of crisis and unprecedented change, when every resource counts, we cannot discount the value of peer-to-peer connection.

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For decades, Knowledge Management (KM) has helped organizations answer a vital question: How do we know what we know?

Through lessons learned, Communities of Practice, taxonomies, collaboration technology, expertise location, and countless more approaches, KM has strengthened how knowledge flows around organizations. Long-time KM practitioners have shown how to design ecosystems that prevent reinvention and enable expertise to travel across boundaries.

But today, a deeper question is emerging:

How do we work together when what we already know is not enough?

This is where Conversational Leadership enters, not as a replacement for KM, but as its expansion.

From Knowledge Assets to Knowledge Flow

Traditional KM often emphasizes artifacts: documents, playbooks, databases, dashboards. These are essential. They stabilize information and extend organizational memory. Fully enhanced KM adds culture and process improvement aspects to KM.

Yet any knowledge is deeply contextual. What one person “knows” cannot be fully captured or transferred as static content. Something always remains tacit, embedded in experience, judgment, intuition, and interpretation.

Tacit knowledge does not travel well in files. It travels in conversation.

KM practices such as Peer Assists, Knowledge Cafés, After Action Reviews, and Communities of Practice succeed not because they produce documentation, but because they create dialogue. The real value is not the report; it is the reasoning, sense-making, and meaning-making that unfolds between people.

Conversational Leadership builds on this insight. It shifts attention from managing knowledge as content to cultivating knowledge as a relational, emergent flow.

The Flow of Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge includes pattern recognition, ethical stance, cultural awareness, emotional intelligence, practical wisdom and often exists in networks as much as it exists in an individual. It is the individual and collective lived dimension of knowing.

Tacit knowledge flows when people:

• Trust one another
• Listen deeply
• Ask deep questions
• Surface assumptions
• Engage in heightened dialogue

Conversational Leadership treats conversation not merely as a channel for sharing knowledge, but as the medium through which collective intelligence forms.

In complex environments, no individual holds the full answer. Meaning emerges through interaction. People reason together. They test interpretations. They challenge and refine assumptions. Through conversation, shared understanding has the potential to be created.

Knowledge is not only transferred—it is generated. And it is not only generated, it is relational and pressure tested. It is ever evolving.

Collective Reasoning and Sensemaking

Modern organizations operate in conditions of ambiguity and interdependence. Under these conditions, stored knowledge alone is insufficient.

KM provides an environment for organizational memory. Conversational Leadership provides adaptive capacity for deep organizational learning, sense-making, and meaning-making.

When teams face novel challenges, they cannot simply retrieve a best practice or even a novel practice. They must interpret signals, weigh competing perspectives, surface unspoken concerns, and decide together.

This is collective sensemaking.

Conversational skill becomes a strategic capability. The quality of reasoning in an organization depends on:

• How safely dissent can be voiced
• How rigorously assumptions are examined
• How clearly distinctions are made
• How aware people are of power, group dynamics, and conversational dynamics

Poor conversational habits distort knowledge flow. Unchecked power can silence insight. Speed can override reflection. Data and information too often substitute for understanding.

Conversational Leadership strengthens the micro-skills that enable better macro-decisions. It develops environments where thinking is visible and meaning can evolve.

The Next Horizon for KM

If early KM focused on repositories, and later KM emphasized networks and collaboration, the next horizon may be conversational awareness and skills.

KM practitioners are uniquely positioned to lead this shift. You already understand knowledge flows, barriers to sharing, and the importance of trust. You’ve worked hard to learn how to get buy-in and measure the immeasurable. Conversational Leadership furthers this momentum by focusing on how people reason together in real time. How people truly move things forward at the speed of need and understanding.

In an era shaped by rapid change and AI-enabled information abundance, the differentiator is not access to data. It is the ability to make sense of it together and take action from there.

The future of KM is not less human. It is more conversational.

Conversational Leadership does not replace Knowledge Management. It animates it, ensuring that knowledge remains alive, relational, and capable of guiding wise collective action.

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1. What Is Conversational Leadership?

Conversational Leadership is about how people think together, not simply how they talk.

In many organisations, conversation is treated as a way of exchanging information. Updates are given, reports are presented, and decisions are announced. Yet the real issue is whether those conversations are improving the quality of collective thinking.

Conversational Leadership focuses on the space between people. It pays attention to how questions are explored, how assumptions are surfaced, and how differences are handled. It treats conversation as the place where judgement is formed and direction is shaped.

In simple terms, it is the practice of strengthening how groups reason and decide together.

In simple terms, what makes it different from traditional leadership development?

Most leadership development programmes focus on the individual leader. They concentrate on personal skills, behaviours, or competencies.

Conversational Leadership shifts attention to the relational space. It asks how people influence the quality of thinking in the meetings and decisions they are part of. Leadership becomes less about authority and more about shared responsibility for how dialogue unfolds.

For those familiar with classical Knowledge Management, this represents a move away from treating knowledge as content to be managed and toward recognising knowledge as something enacted through interaction.

2. Why It Matters Now

Organisations are operating in conditions of uncertainty and complexity. No single person has a complete view of the situation, and information alone does not resolve ambiguity.

What is needed is the capacity to interpret and decide together in real time. That requires the ability to explore different perspectives without rushing to premature certainty.

Conversational Leadership strengthens this capacity. It encourages habits of inquiry, reflection, and collective responsibility for judgement.

Why should someone working in Knowledge Management care about this now?

Classical Knowledge Management focuses largely on organising, storing, and sharing information. That work remains valuable. However, access to information does not guarantee sound decisions.

Many KM initiatives fall short not because the knowledge is missing, but because the conversations around it are superficial or constrained. Lessons may be recorded, yet not deeply examined.

Conversational Leadership extends KM by strengthening the quality of engagement with knowledge. It supports the reasoning processes that turn information into effective action.

How does Conversational Leadership strengthen Knowledge Management in practice?

KM practices such as after action reviews, peer assists, and communities of practice rely on honest reflection and open dialogue. Without the right conversational conditions, they can become routine exercises.

Conversational Leadership focuses on those conditions. Are people able to speak candidly? Are questions genuinely exploratory? Is disagreement treated as a resource rather than a threat?

By improving how people engage with one another, these practices become more meaningful and more likely to influence future behaviour.

What role does AI and increasing uncertainty play in making this work more urgent?

AI is increasingly capable of managing and analysing information at scale. It can summarise, identify patterns, and support decision processes.

What it cannot replace is human judgement, ethical responsibility, and shared meaning making. As technology takes on more informational tasks, the human challenge becomes clearer.

The faster information moves, the more important it becomes to pause, reflect, and interpret together. In that sense, the rise of AI makes thoughtful dialogue more necessary, not less.

3. The Experience and the Impact

The workshop is participative and practical. Participants do not simply hear about conversation; they experience what it feels like to think together with greater care.

As the sessions unfold, people begin to notice their own patterns of interaction. They observe how quickly certainty arises, how hierarchy shapes participation, and how certain voices dominate or withdraw.

This awareness creates space for experimentation. Small adjustments in how questions are framed or how responses are given can noticeably shift the quality of dialogue.

What actually happens in the room? What will participants experience?

The format includes structured conversations, small group dialogues, reflection, and practical exercises. Participants work with real questions drawn from their own professional contexts.

The emphasis is on practice rather than theory. Rather than relying on extended presentations, the workshop creates opportunities to engage directly in dialogue and reflect on what is happening in real time.

The learning comes through experience, observation, and shared reflection.

From your experience, what do people tend to walk away with?

Participants often leave with a different understanding of leadership. They become more attentive to how conversations shape outcomes and culture.

Many report greater awareness of how meetings are framed, how questions are posed, and how disagreement is handled. They begin to see that small shifts in conversational practice can influence decision quality.

The outcome is not a single technique but a developing practice of paying attention to dialogue.

What kind of person will get the most value from this?

Those who are curious and open to examining their own assumptions tend to benefit most.

The work is especially relevant for people operating across organisational boundaries or dealing with complex and ambiguous issues.

Anyone who recognises that better conversations lead to better decisions, and who is willing to reflect on their own role in shaping those conversations, is likely to find the workshop valuable.

Shared Reflection

Over many years of working with groups, a clear pattern has emerged. The quality of conversation shapes the quality of collective action. That observation is what first drew us to this work.

Both of us (David and John) have seen capable, intelligent people struggle to make good decisions, not because they lacked information, but because the conversation closed down too quickly or became defensive. We have also seen ordinary groups produce thoughtful and balanced outcomes when they created the right conditions for dialogue.

What keeps us committed is the fact that the shift is often subtle yet powerful. A different way of framing a question. A pause before responding. An invitation that brings a quieter voice into the discussion. These small changes can alter the direction of a meeting and, over time, the culture of a team.

In a world of increasing complexity, pressure, and technological acceleration, the ability to think carefully together feels more important than ever. That continuing relevance, and the practical difference it can make, sustains our commitment to this work.

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Revisiting Plato’s tale of King Thamus and Theuth to understand our concerns about AI

Each new wave of Knowledge Management technology raises familiar questions about what we might lose. Writing once seemed a threat to memory and understanding, much as AI does today. Revisiting Plato’s story helps clarify what changes, what endures, and why conversation still matters in KM.

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The story of Thamus and Theuth from Plato that is worth returning to. Socrates recounts it. The Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of many arts, appears before King Thamus with a new invention: writing.

Theuth claims it will improve memory. People will become wiser. They will be able to record what they know and not forget.

Thamus disagrees. Writing, he says, will weaken memory. People will rely on external marks instead of remembering for themselves. They will read widely but not truly understand. They will possess the appearance of wisdom without its substance.

It is a simple exchange. The inventor sees promise. The ruler sees risk.

Writing did change us. It shifted knowledge beyond the mind and into artefacts. It altered how knowledge travels across time and distance. From a Knowledge Management perspective, it was a foundational technology. It enabled archives, laws, contracts, science, administration. It allowed knowledge to scale.

But it did not destroy thinking. It transformed it.

Now we face a similar moment.

AI systems generate fluent answers, summarise documents, draft reports, analyse patterns. In KM terms, they accelerate the capture, retrieval, and recombination of information. And again, we hear the anxiety. Memory will erode. Thinking will weaken. We will mistake fluency for understanding.

There is substance to that concern. If we outsource judgement, if we stop questioning, if we treat generated output as authoritative, then we do diminish something important.

Yet every stage in the evolution of Knowledge Management has involved externalising knowledge in some way. Writing did it. Printing did it. Databases did it. The question is not whether we externalise knowledge, but how we relate to what we externalise.

This is where Conversational Leadership enters the picture.

Classic Knowledge Management focuses on organising, storing, and sharing knowledge. That work remains necessary. But in conditions of uncertainty, stored knowledge is not enough. We must interpret it, test it, challenge it, and apply it with judgement.

In the age of AI, answers are abundant. Judgement is not. The scarce capability is the ability to think together, to examine assumptions, to surface differences, and to reason in dialogue rather than accept what sounds plausible.

AI can generate text. It cannot take responsibility. It cannot care about consequences. It cannot sit in disagreement and work through it. That remains human work.

The deeper lesson in the story of Thamus and Theuth is not that technology is dangerous, nor that it is liberating. It is that each new knowledge technology reshapes the conditions under which we think. The task for Knowledge Management today is not simply to deploy AI tools, but to strengthen the conversational capacity through which knowledge becomes wise action.

While technology will evolve, the human responsibility to reason together will not disappear.

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The success of a knowledge system depends on how easily people can find and use that information in their everyday work. The front-end experience — which includes the interface and overall usability of the system — helps bridge the stored knowledge and the employees who use it to create value.

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Why Front-End Design Is Critical for Knowledge Systems

A knowledge management system is often only as effective as its user interface. When the front end is cluttered or slow, users may disengage. This disengagement then becomes a direct barrier to knowledge adoption, regardless of the content's accuracy. Research shows that user interface design can significantly influence engagement through factors like visual aesthetics, accessibility, usability and personalization.

The benefits of a well-designed front-end experience are both practical and psychological. A user-friendly front end allows workers to find and use information essential to their everyday work. It reduces friction and frustration, boosting productivity and trust in the knowledge system itself.

Strategies for a User-Centric Front-End

Improving the front-end experience requires intentionally shifting toward user-centric thinking. Instead of organizing information around internal structures or legacy systems, effective knowledge system design reflects how team members actually search for and use information.

Simplify Navigation

An intuitive information architecture is essential to a usable knowledge system. Navigation should support existing workflows, helping users understand where they are and how to move forward with minimal confusion. Clear hierarchies and consistent terminology reduce the mental effort required to interact with the system.

Best practices in knowledge base UX design include minimizing unnecessary decision points. If business auto-attendants only provide three to five menu options, knowledge base front-end designers should strive for similar simplicity. When users can reach their desired content in fewer steps, the system becomes a natural part of daily workflows.

Optimize Search Functionality

For many users, search functionality is the primary mode of interaction they have with the knowledge system. When navigation gets unfamiliar or the system contains a lot of information spanning multiple categories, search becomes the easiest and fastest way to find answers. Inaccurate or disorganized results can affect user confidence in the system.

While keyword matching is important, effective search functionality design considers user intent. Advanced systems can use natural language processing to interpret queries, while filtering options allow users to refine results according to attributes like content type or date. Optimized search functionality turns the knowledge system into a responsive support tool for everyday workflows.

Personalize the Content Experience

Personalization helps reduce information overload, especially in comprehensive knowledge systems. Different team members often only need access to specific files or information at certain times. A front end that treats all users identically may seem equitable, but it can also overwhelm people with irrelevant content.

Tailoring experiences by role or department enables organizations to deliver knowledge that aligns with immediate needs. Personalized dashboards or contextual recommendations help improve the system’s usability and reinforce its value as a trusted, time-saving resource.

Implement an Organized Content Creation Template

Consistent content presentation is another factor influencing usability. Standardized content creation templates improve scannability and help staff quickly assess whether a resource meets their needs.

A well-structured template usually contains clear summaries and headings, organizing content using a clear visual hierarchy. Each file should also have defined ownership and regular reviews to ensure accuracy and timeliness.

Setting Up for Continuous Improvement

Front-end design requires intention and consistent effort. As priorities and user behaviors change, the knowledge system’s interface must adapt accordingly to stay effective.

Actively Solicit User Feedback

The most reliable insights into front-end performance come from the people who interact with the system daily. Actively collecting user feedback ensures improvements come from the demands of lived experience instead of general assumptions.

Standard methods include quantitative research like surveys and analytics or qualitative techniques like focus groups and interviews. Teams may also conduct moderated testing sessions for a hands-on look at the interface’s functionality. Intentionally collecting and analyzing user feedback allows them to identify friction points early and prioritize changes that deliver the most positive impact.

Embrace Iterative Design

Front-end experiences should evolve through iterative design informed by feedback and usage data. Small, continuous changes reduce disruption while allowing employees to test design decisions in real conditions.

An iterative approach also supports agility and competitive advantage, allowing knowledge management teams to respond to change without requiring large-scale overhauls. Over time, this practice results in a responsive and relevant front end that aligns with real people’s working styles.

Establish a Cross-Functional Governance Team

A cross-functional governance team ensures there is defined ownership over the creation and maintenance of the knowledge system experience. This team should include representatives from key business departments such as IT and HR, along with a dedicated knowledge system manager.

They should regularly review user feedback and implement improvements. Formalizing governance allows companies to ensure consistency and create a more cohesive user experience for all workers.

The Value of User-Centered Design

Improving the front-end experience is necessary to facilitate knowledge adoption and application effectively. Knowledge management teams can use intuitive navigation and continuous improvement to ensure their systems stay comprehensive and usable, powering innovation and sustainable growth.

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