From time to time, I get invited to speak to groups of executives. I’ve even gotten paid to do so and been invited back for repeat performances. What I haven’t done is develop an inventory of stock speeches. That can be an effective and lucrative path for those who opt for it. But, that path is premised on having a message you want to share widely. It’s more about preaching and I am more interested in teaching.
Here’s an example from about a dozen years ago that might tease out the distinction. A software vendor I’d worked with asked if I would keynote their annual users group meeting. They were (and are) a player in the corporate knowledge management space. As a former Chief Knowledge Officer for a growing management consulting firm, I was trying to work out why certain efforts had failed and others succeeded only modestly.
I treated the invitation as a forcing function; an opportunity to work out some thinking with an audience who might have insights to share. Consider it a segment in the longer process of solving for pattern.
A persistent problem in corporate knowledge management efforts was getting knowledge workers to share their work more broadly. Various incentive and control systems didn’t appear to have much effect. The premise behind these solutions was that people were reluctant to share their work for reasons unknown.
I used this event to explore an alternate hypothesis; sharing knowledge work was hard to do because technology made the doing of knowledge work invisible. Work that had been visible in the movement and flow of paper or the flipcharts and whiteboards in conference rooms had disappeared behind the keyboards and screens of workstations, personal computers, and laptops. Solving the sharing problem was not about incentives, it was about visibility. Make knowledge work observable and sharing becomes more natural.