Few plans survive contact with the work you are doing.  If your team make a plan at the start and then refuse to deviate from it as new information becomes available, the plan becomes inflexible and can fail.

Techniques like the PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Act) cycle can help to make plans grow with your project.  Knowledge management tools can be used to supplement this approach and assist staff in adapting to changes and unexpected information.

Unlike the techniques we discussed in the planning phase, these tools are usually brief, producing immediate knowledge that can be put into practice quickly.

Knowledge Cafe

A knowledge café is a tool for generating lateral conversation.  A risk in improvement projects is that there may be a difference between what stakeholders say to the organisers of the project and to each other.  Knowledge cafes are built on the idea of stakeholders talking to each other, and crucially talking to people who may not be within their existing organisational structures.  As such they serve as a tool for sharing perspectives, breaking down silos, and building communities.   

1. As knowledge cafes tend to revolve around conversations between groups who may be new to each other, facilitation should be given about who should facilitate them.  Conversations may not naturally start by themselves, so an introduction to set the tone might help.  A typical session might run like this: 
2. A  facilitator explains to attendees how the session is going to run.  They introduce the theme of the café with a short talk, of an absolute maximum of fifteen minutes but less if at all possible.  They then post the question that the café will be considering. 
3. People are assigned to their initial groups.  This can be an assignment of convenience (who they're sitting with to begin with) or one of randomisation.  These small groups or table assignments will then discuss the question for fifteen minutes. 
4. After fifteen minutes, the facilitator will get everyone's attention and get them to swap groups again.  As before, this can be ad hoc (everyone goes to a new table) or randomised by whatever method the facilitator chooses.  They then have another conversation about the question the facilitator has posed for the next fifteen minutes.  Optionally after this groups can be remixed another time. 
5. Once these conversations have taken place, the facilitator brings the groups back together for a room discussion of what has been raised and what has been learned.   
6. The point of these sessions is the conversations, not necessarily to take actions from them.  If people have learning they want to share or the broader group sees actions emergent from the discussions they have had, they very much should take them, but the value of the cafe is in the conversation itself. 
7. At the conclusion of the session, the facilitator thanks participants.  If any notes have been taken they can be shared amongst the group afterwards. 

Randomised Coffee Trials 

The Knowledge Café is a method of generating lateral communication in a focused short form environment, bringing staff together to discuss a specific issue.  A Randomised Coffee Trial is an attempt to encourage this communication in a way that is lower stakes, more broadly connective, and happens across a greater timeline.  The core of the idea is that individuals within given community – such as a longterm project group, a service undergoing improvement, or any other grouping with shared interests but with perhaps little peer to peer communication – are paired at random and then given a medium length timeline in which to meet for a discussion.  This discussion can be about a question or a topic that the coordinator sets, or can be a more general introduction to share the work that each of the pair does. 

The purpose of the exercise is to build relationships, encourage collaboration, and improve communication.  Once the exercise has been completed participants will be given the opportunity to conduct the activity again and pair with someone else within their community.  A typical Randomised Coffee Trial might run like this. 

1. The community is identified and participants are invited to join.  The community can consist of anyone who the coordinator wants to help connect better but would typically be focused on one area of work focus.  This might interface will with the knowledge management "Communities of Practice" tool. 
2. Once participants have been identified, invited, and consented to participate, randomly match people in pairs.  Optionally you can re-randomise individuals who have been paired with someone within their existing team in order to increase ther chances of new conversations. 
3. Notify people of who they are paired with.  There may be some further work with re-pairing people whose partners drop out. 
4. Participants now have six to eight weeks to arrange time for a face to face or virtual converstions with their partner.  This can either be to consider a question of the coordinator's choosing or to meet and connect with someone from a different part of their community of practice. 
5. The coordinator should send a small number of reminders in the six to eight week period, both to remind participants to arrange and hold their meeting, and to gather feedback for how the meetings have gone, if anything came up that warranted broader conversation, etc. 
6. The coordinator gathers and shares feedback and success from the trial and canvases participants on whether they would like to repeat the trial.  If they would, begin the process of setting up the trial again. 

Fishbowl exercises 

A Fishbowl Exercise is a dynamic discussion and problem solving tool designed to let broad ranges of people discuss issues that affect them all without anyone being drowned out or excluded.  The way they work is that there are a limited number of people who can talk at once, but anyone who wants to join the discussion can do so, with current participants ceding the floor to new speakers. 

The setup of the Fishbowl is that a facilitator sets up an outer circle of chairs, with three or four chairs in the middle.  They then appoint a small number of people to begin the discussion.  These will usually be people specifically knowledgeable about the topic for discussion, and there will usually be one less person than there are chairs.  A fishbowl may also use a prop such as a toy fish to indicate who is speaking at any given time.  The audience in the outer circle will be other people interested or involved in the topic or issue being discussed.  The fishbowl will work something like this: 

1. The facilitator introduces the concept of the fishbowl and the subject under discussion to the outer circle.  They then introduce the participants and  ask for their opinions about the subject and they take turns expressing their point of view. 
2. Once this is done, and initial participants have had the opportunity to discuss the issue back and forth, the facilitator will open the discussion to the outer circle, inviting anyone who wants to join the conversation to take the empty chair.  Once a new person has joined, an existing participant in the conversation should take a seat in the outer circle. 
3. As well as the facilitator, it helps to have a scribe who is making a note of what was said and by whom.  
4. Either at the end of the alloted time or when the conversation reaches a natural stopping point, the facilitator and the scribe should recap what has been said, reinforce any points or actions generated, and thank everyone who has taken part for their time. 

For more information about knowledge management and mobilisation, to access toolkits relating to different knowledge management techniques, or to look into having the library facilitate a knowledge management session with your team, get in contact with the library.