By exploring play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as cornerstones of learning, Brown creates a vision of learning for the future that is achievable, scalable, and one that grows along with the technology that fosters it and the people who engage with it. The result is a new form of culture in which knowledge is seen as fluid and evolving, the personal is both enhanced and refined in relation to the collective, and the ability to manage, negotiate, and participate in the world is governed by the play of the imagination. Gain insights from our experienced speaker to apply in your organization for better communication, collaboration, innovation, and knowledge-sharing.

GE consistently ranks in the top of the Most Admired Knowledge companies surveys. Now they’ve taken it a step further—and taken KM a step further. GE Capital has turned the tools and ideas of KM into a portal for customers, which they call Access GE. The idea is to use knowledge to differentiate GE Capital from other financial services companies. “Anyone can loan you capital—we can give you access to something far more valuable: our intellectual capital.” GE Capital customers have access to a library of documents about GE’s own best practices in cost/operations management, innovation and growth, leadership and development, and finance; a curated collection of documents from Booz, McKinsey, HBR, and CFO on the same topics; and a team of “concierges” who help match a client question with a GE expert who can answer it. Hear how customers are reacting and gain lots of insights to apply in your organization.

Experts typically have trouble articulating the subtle know-how they use to make effective judgment calls outside the specific cases in which they applied it. As a result, their deep understanding and ingenuity can’t be captured in decision trees or databases. Nor is it typically shared in the common tools of communities of practice. Recent developments in cognitive science and decision analysis have made it possible to describe a set of thinking disciplines experts use to make difficult judgment calls. These thinking disciplines provide a framework through which experts can teach more junior staff how they think through difficult judgment calls. Using examples from the IFC, MWH, NASA, and others, this talk highlights several different mechanisms KM staff can use to help experts teach others how they think.

Our speakers share their secrets and focus on the critical success factors of any KM project.

In organizations around the globe, senior managers are demanding (and getting) iPhones and iPads. Staffs want devices they use at home, which are more advanced than corporately provided tools. What should mobile enterprise solutions look like, and how best to deliver them? Mobile devices are transforming how we work, but there are still questions to answer to make them effective. This practical discussion provides real-world insight into how to design and deliver a mobile enterprise. It’s simpler and easier than you might think! See many screenshots and examples from leading organizations, and use the ideas gained to plan your own mobile projects.

SharePoint has become an integral part of the software stack for many companies, and the growth and adoption of this platform has been “explosive”! Speakers discuss their approach, implementation, and platform framework. Get the lessons learned from Merck’s recent upgrade including putting a structure of services in place. Hear about their experiences and recommendations for others taking this journey.

This informative session lets you peek behind the firewall of leading-edge intranets from a number of different industries and includes award-winning sites from the 2012 Intranet Innovation Awards. These case studies of successful, active intranets provide ideas and insights to apply in your organization.

This zany one-act comedy with nine short tragic scenes that illustrate really bad practices in business conversations and business meetings in a KM context is hosted by a long-time KM practitioner and features actors selected from the audience in the moment. Pollard invites the audience to suggest ways this comedy of errors might have gone better with the right forethought, design and in-the-moment facilitation. Prizes of Group Works: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings, a 91-card deck of best practices and processes for group facilitation, is awarded to four astute audience members and the “best actor” as voted by the audience.

Using facilitation techniques that are based on complexity science, this session helps you find ways to work out if a problem is complicated — or wicked — because if it is, there is no right answer, and we need to experiment with safe-to-fail solutions. Get a template with heuristics for creating wicked problem interventions and use “ritual dissent” to temper/test the proposals so that they will stand up. Participants will try these techniques and take home a set of simple techniques to use in their organizations to collectively find new solutions to complex problems.

Sometimes it’s most helpful to hear what other practitioners are thinking of doing next as well as visions of the next BIG thing. Hear from a few BIG thinkers as they share brief thoughts about what their organizations are planning for next week, next month, and next year, and then share your insights with colleagues.