I am a management consultant and reluctant academic specialising in knowledge management, collaborative working and learning – despite believing that knowledge can’t be managed. I facilitate, I listen, I suspend judgement – and I find it hard to describe what I do. If I do it well, it’s invisible. This makes it difficult to get paid.The focus of my work is knowledge management and organisational learning – how people work together effectively and efficiently to get things done, come up with new ideas, make better decisions and generally make best use of what they know. In practice this can mean anything from designing and facilitating a single workshop to a consultancy assignment lasting several months. My work is positioned firmly on the boundaries between academia and practice. Not the most comfortable place to be, but there’s such a huge gap between the two that there’s a lot of bridging to be done. In my academic work I develop post-graduate programmes and supervise master’s students doing projects and dissertations. I get a real kick out of helping management students understand how to do research.In my spare time I do voluntary work for the Association for Project Management, where I co-founded the Knowledge SIG; and for the Project Management Institute, where I contributed to a new knowledge management section in the next edition of the PMBOK® Guide.I am also known for introducing collaborative working and social software to the Henley KM Forum and to CIRIA – and for being a member of the #teatowelclub on Twitter.