The World Café

Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter

Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, World Cafe Community

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781609940393
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

The World Cafe is a flexible, easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue, sharing mutual knowledge, and discovering new opportunities for action. Based on living systems thinking, this innovative approach creates dynamic networks of conversation that can catalyze an organization or community's own collective intelligence around its most important questions.
Filled with stories of actual Cafe dialogues in business, education, government, and community organizations across the globe, this uniquely crafted book demonstrates how the World Cafe can be adapted to any setting or culture. Examples from such varied organizations as Hewlett-Packard, American Society for Quality, the nation of Singapore, the University of Texas, and many others, demonstrate the process in action.
Along with its seven core design principles, The World Cafe offers practical tips for hosting "conversations that matter" in groups of any size- strengthening both personal relationships and people's capacity to shape the future together.

12

ONE

Seeing the Invisible:
Conversation Matters!

It’s never enough just to tell people about some new insight.Rather, you have to get them to experience it in a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people’s heads, you need to help them grind a new set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way.

—John Seely Brown, Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation

13

What if humans are in conversation the way fish are in water?

14

STORY

DISCOVERING THE WORLD CAFÉ: THE INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL PIONEERS

As Told By

David Isaacs

David Isaacs, my partner in life and work, is a co-originator of the World Café. In this story he shares the serendipity surrounding the birth of the World Café and its community of practice, along with our early musings about what was at play in Café dialogues. Our initial Café experience also set the stage for unexpected discoveries about the powerful role that conversation plays in shaping our futures.

January 1995. It is a very rainy dawn at our home in Mill Valley, California. A thick mist hangs over Mt. Tamalpais as I look out beyond the massive oak tree that borders the patio outside our living room. We have twenty-four people arriving in half an hour for the second day of a strategic dialogue on intellectual capital. Juanita and I are hosting the gathering in collaboration with Leif Edvinsson, vice president of intellectual capital for the Skandia Corporation in Sweden. This is the second in a series of conversations among the Intellectual Capital Pioneers—a group of corporate executives, researchers, and consultants from seven countries who are at the leading edge of this inquiry.

The field of intellectual capital and knowledge management is still in its infancy. No books have yet been written. No maps exist. We’re making them as we go. Last evening we were in the midst of exploring the question: What is the role of leadership in maximizing the value of intellectual capital?

Juanita is worried. As she sets out the breakfast and prepares the coffee, she’s concerned about how we can create the right setting for the day’s agenda if the pouring rain continues and no one can go outside on the patio to visit when they arrive. Then I have an idea. “Why don’t we set up our TV tables in the living room and just have people get their coffee and visit around the tables while we’re waiting for everyone to arrive? We’ll then put away the tables and begin with our normal dialogue circle.”

Juanita breathes a sigh of relief. As we set out the small tables and white vinyl chairs, our interactive graphics specialist, Tomi Nagai-Rothe, arrives and adds, “Those look like café tables. I think they need some tablecloths!” She improvises, draping white sheets of easel paper over each of the paired TV tables. Now it’s getting kind of playful. We’ve stopped worrying about the rain, which is coming down in sheets. Juanita decides we need flowers on the café tables, and goes for small vases downstairs. In the meantime, Tomi adds crayons to each of the tables, just like those in many neighborhood cafés. She makes a lovely sign for our front door—Welcome to the Homestead Café—playing off our address, Homestead Boulevard, which is actually a narrow road up the side of a mountain.

Just as Juanita places the flowers on the tables, folks begin to arrive. They are delighted and amused. As people get their coffee and croissants, they gather in informal groups around the café tables and begin to talk about last night’s question. People are really engaged. They begin to scribble on the tablecloths. Juanita and I have a quick huddle and decide that, rather than have a formal dialogue circle to open the gathering, we will simply encourage people to continue to share what’s bubbling up from their conversations that could shed light on the essence of the relationship between leadership and intellectual capital.

15

Forty-five minutes pass and the conversation is still going strong. Charles Savage, one of our members, calls out, “I’d love to have a feel for what’s happening in the other conversations in the room. Why don’t we leave one host at the table and have our other members travel to different tables, carrying the seed ideas from our conversation and connecting and linking with the threads that are being woven at other tables?” There’s consensus that the suggestion seems like fun. After a few minutes of wrap-up, folks begin to move around the room. One host remains at each table, while the others each go to a different table to continue the conversations.

This round lasts another hour. Now the room is really alive! People are excited and engaged, almost breathless. Another person speaks up. “Why don’t we experiment by leaving a new host at the table, with the others traveling, continuing to share and link what we’re discovering?”

And so it continues. The rain falling, hard. People huddling around the TV tables, learning together, testing ideas and assumptions together, building new knowledge together, adding to each other’s diagrams and pictures and noting key words and ideas on the tablecloths. Juanita and I look up and realize that it is almost lunchtime. We have been participating in the café conversations ourselves and the hours have passed as if they were minutes.

The energy in the room is palpable. It is as if the very air is shimmering. I ask the group to wrap up their conversations and gather around a large rolled-out piece of mural paper that Tomi has placed on the rug in the middle of the living room floor. It looks, in fact, like a large café tablecloth spread on the floor. We invite each small group to put their individual tablecloths around the edges of the larger cloth and then take a “tour” to notice patterns, themes, and insights that are emerging in our midst.

As Juanita and I watch our collective discoveries and insights unfold visually on the large mural paper in the center of the group, we know something quite unusual has happened. We are bearing witness to something for which we have no language. It is as if the intelligence of a larger collective Self, beyond the individual selves in the room, had become visible to us. It feels almost like “magic”—an exciting moment of recognition of what we are discovering together that’s difficult to describe yet feels strangely familiar. The café process somehow enabled the group to access a form of collaborative intelligence that grew more potent as both ideas and people traveled from table to table, making new connections and cross-pollinating their diverse insights.

. . .

16

Perspectives & Observations

After that breakthrough meeting, David and I, along with Finn Voldtofte, a close colleague from Denmark who had participated in that initial gathering, spent the next day trying to understand what had happened. We looked at each of the components of the day, examining how it had contributed to the living knowledge that emerged. We considered what had occurred when people entered the house and saw the colorful and inviting Homestead Café in our living room. Was there something about the café itself as an archetype—a familiar cultural form around the world—that was able to evoke the immediate intimacy and collective engagement that we experienced? Did the positive associations that most people make with cafés support the natural emergence of easy and authentic conversation that had happened, despite the lack of formal guidelines or dialogue training among the participants?

We considered the role and use of questions to engage collaborative thinking. Was there something in the way we had framed the conversation around a core question that participants cared about—“What is the relationship between leadership and intellectual capital?”—that affected the quality and depth of collective insight? Then there was the cross-pollination of ideas across groups. Did carrying insights from one group to another enable the emergence of an unexpected web of lively new connections among diverse perspectives? We mused on the function of people writing on their tablecloths and later contributing their collective insights to the common tablecloth as we explored our discoveries together. What was the importance, if any, that people could literally see each other’s ideas on their tablecloths, similar to a hurried sketch or an idea scribbled on a napkin?

As we tried to illuminate our experience, we were reminded of how many new ideas and social innovations have historically been born and spread through informal conversations in cafés, salons, churches, and living rooms. We realized that what we had experienced in the café conversation in our living room was perhaps a small-scale replica of a deeper living pattern of how knowledge-sharing, change, and innovation have always occurred in human societies. We recalled the salon movement that gave birth to the French Revolution, as well as the sewing circles and committees of correspondence that foretold America’s independence. Finn reminded us of the widespread network of study circles that fostered the social and economic renaissance in Scandinavia during the early twentieth century, and we realized that David’s and my early experiences with social movements, including the farmworkers, followed the same pattern of development. Founders of major change efforts often say, “Well, it all began when some friends and I started talking.”

17

Are we as human beings so immersed in conversation that, like fish in water, conversation is our medium for survival and we just can’t see it?

The evolving web of conversations in our living room seemed to allow us to experience directly the often invisible way that large-scale organizational and societal change occurs—what we have since come to call “nature’s strategic planning process.” Are we as human beings so immersed in conversation that, like fish in water, conversation is our medium for survival and we just can’t see it? Had we somehow stumbled onto a set of principles that made it easier for larger groups to notice and access this natural process in order to develop collaborative intelligence around critical questions and concerns? Might this awareness support leaders in becoming more intentional about fostering connected networks of conversation focused on their organization’s most important questions?

Out of this conversation, the image of the World Café emerged as a central metaphor to guide our nascent exploration into the possibilities that we had tapped into that rainy day. Many of us who were at that initial gathering began to experiment with the simple process that we had discovered. We began to host World Café conversations in a variety of settings and to share our learnings with each other as we went.

And then from a completely unexpected source, it became clear to me just how much conversation matters. It matters a lot.

18

Knowing Together and Bringing Forth a World

I was serving as co-faculty for a living system...