Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, World Café Community, The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005.
Referenced in: Strategies for Church Renewal – Whole Systems, Large Group
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
This book discusses World Café, a Whole Systems approach to organizational renewal that has been useful in churches. It is popular worldwide. Since its inception in 1995, tens of thousands of people on six continents have used World Café for productive conversations in groups ranging from 12 to 1,200. As with all Whole Systems approaches, it works only in situations where leaders are willing to let creative solutions arise from the people, not in controlled outcome settings. For a good description of its potential in churches, see the discussion in Mead and Alban Creating the Future Together. For a general description of World Café process, the following is taken from the World Cafe Community Foundation.
The World Café is a living network of conversations around questions that matter. It is an easy-to-use method for fostering collaborative dialogue, particularly in large groups. It is, simultaneously, a provocative metaphor enabling us to notice the often invisible webs of conversation and social learning which lie at the heart of our capacity to share knowledge and shape the future together.
Using the World Café as a method empowers leaders and other professionals to intentionally create focused networks of conversation around an organization or community’s real work and critical questions. Café conversations are designed on the assumption that people already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges. They are based on the natural process by which authentic conversations enable people to think together, create shared meaning, strengthen community and ignite innovation. Given the appropriate context and focus, Café dialogues allow members to access their mutual intelligence in the service of desired outcomes.
The process is simple, yet often yields surprising results. In a World Café gathering, you join several other people at a Café-style table or in a small conversation cluster exploring a question or issue that really matters to your life, work or community. Others are seated at nearby tables or in conversation clusters exploring similar questions at the same time. People are noting down or sketching out key ideas on the Café’s paper tablecloths or large cards.
From these intimate conversations, members carry key ideas and insights into new small groups. This cross-pollination of perspectives is one of the hallmarks of the World Cafe. As people and ideas connect together in progressive rounds of conversation, collective knowledge grows and evolves. A sense of the larger whole becomes real. Innovative possibilities for action are made visible.
Under what circumstances is the World Café model most successful or fitting? The Café process is almost infinitely malleable and will work with any group of 12 or more. We have successfully conducted Cafes with 1200 people, so size is not a problem. To date most of the Cafes we have designed, hosted and convened have been to enable large groups of people to think together about some aspect of their common future. It is a powerful community development tool. The World Cafe process has been used successfully at large conferences, at town meetings, among educators, for designing and implementing organizational strategy, and in numerous other settings. For stories and examples of how and where the Café has been applied, please see our website.
World Café is a relatively simple process, but requires careful orchestration to maintain the “living system” environment. Toward that end, this guidebook devotes a separate chapter to each of the seven core design principles. Each chapter begins with a narrative or “learning story” describing how these principles have proven valuable in real conversational settings:
- Set the context
- Create hospitable space
- Explore questions that matter
- Encourage everyone’s contribution
- Cross-pollinate and connect diverse perspectives
- Listen together for patterns, insights, and deeper questions
- Harvest and share collective discoveries
The next three chapters offer a stand-alone World Café hosting guide to help practitioners plan Cafe dialogues in diverse settings, insight on the organizational infrastructures and personal leadership capabilities for using World Café to tap into the collaborative intelligence of organizations, and the societal implications and promises inherent in embracing and acting on the practice of World Cafe.
World Café has good potential in churches and other missional settings. For insight into other Whole Systems approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry and Asset-Mapping, see the Resource Guide.
From the Publisher
THE WORLD CAFE: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
- Introduces readers to a simple, yet powerful conversational process for thinking together and creating actionable knowledge that has been used successfully with organizations and communities on six continents
- Clearly articulates seven key World Café design principles that create the conditions for accessing collective intelligence and breakthrough thinking
- Includes actual stories from widely varied settings-such as Hewlett-Packard, American Society for Quality, the nation of Singapore, the University of Texas, and many, many others-to show the World Café process and results
The World Café 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 Café 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 Café 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.
About the Authors
Juanita Brown, Ph.D. is co-originator of the World Café and has served as a Senior Affiliate at the MIT Sloan School’s Organizational Learning Center (now Society for Organizational Learning), as a Research Affiliate with the Institute for the Future and as a Fellow of the World Business Academy. For more information, visit www.TheWorldCafe.com.
David Isaacs is President of Clearing Communications and designs strategic dialogue forums with senior leaders in the U.S. and abroad. David is also a co-originator of the World Cafe and serves as adjunct faculty with the University of Texas Business School’s Executive MBA Program. For more information, visit www.TheWorldCafe.com.
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