7
World Café
Some time ago I was asked to act as chair for a debate within the counselling community. This was at the time when, in the UK, all health professionals were being asked to register with the Health Professions Council (HPC). Some groups of counsellors or therapists weren’t entirely convinced that this body would understand their unique and particular perspective or approach. The idea was that a representative of each of the main UK counselling bodies, plus a representative from the HPC, would hold a debate on a raised dais in front of an audience of counsellors and therapists. I was effectively being invited to referee a bun fight on stage and then field audience questions. The image the organizer had in mind was the kind of adversarial debate newscasters like to conduct.
This invitation was not attractive; however, the idea of being able to work with a large group of people always is. I held some conversations with the people who would be on the dais and read some background literature. It was evident that feelings were running very high about this. The questions the organizers wanted to ask suggested they were a bit caught up in the counselling culture of digging deeper into difficult feelings. The language of many of the questions as originally written was freighted with strong negative feelings. It seemed to me the HPC spokesperson was in danger of being publicly lynched, figuratively speaking. I wanted to help them construct a more constructive way of proceeding that also allowed the audience, who were in effect the system being affected by this proposal, a much wider say in the matter. I also wanted to create sufficient safety for all the panellists.
After a lot of negotiation, we agreed on a design that delivered a tightly controlled panel session and then an afternoon World Café. The point of the panel session was to create a shared awareness in the room of the degree of commonality or difference that existed between the different organizations. It was also an attempt to separate truth from rumour, fact from fear, and the negotiable from the non-negotiable. To this end each panellist was asked the same questions, which they had been given in advance, and were allowed up to five minutes to respond. Panellists indicated in advance which questions they were interested in addressing, so no one had to speak for the sake of it. I negotiated to make these questions as positive and appreciative as I could. They may not look particularly so, but they are considerably more so than those originally proposed. They included questions such as: “What structures exist for further negotiations by members of the professional community with the Health Professions Council on areas that continue to be contested?”; “What capacity does the HPC have to address the ongoing concerns expressed by the professional community?”; “What would the consequences be of not joining the HPC register? Will the practitioners have their membership of their current umbrella organization withdrawn?”; “The HPC Standards of Proficiency are raising concerns because they are formulaic. How would the HPC ensure that these do not restrict good practice that is process-based and that will take into account ruptures in the practitioner–patient relationship that are often part of the therapeutic process?”; “What would be the role of independent training organizations in a post-regulation culture?” Then, after a break where people could consider not only what they wanted to ask but also how, we had an audience-to-panel question session so they could engage with what had been said so far.
In the afternoon we were able to move to a World Café structure for a whole group discussion. The question we constructed for this was, “How might we continue to work towards a regulatory structure that robustly protects the needs of the customer, patient, or client, while preserving the vibrant creativity and intellectual vigour of these professions?” We held two rounds of conversation focused on this question and then spent a final period pulling the discussions together. It was evident that the group membership was not really interested in the divisions between their professional organizations, but was much more focused on finding constructive ways forward that would enable them to continue practising their particular school of therapy or counselling with confidence. While people might not like being brought in under this particular regulatory umbrella it was clearly going to happen and the key thing was to negotiate the best possible ways forward. In other words, attention was switching from fighting a rear-guard action against things they couldn’t influence to focusing on a forward orientation to focusing on things they could influence. It was a tough day but, from my point of view anyway, constructive and conducted without the need for bloodletting!
Introduction
In the example above, ideally I would have liked to negotiate the whole day for a co-creative process, but in this instance it was not possible. However, I was able to incorporate a World Café (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005) into the design, which is another co-creative methodology. World Café is a dialogue-based methodology particularly suited to connecting and combining people’s knowledge and expertise to create new awareness and insights about particular opportunities or concerns. The process brings together everyone connected to the issue, with all their particular localized knowledge and personal experiences, to address specific questions. These questions are designed to move group thinking forward on an issue. People talk together in small groups about a specific question, challenge, topic, or opportunity. A clear process, refined through trial and error, offers guidance on how to ensure the conversations are productive, generative, and connected.
The Process
The World Café process was designed as, “a simple yet powerful conversational process for fostering constructive dialogue, accessing collective intelligence, and creating innovative possibilities for action, particularly in groups that are larger than most traditional dialogue approaches are designed to accommodate” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 3). The conversations facilitated by the World Café process allow those present to “notice a deeper living pattern of connections” (p. 3).
The process of World Café is very straightforward. To open the event the host or facilitator introduces the session, sets the context, explains the process, and introduces “café etiquette” (see Box 7.1). Following the introduction there are a number of rounds of discussion at small tables or in small groups. Each round is focused on a question or questions. That is, sometimes all tables are working on the same question, as in our example, and sometimes on different questions. Rounds can last any length of time, usually about 40 minutes to an hour. The process itself can extend over a couple of hours or a couple of days.
At each table is a designated host whose job it is to make sure people introduce themselves and to encourage the recording of key conversational discoveries and insights. This is often done informally. Famously, this typically means on the paper tablecloths that ideally are provided at the café tables for precisely this purpose. Hosts are not charged with facilitating the conversation in any way, only with effecting introductions and encouraging recording.
At the end of each round, a brief discussion is held to connect the table conversations and to illuminate the value of the conversations so far. This is to ensure that the collective knowledge that emerges becomes visible to the whole group. After each round, participants are asked to redistribute themselves for the next round of conversation. The host stays put and everyone else disperses to different tables. The next round starts with the host connecting the new group with each other (introductions) and with “the story so far” at that table. In more or less formal ways, the new group will bring their experience of their previous conversations into the discussion. In this way it is likely that the collective knowledge, insight, and group wisdom around the issue under discussion will grow.
After the final round, the event host will conduct a final inter-table conversation to illuminate and connect the various insights and discoveries that have emerged at each table and to bring the proceedings to a close. They may well inquire after any ideas for action. They close by clarifying what, if anything, will happen with the data that has been generated, and by recording any forthcoming plans of action.
Purpose
The purpose of the process is to generate collective knowledge-sharing, to create or support webs of personal relationships, and to generate new possibilities for action. It is specifically or purposefully “designed to avoid predetermined outcomes” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 52).
Recommended Use
The World Café process is designed to help people talk together, exchange ideas, and develop their thinking about an issue in a relaxed, informal, yet purposive way. In small café groupings of no more than six people, groups discuss particular questions or topics with the aim of expanding their understanding of their own and others’ views, and of the possibilities for the future. World Café is useful in many contexts, and excels when the main object is to connect knowledge and explore ideas around a particular topic. At its best it produces conversation that connects, has energy, is emergent, and is valuable.
World Café works to create new insights or new possibilities for action by combining and recombining the knowledge and experience in the room in different ways. Like all these co-creative methodologies, it is usually a highly dynamic and motivating experience. Generally, people come away changed by their conversations in terms of: their mental maps of the situation; their understanding of their colleagues; their energy for engaging with the issue; and their willingness to work with others to make things happen. It is a methodology that trusts participants to be able to hold conversations around things that are important to them in a committed, thoughtful, and adult way. It doesn’t require a professional facilitator at each table, instead different roles are assigned to participants to help them hold and connect the various conversations. Senior people present become part of the community, one voice among many.
As ever for larger events, good planning is needed beforehand to ensure that the event is clearly located in the bigger context, and to ensure that there is clarity about the decision-making and action-taking processes connected to the event. Sometimes there is no expectation that decisions will be needed or actions taken, in which case the café is run as a very open-ended discursive exercise to raise awareness of the importance or impact of a topic and to get people to engage with the topic. It can be run with the sole purpose of connecting people around an organization-wide topic that can’t easily be addressed through the normal managerial processes.
In this way it is particularly suitable for conversations about organizational culture. Culture, being a process, is very difficult to manage from the top. It is a product of individual thoughts and actions created within an intangible but very real understanding of the affordances and constraints of the existing culture (see S. Lewis, 2011). In other words, culture is perpetuated by the daily words and deeds of organizational members. In order to change culture, everyone needs to feel the need to, and believe they have permission to, behave differently. They also need the skills and the personal contacts to do so. World Café, with its combination of individual influence and group conversation, and its output of personal impact and organizational learning, can be very helpful in facilitating organizational culture shifts.
World Café is also particularly suited to counteracting the challenge of “a silo mentality,” the bane of much organizational life. The development of a “silo mentality” is a recurring challenge to organizations that becomes particularly problematic in times of change. For reasons of efficiency, most organizations are functionally split into different departments. These activity-based splits are often further reinforced by more concrete divisions such as walls or physical distance. Often, different functions are located in different offices or workshops, on different floors, on different sites, or in different countries. Few organizations put the same degree of energy into keeping these separate units connected as they do into fostering connections within each unit. Over time, each unit can become more and more self-contained and less and less connected to the wider system. The World Café process sets out to help people gain a more system-based understanding of how their organization works. They begin to understand the deeper patterns of the organization, not just those of their own space.
Key Ideas
1. Calling on the collective wisdom of the system
In 2004, Surowiecki published The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few. In it he cites many examples of when the crowd is smarter than the individual. For example, he tells a story of Galton, a scientist and psychologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who was a pioneer in using statistics to measure human variability. He is particularly known for his early work on intelligence and other hereditary traits. Galton found himself at a fair with a “guess the weight of an ox” competition. After the event he collected all the tickets and averaged out the crowd guess. As Surowiecki reports it,
Galton undoubtedly thought that the average guess of the group would be way off the mark. After all, mix a few smart people with some mediocre people and a lot of dumb people [sic], and it seems likely you’d end up with a dumb answer. But Galton was wrong. The crowd had guessed that the ox, after it had been slaughtered and dressed, would weigh 1,197 pounds. After it had been slaughtered and dressed, the ox weighed 1,198 pounds. In other words, the crowd’s judgement was essentially perfect.
(2004, p. xiii)
Surowiecki quotes many other examples, arguing that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them” (2004, p. xiii). These right circumstances refer to the nature of the challenge and the nature of the group. The wisdom of crowds doesn’t hold for all challenges. However, its potential to create greater wisdom than any individual seems quite remarkable, as the story below illustrates.
Surowiecki finishes his introduction with another story about the location of a lost submarine. In essence, this lost submarine could have been anywhere in a 20-mile-wide circle. Working with a group of people’s best guesses as to the most likely scenario of what had happened, and the effect of that on calculable things like speed of descent, he pinpointed a spot on the ocean floor (which was not one any individual had guessed). The submarine was found 220 yards away. He says, “What’s astonishing about this story is that the evidence that the group was relying on in this case amounted to almost nothing. It was really just tiny scraps of data. No one knew why the submarine sank, no one had any idea how fast it was travelling or how steeply it fell to the ocean floor. And yet, even though no one in the group knew any of these things, the group as a whole knew them all” (2004, p. xxi).
At the time, the wisdom of crowds was a fairly new concept and the book was very popular. The title is still quoted by people at opportune moments. World Café, and the other co-creation approaches, call on this collective wisdom that is available to us as a group and unavailable to us as individuals. World Café works with the “assumption that people already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 4), and that the process can “evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group” (Brown, Homer, & Isaacs, 2007, p. 180).
2. The social nature of learning
In tandem with the growing understanding of the collective intelligence of the organization, we are becoming more aware of the social nature of learning. Senge was alert to this in his work The Fifth Discipline (1990), where he identified the team as the learning unit of the organization (rather than the individual). Sharing knowledge and insights, debating and discussing, groups create new knowledge. Brown and Isaacs note that the World Café process, “Allows people to drill through the formal layers of their professional titles and bring more of their whole person to the conversation” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 31). This encourages the development of human relations, which in turn encourages good listening and conversation.
3. The motivating power of conversation about things that matter
We take conversation for granted: it is such an everyday phenomenon that we become inured to its transformational power. Yet it is our primary tool for collectively “discovering what we care about, sharing knowledge, imaging the future, and acting together to both survive and thrive” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 18). It is “the core process by which we humans think and coordinate our actions together” (p. 19).
While there are many different kinds of conversation for different purposes, World Café is interested in creating conditions for collaborative conversation, particularly conversation that helps people co-create stories and images of the future. In World Café, people move from ordinary conversations, “which keep us stuck in the past, are often divisive, and are generally superficial” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 4), towards conversations that matter (e.g., those that generate deeper collective understanding or forward movement in relation to a situation people really care about). Brown and Isaacs see World Café as a conversational greenhouse, “nurturing the conditions for the rapid propagation of actionable knowledge” (p. 4). Conversation is understood as a living force, with the World Café process allowing organizations to engage its power. Conversations can be how we discover what we know and how we discover what we don’t know.
4. Process over personality
World Café, in common with the other co-creative approaches, privileges process over personality. To some extent this can be seen as the further embodiment of the wisdom of crowds philosophy: in a large group the idiosyncrasies of personality are likely to have less influence. But it is mostly that we are more interested in influencing the system, and the patterns of the system, than in influencing any particular individual. We are more interested in connections and patterns than in bits of data or individual contributions. By moving people around the groups, the process also regularly breaks up any unhealthy dynamics (such as dominance by one member) that might have emerged in any one conversation. It is my experience that when people are feeling good and engaged in an important task they cope remarkably well with some of the less socially skilled, less emotionally intelligent, or more insensitive members of the group. The regular movement of people around the tables means that any difficult dynamics are only temporary and don’t become entrenched in the event. In this way, the ability of the system to access and utilize the knowledge of some of the more difficult characters, without being distracted by an emotional reaction to their “personality,” is enhanced. In a carefully structured situation like World Café it becomes more possible to draw on all the resources in the room.
5. Actionable knowledge
In the World Café environment, we are interested in developing, or creating, actionable knowledge. We want “whatever emerges from a Café to be something that can be put into practice” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 29). In other words, the café is not just a theoretical thinking exercise. This desire guides the design of the café topic, the questions, the invitees, and of course the process as a whole. As with all these co-creative methodologies, a World Café benefits from careful context-sensitive and context-specific design. So although the principles laid out below are general, their application in each case is tailored to the specific event.
Critical Success Factors
There are eight design principles that “improve people’s collective capacity to share knowledge and shape the future together” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 3). These can be regarded as the critical success factors.
1. Introducing the event and setting the context
The context is “the situation, frame of reference and surrounding factors that, in combination, help shape the ways we make meaning of our experiences” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 48). Context is affected by the opening introductory welcome as well as by the people present, and by the focus of the event. The context is also set by the venue, the tables, the layout, and the materials, such as the paper tablecloths, flowers, and vases. In addition, it is influenced by the post-event activities and how the event is documented. All of these need attention to ensure the creation of a relaxed, café atmosphere. The event host can begin to create a shared context for the ensuing discussions by addressing questions such as, “Why this conversation now?” “What is our purpose?” and “What do we hope to achieve?” Addressing questions such as these should illuminate the social, economic, organizational, and community factors that make this an important conversation.
The opening comments should also clarify the broad parameters of the conversation. They might suggest what it is not likely to be helpful to spend time talking about, as well as giving some pointers for potentially more fruitful ground. So for instance, they might note that although the current IT system causes problems and people might imagine that a complete upgrade would solve all the problems, this is outside the scope of the conversation. However, it is hoped that what can be achieved is a pulling together of all the wisdom people have acquired in their own sections about how to get the best out of the existing system. This might include such things as how to get it to do what is required and the workarounds and hidden features they have discovered. Shared knowledge of these should help to improve the productivity of the group or of the whole organization with this less-than-ideal current system.
The event host, in his or her opening remarks, may also cover the expected possible tangible outcomes and the success criteria. These might include, for example, discovering new strategic direction, considering innovative programme or policy options, or illuminating new business opportunities for a specific product. But equally often, as in our example, World Café is not focused on finding an immediate answer or solution, it is more about discovering the right questions to ask, and creating an opportunity to think and explore the situation together. It’s about building relationships, sharing knowledge, and providing opportunities for contribution.
It is often useful in the welcome speech to talk about how the event is a learning event, just one that is different from the kind of learning events the participants may have attended before (e.g., those involving extensive use of PowerPoint and speeches). World Café, like the other co-creative approaches to learning and change, is a many-to-many conversational design. This can be something of a novelty to people in organizations that more usually use a one-to-many model. The naming of the event can be important. Calling it a World Café may not be the most appropriate or resonant in any particular organization.
2. Accommodating the experts
If the topic under discussion is one in which there are organizational experts, for instance in the example above the IT team, it is important to talk to them beforehand to help them be clear that the conversation is not intended to be a scrutiny or critique of their work. It is also useful to help them think about how they can best feed in their expertise in a way that will be helpful to the group at large. For example, one might discuss how they can minimize their use of jargon, or how they can manage their reaction to the many bizarre mental models people may have of how the IT system (or indeed computers in general) actually work and what they are or aren’t capable of. Helping them understand that this isn’t about them demonstrating what they know (that is taken as read), but that it is about helping to increase the IT literacy of the whole organization, should increase the value of their contribution to the process. This will involve much listening on their part so they can select what bits of specialized knowledge or information to share, and when, in the conversation. A similar pre-conversation is often very useful with leaders, who may also be concerned about how to contribute effectively.
In both these situations I find that helping people think of themselves as part of the organizational community and, for this conversation, privileging their community hat over their many other organizational hats, for instance leader or expert, leads to more effective participation. Of course, they can access the knowledge they hold because of their position in the organization, and indeed it is important that they do, yet they need to speak from the position of a community member. This is often a useful point to emphasize for everyone in the welcoming speech.
3. Creating hospitable space
It is important to create a hospitable space. This is defined by Brown and Isaacs as an environment that nurtures “authentic conversation” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 61). However, creating a nurturing, welcoming, hospitable space in a corporate environment isn’t easy. For example, many offices I visit make valiant efforts to incorporate some elements of “home” into the office. These include providing spaces to make your own coffee, and comfortable sofas for less formal chats. Yet one rarely sees, for example, mirrors anywhere except in toilets. The artwork on the walls is usually corporate and rigidly arranged, not in the higgledy-piggledy style that emerges in most people’s homes. The ideas of a corporate environment and a hospitable environment don’t necessarily mesh together that well. So the deliberate creation of a more welcoming, more hospitable environment for the World Café has to be a very conscious act; and it can feel uncomfortable at first. It is easy to think that a lack of flowers, or tea and biscuits, or tablecloths doesn’t really matter; after all, we are at work and we are here to work. But this is to miss the whole point, which is that by changing the environment we heighten the possibility of changing the interactions and the conversational pattern. From this, something new is more likely to emerge.
In a similar way of thinking, it is easy to “settle” for the larger tables that the organization already has rather than holding out for appropriately sized tables. But big tables are a barrier to small group conversation. Add in the fact that these tables are often arranged in a confined space, and you will find that large tables, where people have to strain to hear the people opposite them over the people behind them, quickly diminish people’s engagement.
4. Exploring questions that matter
Questions are key to the World Café process, as they are to the other co-creative methodologies presented here. Questions don’t just uncover existing knowledge (e.g., “Do you know where the toilets are?”), they also create knowledge by promoting new thought (e.g., “How might things be different if …?”). Thoughts are brought into being by language. Once in spoken or written form, they are accessible to others, and the ideas contained within them become more likely to be actioned as they capture the imagination, and gain the commitment, of others.
The World Café process is ideally based around a series of carefully constructed questions, designed to facilitate collaborative inquiry. Brown, Homer, and Isaacs (2007) suggest that some characteristics of effective World Café questions are that: they are appreciative; they evoke a sense of possibility; they are clear; they are connected to purpose; and they are meaningful to participants in practical ways.
5. Encouraging everyone’s contribution
World Café is based on an understanding of organizations as living human systems. This suggests that the organization and its environment cannot be known or understood by any one person; rather, all the agents or elements of the system (the people) understand something of what is going on. By bringing different voices together into one conversation in a structured way one is building on the knowledge of each individual to create a greater intelligence. When two previously unconnected “bits” of information are brought together into the same space, they can combine to create new knowledge in a manner more similar to multiplication than to simple addition. As we bring our individual knowledge together our collective knowledge can expand exponentially.
The World Café process, with its small group conversations, relaxed and informal environment, and meaningful questions, creates the potential for this. The way the invitation is issued, and other work before the event, helps encourage people to feel that their contribution is important. How the host sets the context and invites contributions helps to maximize this potential.
6. Cross-pollinating and connecting diverse perspectives
The World Café process is designed to connect the emerging ideas as people move around between the tables. At the same time, the host works to keep the conversation connected between discussion rounds by asking for updates from tables of how their thinking is going. In addition, the paper tablecloths allow a highly visible record to emerge of the conversation at each table. Through the “small, intimate conversations [that] link and build on each other as people move between groups” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 4), ideas are cross-pollinated and new insights emerge into questions or issues that really matter in their life, work, or community. The participants access “dynamic networks of conversation and knowledge-sharing around an organization’s real work and critical questions” (p. 4). Through these conversational processes the organization begins to see and experience itself as a living system and the collective wisdom of the group becomes more accessible.
7. Listening together for patterns, insights, and deeper questions
Conversation by its nature consists of talking and listening. In World Café events, participants are asked to listen on a deep level for the insights and knowledge that emerge in the conversation. They can be encouraged to ask the unasked questions that hover close to consciousness and that would, if asked, move the conversation on to a deeper level of understanding. Brown, Homer, and Isaacs talk about how, as people make new connections, “sparks of insight” begin to emerge that no one would have had on their own (2007, p. 182).
8. Collecting and sharing collective discoveries
Somehow the process must make collective knowledge and insight visible and actionable. This is achieved through the recording process. It is also achieved by the event host, who helps to create links and to articulate discoveries. The host can also be active in encouraging much scribbling on tablecloths. A summary of critical success factors is outlined in Box 7.2.
Key Skills
1. Including diversity well
For a World Café to work well it needs to be able to access a diversity of thought and experience. However, high levels of diversity can cause conflict if people fail to understand the perspective, context, and constraints of the situation of others whose experience, professional emphasis, or personal ambitions differ from their own. World Café creates an emphasis on exploring and understanding over deciding and acting. Without the pressure to reach decisions, people have more time and ability to seek to understand different points of view. The event host needs to emphasize this, encouraging people to ask questions of each other in their quest to better understand and honour all contributions. Everyone sees something different, and each of these perspectives has value. As we have seen, World Café encourages many different perspectives to come together to generate enough information to create good understanding of situations and, if appropriate, good decisions.
2. Devising good questions
The questions are key to the process. They need to be relevant, engaging, and capable of creating new insights or knowledge.
3. Effective facilitation
While the process is based on principles of self-organization and the attraction of critical questions, it still needs facilitating. However, the focus of the facilitator is less on guiding the conversation and more on guiding people through the process. The way the process encourages “intimate exchange, disciplined inquiry, cross pollination of ideas, and possibility thinking tends to create psychological safety” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 7), and to lessen inappropriate grandstanding or over-attachment by people to their own ideas.
4. Encouraging the strength of humility in leaders
World Café asks leaders to exercise the strength of humility, to recognize that they can’t do it all on their own, and to be humble enough to ask for the help and assistance of all in the organization. Café conversations are “an act of respect for our people and their capacity to contribute” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 33).
Origins of the Methodology
This process was originally devised by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, who very kindly brought all their experience together into the definitive book on the topic in 2005. Experienced community workers, they noticed that as people shared time and space together focused on particular challenges their conversations often took a particular turn. Initially there would be an expression of the impossible dreams of difference (i.e., “if-only” conversations). Sometimes these progressed into dreams of possibility (i.e., “what-if” conversations). These could be, “What would happen if …” or maybe, “What would be the worst that could happen if …” or perhaps, “If that were possible, how would things be different?” One can see immediately the similarity with the Appreciative Inquiry methodology and the importance of ideas of possibility and dreaming. Often, as ideas of possibility took hold, the conversation would advance to a more determined, hopeful “why-not” state, as in “Why not give it a go?” “Why not at least ask?” or “Why not involve them in our conversation?” In this way, impossibility changes to possibilities, the stuck situation changes to the fluid situation, and the hopeless outlook changes to the hopeful outlook. All of these changes create and support the energy for action to make things different.
They noticed that a lot of these truly transformational and energizing conversations happened outside the formal conference or community event sessions they ran, and they began to wonder how they could increase the likelihood of these valuable conversations. In seeking to do so, they identified two key questions that their process needed to address, namely, “How can we enhance our capacity to talk and think more deeply together about the critical issues facing our communities, our organizations, our nations, our planet?” and “How can we access the mutual intelligence and wisdom we need to create innovative paths forward?” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 3).
In their book, Brown and Isaacs tell the tale of how they first stumbled into the methodology that is at the core of the World Café process. While they tell it as a response to the constraints of a particular rainy day, it is also, of course, an expression of their conversation wisdom gleaned over many years. In particular, one can see their sensitivity as facilitators to what is actually happening in front of their eyes rather than what they had in mind before the day began. To cut a longer story short, on the second day of a process people arrived into a very welcoming room with small tables set out and, “while waiting for the others,” just began to have conversations at the table related to the topic of the event. It seemed unhelpful to interrupt these energized and on-topic conversations. When someone expressed an interest in knowing what was being discussed at other tables, the idea of moving between tables was born. When more time had passed and more curiosity about what was happening at the other tables emerged, the idea of rounds was born. And the improvised paper tablecloths were just conveniently there as part of the early morning effort to create an impromptu working space when the anticipated outside space was unusable. When people wanted to record what they were discussing they just used what was to hand, and so the paper tablecloths recording process was born. After some time had passed, they collected their sheets of recordings together, arranged them around another, as yet blank, piece of paper and walked around to see what they had created. The story is a lovely example of making it up as we go along. It is a systemically situated response to changing and emerging conditions with a clear focus on the key purpose of the event.
What they noticed was that this emerging café process somehow “enabled the group to access a form of collaborative intelligence that grew more potent as both ideas and people travelled from table to table, making new connections and cross-pollinating their diverse insights” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 15). This idea of the value of informal, less directed, more discursive conversation has precursors such as the French salon movement that gave birth to the French Revolution. And of course many have noticed the “water cooler” phenomenon, where the most important conversations happen in the less clearly work-orientated space.
What emerged from this early discovery is a process that “consistently connects intellect and emotion to a business frame of reference” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 32). That is, as a process World Café calls on both our rational data-analysis or problem-solving skills and our psychological group processes. The rational data processes allow us to become more knowledgeable about the issues and options, while the psychological processes help generate innovative thinking, motivation, energy, and coordination. It is the ability of the World Café process to access both these important facets of human life that Brown and Isaacs note as “a key strategic business advantage” (Brown, Isaacs, & The World Café Community, 2005, p. 32).
Conclusion
World Café is a wonderful group conversation process. It can easily be incorporated as part of a larger group process, such as an Appreciative Inquiry event, as well as being an event in its own right.