The World Cafe

The World Café as a conversational process based on a set of integrated design principles that reveal a deeper living network pattern through which we co-evolve our collective future.

As a conversational process, the World Café is an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. These conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people’s capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims. The integrated design principles have been distilled over the years as a guide to intentionally harnessing the power of conversation for business and social value. When used in combination, they provide useful guidance for anyone seeking creative ways to foster authentic dialogue in which the goal is thinking together and creating actionable knowledge.

As a living network pattern, the World Café refers to a living network of conversations that is continually co-evolving as we explore questions that matter with our family, friends, colleagues, and community. The metaphor of the "World as Café" helps us notice these invisible webs of dialogue and personal relationships that enable us to learn, create shared purpose, and shape life-affirming futures together.

In this sense, the World Café is also a growing global community of people, groups, organizations, and networks using World Café principles and processes to evoke collective intelligence and link it to effective action in pursuit of common aims.

 

Emergence of the World Café
The World Café was born in 1995 during a two-day dialogue among a global, interdisciplinary group known as the Intellectual Capital Pioneers. Impressed by the depth, scope, and innovative quality of their collaboration, they asked, “What happened here that supported such great conversation and breakthrough thinking?” Reflection on the largely improvised process, together with subsequent research and experimentation, resulted in the distillation of seven World Café design principles and a sketch of “Café etiquette.”

Development of the World Café
In the years since its inception, tremendously exciting developments have taken place:

·         The World Café has been used by hundreds of groups, including large multinational corporations, small non-profits, government offices, community-based organizations, and educational institutions.

·         Café hosts and conveners are learning that the core design principles of the World Café can be applied in many different ways – and that the process resonates with traditional practices of dialogue and deliberation in many different cultures.

·         An international community of learning and practice is beginning to form, comprised of people around the world committed to awakening and engaging collective intelligence through conversations about questions that matter. Participants live and work in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. They include business leaders, government officials, nonprofit managers, social entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens who are stepping forward to play key roles in catalyzing positive change in their communities. Through their efforts, innovative approaches to health care, education, socially responsible business, environmental protection, social welfare, conflict resolution, sustainable development, and many other critical issues are being discovered and implemented.

·         In World Cafés across the globe, youth and elders together are creating the container for multi-generational dialogues that heal the fragmentation of modern life by nurturing collective wisdom and collaborative action.

·         Key practitioners are connecting to others who feel an affinity for the deeper patterns underlying the World Café, including those who promote dialogue as a core practice to create value in our lives and work, those committed to emerging forms of process-based activism, and those involved in critical issues requiring collective intelligence across traditional boundaries for discovering innovative paths forward.

The story of the World Café and its unfolding during the first decade of its life are told in The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter, co-authored by Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, and the World Café Community, and published by Berrett-Koehler in 2005.

The World Café at a Threshold
After a decade of development, the World Café is at a threshold. Several factors make this a pivotal moment in the evolution of this global movement.

·         The creation of the World Café website and the publication of the book has stimulated widespread experimentation with the World Café process and principles, together with a rapid growth in the global community network. The recent translation of the book into Spanish and Turkish, and upcoming publication of translations into Chinese, Portuguese, and German are certain to accelerate this growth dramatically.

·         Key individuals in numerous countries and a wide range of fields are beginning to move into new roles as stewards of the World Café. As this happens, dynamic regional networks of World Café hosts, conveners, and champions are developing in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

·         Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, co-founders of the World Café, are “stepping to the rim” of the global community and encouraging new leaders to come forward as they transition to the next stage of their lives and their collaboration with the World Café.

·         At the World Café Stewardship Dialogue in August 2007, more than 80 World Café pioneers, hosts, and friends from 16 countries met to deepen relationships, to explore the most exciting opportunities emerging for the World Café (including connections to kindred efforts around the world), to determine what is needed for the World Café network to thrive in the years ahead, and to foster a shared sense of responsibility for next steps.

·         The World Café Community Foundation, created in 2001 and granted 501c3 status in 2003, is now available as a legal entity through which monetary and in-kind contributions to support the World Café can be received, honored, and invested in ways that increase the capacity of the World Café network as a whole to effect positive change.

The World Café: Shaping Our Futures
Through Conversations That Matter
by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs with the World Café Community; Forward by Meg Wheatley, Afterword by Peter Senge

In the first comprehensive book on the World Café, co-founders Juanita Brown and David Isaacs introduce readers to this simple yet powerful conversational process for thinking together, evoking collective intelligence, and creating actionable results. World Café principles and processes have been used successfully over the past decade with organizations and communities on six continents.

"This book is required reading for anyone who cares about a better tomorrow. The World Café offers tools that can convert analysis into profound change and provides a structure for connecting people that is pure genius."

~ Peter Block, author of Stewardship and The Answer to How Is Yes

Beautifully illustrated with stories contributed by World Café practitioners in settings as diverse as Hewlett-Packard, American Society for Quality, the nation of Singapore, University of Texas, and many others, this is the most definitive compendium of Café know-how available.