Product Description

"The World Cafe" is an easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue and creating innovative possibilities for action particularly in large groups. Anyone interested in creating "conversations that matter" can engage the World Cafe approach, with its' seven simple design principles, to improve people's collective capacity to share knowledge and shape the future together. Using the World Cafe process and principles empowers leaders and other professionals to intentionally create dynamic networks of conversation around an organization or community's real work and critical questions, improving both personal relationships and collective performance.Part of "Berrett-Koehler's" series of books on the most popular, participative, engaging methods of changing communities and organizations, this title introduces readers to, the World Cafe, a simple, yet powerful process for catalyzing and leading catalytic conversations that has been used by tens of thousands of people around the world to tackle real life issues and questions. It includes real-world stories - from widely varied geographical, cultural, business, government, non-profit, community and educational settings, including Hewlett-Packard, Saudi Aramco, the nation of Singapore, the University of Texas and many others - show how the Cafe process produces business and social value.It breaks new ground in offering an almost infinitely scalable design for creating constructive dialogue both in very large groups and with people who have not had prior dialogue training. It clearly articulates seven key design principles that, when used in combination, create the conditions for breakthrough thinking. It includes a foreword by Margaret J.Wheatley, author of the bestselling "Leadership and the New Science", "A Simpler Way", and "Turning to One Another"; and an afterword by Peter Senge, author of "The Fifth Discipline".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29681 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Paul Borawski, Executive Director and Chief Strategic Officer, American Society for Quality
This book provides all of us the opportunity to embrace the future and let go of the past.

Lic. Esteban Moctezuma Barragan, Mexico’s former Minister of Social Development
The World Café serves as an inspiration to help make greater mutual understanding across social and cultural differences possible.

Fritjof Capra, Author, The Tao of Physics; The Web of Life; and The Hidden Connections
Understanding the processes that constitute the World Café’s conversation network is essential for understanding life and leadership in human organizations.

Customer Reviews

An engaging guide to optimising your group's intelligence
Well, we've long intuited that there is greater intelligence in groups than in individuals and in recent times research has confirmed this to be so.

And this book shows that it requires but a few simple processes to surface this. Starting with planning for diversity and inclusion, and providing a safe environment where everyone has a voice. Add a relevant contexts, some juicy questions and its hard to stop the flow of fresh thinking. Ring a bell? Its not for nothing that café's of the past have fomented cultural revolutions.

The bare bones of this process is available via their website at http://www.theworldcafe.com/. However, I found the book immediately inviting and a joy to own. Time and again I read something and find myself staring into space as new pieces of the jigsaw fall together, like this quote from Fran Peavey in their section on "the art and architecture of powerful questions" p91. "Questions can be like a lever you use to pry open the stuck lid on a paint can.... If we have just a short lever, we can only just crack open the lid on the can. But if we have a longer lever, or a more dynamic question we can open that can up much wider and really stir things up". And the book gives enough examples of long levered questions to fire you up to start generating plenty of your own.

So once everyone is sitting around friendly little café tables in groups of four, using coloured pens for drawing and mindmapping on paper tablecloths, well it just takes those "long levered" questions to open the floodgates of communication. Then at the signal, everyone moves to another table, with one person staying to welcome and host their table. Everyone contributes a report on the conversation they've been having and the cross pollination begins. And then together, the group draws out themes and extends on each other's insights. And by the time everyone moves a third time, either to a new table or back to their original table, common themes have started to emerge. These are drawn together into a group "tablecloth" and wholeness emerges.

For me, this book speaks to my heart and mind using stories, drawings, explanations and questions to describe and illustrate how to host conversations that are "coherent without control". The process is being used by governments and companies around the world, and I will do my best to have my organisation join them as soon as possible.

Good Talk
Authors David Isaacs and Juanita Brown came up with the idea for the World Café when they tried to rescue a meeting in their home that was threatening to turn into a disaster. Leaders from the Skandia Corporation were supposed to have a discussion on their northern California home’s beautiful patio. Unfortunately, it was pouring. Brown and Isaacs had to squeeze 24 Swedes into their living room. They hastily covered small TV tables with sheets of newsprint anchored with small flower vases. Soon, the place looked like a coffee shop. The delighted guests began conversing immediately, eventually moving among the small groups to hear what others had to say. Thus, the World Café movement was born. Isaacs and Brown include many stories about ways that organizations have used World Café conversations. They provide lists, drawings and discussion questions. Brown’s commentary on process and principles weaves all this together. She makes grand claims for this approach, believing that conversation is the wave of the future and the best way for people to learn and change. Jargon alert: the authors truly adore New Age gobbledygook. One example suffices: "Optimum learning and development occur in systems in which there is a rich web of interactions, along with an environment of novelty where new opportunities and spaces of possibility can be explored." Despite such warm-hearted mush, we recommend this book to managers who are willing to experiment with an innovative meeting format that lets them synthesize experts’ ideas with the experiences of their own people.