The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter

There is nothing more important to the future of the world than encouraging people to engage in meaningful conversations with one another. The World Cafe shares the wisdom of a very effective large group process that facilitates the exchange of stories, experiences and ideas. The case studies in the book are intermixed with practical guidelines for running world cafes. This format makes the book easy to use since it does not have to be read from cover to cover but which stimulates and inspires readers to put the lessons learned from running World Cafes into practice. As an Organizational Development Consultant and practioners of narrative this book is a wonderful contribution to the field.

This remarkable book has a foreword from Margaret Wheatley, genius guru and author of Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World who inspired Robert Buckman's tremendous work on Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and it has a review from Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All and founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute. As I finished this book and dealt with my teen-ager who at 16 is quite certain that even the great schools of Fairfax County are largely boring and dysfunctional, still teaching by rote and testing memory rather than the ability to discover, it occurred to me that this book is in fact a handbook for both educating the world, and for reforming education. Instead of the current didactic form of instruction (one-way lectures) we should be teaching, at every level, interactive discovery. It's not what you can remember from the past, but what what you can discover in tandem with others, and apply constructively! EDIT of 12 Dec 07: Lots has happened since I reviewed this book, and it was a delight to discover that this long buried insight actually found itself manifested in the new non-profit, the Earth Intelligence Network, whose 24 co-founders recognize that we need an EarthGame where we all play ourselves, and that to save the planet, we must educate the five billion poor "one cell call (or conversation) at a time," something we can do by giving out free cell phones and recruiting 100 million volunteers with Internet access who among them cover the 183 languages we do not speak--that will create infinite wealth (see books at bottom of this review). As someone who has been trained to be dysfunctional, overly reliant on "command and control" and predictability, I can certainly see how this book would cause discomfort and inspire disbelief among the mandarins of industry and government, but I can also see this book sensibly defines the only path likely to lead to collective intelligence and collective consensus solutions. Context, hospitable spaces, questions that matter, encouraging everyone's contribution, cross-pollination of diverse perspectives, listening for patterns, cultivating collective intelligence and insight through dialog instead of debate--this book has it all. My last annotation in the book is "Wiki!" As smart people like Jock Gill and Howard Rheingold start to think about how to create a global Wiki that enables a World Cafe with a space for every topic, every challenge, every zip code, every neighborhood, I have a strong feeling that "bottom up people power" may at last be in the offing. Alvin and Heidi Toffler are publishing a new book in April called Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives Knowing their past work, I suspect it will be an epic statement that carries the work of Tom Stewart The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization

Juanita Brown's THE WORLD CAFE is a profoundly insightful and richly practical book, designed for evolutionary times. For me, it is already a classic. One expects it to be a book about one conversational practice, the World Cafe, written by its co-founder. It is. And it isn't. What it is -- most of all -- is an exploration of the power of CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER -- ALL conversations that matter. It is also an exploration of the conditions under which QUESTIONS THAT MATTER can be deeply and productively explored. The essence of true dialogue is the exploration of questions that are important to us, that shape how we think and what we do next. These questions are central; they are the channel through which our life-passion flows when we are evolving, deepening, and learning. When we do that together -- in rich conversation -- our passions can flow and evolve together, usually going deeper and wider than we tend to go alone. In THE WORLD CAFÉ, this creative dance of conversations and questions is chronicled by more than 100 practitioners, each more articulate than the last, each leading us to another level of understanding about one more important dimension of the transformational magic of dialogue. Their voices are warm, engaged in the shared exploration, not lecturing. Juanita includes all these folks quite intentionally and comfortably. She is being more than "author". She is being "host" -- as in a café conversation in her living room -- welcoming all voices, including her own, into a place of common learning and deepening. I know -- because I have experienced it -- that she has a habit of interviewing practitioners and thinkers who visit her, one by one, sitting on her couch, and collecting their recorded words. And then there is her library of beloved books and articles. In creating this book, THE WORLD CAFÉ, she has dived with friends down to these seabeds of accumulated wisdom, coming up with treasures, food, and exotic life from the depths, eager to share them with the rest of us. They read like poetry: Questions function as open-handed invitations to creativity, calling forth that which doesn't yet exist. What do we NOT know, that if we DID know, could transform this situation for the better? Human systems grow towards what they persistently ask questions about. We contribute because we are part of something larger than our own lives and efforts, but the form of our contribution is based on our uniqueness and our individuality. One of the hard questions is asking ourselves, 'Is this not working, or is it just uncomfortable?' Sometimes the uncomfortable is necessary to break through to new thinking. Silence is the pulley, similar to the rope in a well, that enables members to draw a deeper wisdom up from the common well of mutual exploration and experience. A leader

This book can help people break out of the linear, encapsulated world of every-day life, in which most are ensnared and help organizations and networks achieve collective intelligence and formulate future-focused plans. The book provides a means for engaging with many others in exploring important issues at a variety of levels: group, corporate, community, national, or international. It presents the World Cafe Process (Cafe or WCP), which generally consist of three rounds of progressive conversation, each lasting about 20 or 30 minutes, followed by a dialog among the whole group. This is the story of the discovery and evolution of the WCP, enabling people to foster constructive dialogue, access collective intelligence, and create innovate possibilities for action. The process has seven core design principles: 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; and harvest and share collective discoveries. Each chapter begins with a quotation, an illustration, and a question; these give you an overview of the book's themes. Speaking as a consultant (FutureOrganization.com) I believe that business leaders will find the Cafe a potentially powerful process to increase organizational effectiveness and achieve change. One president of a pharmaceutical company, Yvon Bastien, reports how he successfully used the process to develop the company's long-range business plan. But this story is only one a vast array of successful experiences reported by leaders in all types of organizations. Chapter 10 provides a guide to successfully hosting a Cafe; it is specific, to-the-point, and very helpful. Closing chapters provide stories of how leaders are using the Cafe, and its societal implications. For further information, the book concludes with a section on resources and connections. The Cafe concept is very appealling and, from reports, works. It opens the door to learning, creativity and action through a powerful process that deserves consideration by all leaders. As a leader and faciliator of change, this is a book you will want to read. At the very least, Cafe, as a dynamic process, is extremely alluring.

I feel very privileged to consider Juanita Brown and her partner David Isaacs as good friends and trusted colleagues. We worked with David Isaacs last year to apply the World Café to the first World Congress on the Future of Work in San Francisco. It was so successful that we'll be using it again in Philadelphia this spring. For those of you who haven't yet experienced a World Café, we can only offer our condolences. It's unlike any other "tool" we've ever seen or used for enabling a group of individuals to become what Juanita likes to call a "collective wisdom." The World Café enables all participants at an event to meet, interact with, and learn from all the other participants. It is as different from a typical conference (with PowerPoint presentations and jumbotron television screens) as an intimate dinner with a lover is from a gathering of the faithful in St. Peter's Square in Rome. This remarkable book is a rich and compelling conversation in itself about an incredibly important "new" process for generating new ideas, insights, relationships, and deep personal conversations. We are true believers, and even with our past experience with the World Café we found the compilation of personal stories, guidelines, and case examples wonderfully inspirational. This is truly a remarkable book. I endorse it without reservation. No, let me go further: whether you know it or not, you need to buy this book. Now, let me take just a few moments to give you a flavor of what this is all about. David Isaacs is fond of saying that conversation is for people what water is for fish: we are surrounded by it, but we hardly recognize how critical it is for life and meaning. The World Café is an approach to group interaction that helps us remember what conversation really is: "the medium though which all of us together understand and create the realities we live in" (David Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, quoted in the Introduction). When you participate in a World Café you find yourself seated at a small round table with three other people, who you may or may not know. The table is covered with a large piece of butcher paper, and there is a small vase of fresh flowers in the center. You have access to several crayons or markers, and you are engaging in conversation about something that really matters - typically one or two "Big Questions." You work together for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, and then your Host/Hostess asks three of you to get up and move to three different tables to continue the conversation, while one remains behind to report to three new participants on the meanings behind the scribblings you've left behind on that butcher paper. It all sounds so simple - yet the total experience is incredibly profound. You discover very quickly that the whole truly is greater than the sum of the parts. There really is a collective intelligence that is far more powerful than any of our individual insights. To get back to the book fo