The World Café History

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.”

Graphic Map of World Café History
At the Global Stewardship Dialogues in August, 2006, graphic recorder Susan Kelly created this graphic map of key historical events in World Café history.

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.