The World Cafe

Co-Evolving our Futures

by Juanita Brown | Sep 9, 2015 | 20th Anniversary Messages

Since the World Cafe was born in our living room 20 years ago, I have been completely amazed and humbled by its spread across the globe. It is my deepest hope that both the Spirit and the practice of the World Cafe will continue to be of service to life-affirming futures in business, government, and not-for-profit organizations as well as to communities big and small in the decades ahead.

Now that I’ve entered my 70’s and a new stage of my own life, I’m especially excited to see the growing cadre of next generation hosts who are committed to nurturing “conversations that matter” as a co-evolutionary force for the common good. I also look forward to continuing my active participation with the Wiser Together Collaboratory which is strengthening the movement toward partnering across generations around critical societal and organizational issues as we co-evolve futures together that are worthy of our best efforts.

The personal relationships David and I have enjoyed over these years last 20 years with the World Cafe have enriched our lives immeasurably. We are grateful to all of you in the World Cafe community who have brought so much love into our midst, and to the deep friendships among World Cafe hosts and others in kindred communities that have been at the heart of this work always. read more…

The World Café – Percolating Possibilities

by Sunny Cook | Aug 15, 2015 | Creativity

Eleanor Roosevelt observed: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” In my experience, the most interesting people are interested in ideas.

The World Café is full of such people.

Cafés have always been associated with artists, poets, writers, and other creatives. Before mass media, cafés were the idea incubators and Internet of their time, connecting creatives with each other and cross-pollinating and growing their ideas across all the arts, from music to drama.

In the cafés of early twentieth-century Paris, the birth of the Impressionist movement was monumental and revolutionary.

Welcome!

by Amy Lenzo | Jul 20, 2015 | Community, Conversation

The World Café is a global community of people dedicated to awakening and engaging collective intelligence through conversations about questions that matter… this is our collective blog. Your active involvement in this conversation is warmly invited. Make comments on what you like or have questions about, send us posts, links, etc. or better yet – become an active blogger and post them yourself! Contact us to set you up with an account.

Sense-Making and Harvesting World Cafe

by Amy Lenzo | Apr 14, 2015 | Harvesting

Canadian mate Chris Corrigan has been doing some absolutely brilliant thinking about harvesting, and publishing much of it on his blog, “Parking Lot“.

His latest “Sense-making in a World Cafe” outlines a proposal for a World Cafe designed to harvest complexity. In it, Chris details a complex but very effective process that offers valuable clues for how to frame and manifest participant-driven evaluations/harvests.

A quick search for “harvesting” on Chris’ blog will yield rich results for all World Café hosts and other participatory practitioners. Start with his seminal piece on Harvesting as a verb and you’ll never look back!

Alex Bretas

by Amy Lenzo | Sep 5, 2014 | Community, South America, World Cafe Signature Learning Programs

I was having a Skype conversation the other day with David Isaacs, co-founder of the World Cafe, and a young World Café host named Alex Bretas Vasconcelos from Sao Pablo, Brazil.

Alex had called us together to talk about an educational initiative he's just finished crowd-sourcing funds for called "Education Outside the Box" (check out his video – it has English subtitles – and scroll down to hear a video message of support from Juanita Brown, co-founder of the World Café).

During our conversation, Alex started talking about his experience as a participant in one of the first Hosting World Café: The Fundamentals courses we hosted at Fielding. It was exciting to me to hear how strong its impact had been on him. Here's an excerpt from what he said:

After giving permission for me to pull out this piece of our conversation, he asked me if I wanted him to write something about his experience, so of course I said yes. Here's what he wrote:

It was a wonderful time taking the World Cafe Signature Learning Program, since it was both a challenge and an opportunity to me to get in touch with people from all around the world and practice my English. Beyond that, I was deeply curious to take a better look at the World Cafe, and at that time I was beginning my personal journey of discovery when it comes to host conversations that matter.

It was also an opportunity for me to read Juanita Brown's dissertation, a masterpiece which is always coming back at me in diverse forms. Now, I have a deeper knowledge about hosting practices both in a theoretical-reflexive level and in a experiential level, and the Signature Learning Program was co-responsible for that.

Peer-Learning

by Amy Lenzo | Aug 28, 2014 | World Cafe Signature Learning Programs

The World Cafe Hosting: The Fundamentals course we host in collaboration with the Institute of Social Innovation at Fielding Graduate University is offered in a peer-learning format.

“…What the heck does that mean?!” you may ask.

Well … let’s start with what peer learning ISN’T, at least in this case.
Peer learning isn’t being left to your own devices without guidance or attention. Your course host will be paying close attention to your learning process, and there to respond to your questions and offer help at crucial times.

Peer learning isn’t about an unstructured environment. This course has been carefully designed as an immersion into the World Cafe method, and the principles that give the method its form. Deepening your understanding of these principles will give you the solid ground you need to design, host, and harvest World Café events in any sector, and help you evolve your hosting practice, no matter what your current level of experience is.

Peer learning doesn’t use the standard one-to-many model of education, although you will have access to all the written and multi-media resources you need, as well as engagement with some of the most experienced and innovative World Cafe hosts in the world.

There will be weekly assignments and expectations, but within that structure you are the one that determines the pace, and ultimately the depth, of your learning.

But peer learning isn’t just student-led learning; it’s an interactive, participatory process that relies on real engagement. You have a lot of responsibility in this course – for your own learning, yes, but even more importantly, for the level of your engagement with others. In this course, your peers are your most powerful allies; the depth of your engagement with them will determine the depth of both their learning and yours.

Make no mistake – this course will ask a lot of you. It’s not something you can skate through and watch a video later to catch up on. It is a robust, professional-level learning experience at a premier graduate learning university. You will come out of it with academic and professional credit, and a foundation for your World Café hosting practice that you simply could not get otherwise, even after years of practice on your own. Why? Well one reason is because you have a circle of quality peers to learn with and from.

There are research studies and significant statistics to back this up, but on one level peer learning is just common sense. If you think about, it’s the way we as human beings have always learned – from and with each other. And it’s one of the World Café’s basic premises that together we know more than any one of us could possibly know alone.

The fact that we all learn and grow through the networks of meaningful conversation that make up our lives and work is the foundation of Conversational Leadership. And it’s key to many of the principles that inform not only World Cafe hosting practice, but all participatory engagement. In other words, it’s a great muscle to build and keep well-exercised.

Peer-learning is not just a one-way street, either. Your host Amy Lenzo learns a LOT from participants every time she offers this course – about the course and what will make it better, but also about her own hosting practice and what makes her a better, more effective World Café host.

So come join the party – we look forward to learning with you!