Reading List

These are books by friends, colleagues and other leading authors that have informed and contributed to World Café thought leadership:

Appreciative Inquiry, by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney
Written by the founders of AI, this short, practical guide offers an approach to organizational change based on the possibility of a more positive future.

The Art of Convening, by Craig & Patricia Neal, with Cindy Wold
Details a powerful set of principles and practices for making any gathering productive, meaningful, and transformative.

The Art of Possibility, by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander
Presenting twelve breakthrough practices for bringing creativity into all human endeavors.

Artful Leadership, by Michael Jones
Aims to empower leadership development and innovation by connecting the world of the performing arts and the business world.

Authentic Conversations, by Jamie Showkier and Maren Showkier
Authentic Conversations takes a radical new look at the potentially transformational role of workplace conversations.

The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam
Explains how to use visual-thinking tools to solve business problems and convey ideas with little more than a scrap of paper.

Calling the Circle, by Christina Baldwin
Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity.

The Change Handbook, Eds Peggy Holman, Steven Cady, and Tom Devane
This definitive resource invites people and systems to gather around issues that they care about, unleashing the energy and wisdom to move their dreams into action.

Community: The Structure of Belonging, by Peter Block
Offers a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together, by William Isaacs
Provides practical guidelines for one of the essential elements of true partnership–learning how to talk together in honest and effective ways.

Digital Habitats, by Nancy White, Etienne Wenger and John Smith
This book develops a new social literacy and language to describe the practice of stewarding technology for communities.

Engaging Emergence, by Peggy Holman
Shows how to spot the emergence of a new level of order from the seemingly chaotic change and offers practices and principles that will help you align yourself and your organization with the new order.

The Facilitative Way, by Priscilla Wilson
The Facilitative Way includes five approaches to working together more effectively.

The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge
Senge explains why the “learning organization” matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principles and offers some basic tools for practicing it.

Finding Our Way, Meg Wheatley
A comprehensive summing up of the thought of one of the most original and creative organizational thinkers of our time.

Gracious Space, by Patricia Hughes
Gracious Space is a simple yet powerful approach to working better together. Gracious Space can move organizations and communities forward, together, with deeper understanding and problem solving.

Informal Learning, by Jay Cross
This book offers advice on how to support, nurture, and leverage informal learning and helps trainers to go beyond their typical classes and programs.

The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management, by Edna Pasher and Tuvya Ronen
A straightforward guide to leveraging your company’s intellectual capital by creating a knowledge management culture.

Linked, by Albert-László Barabási
The nation’s foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously thought.

Making Questions Work, by Dorothy Strachan
This book offers over 1700 rich questions that you can borrow or adapt to improve your inquiry skills, and provides clear frameworks that point to when, where, and why particular questions are most useful.

Mapping Inner Space, by Nancy Margulies
This introduction to visual note taking illustrates how relationships among various concepts are highlighted and more information can be recorded visually on a page.

Nature and the Human Soul, by Bill Plotkin
Plotkin presents a model for a human life span rooted in the patterns and rhythms of wild nature, a template for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation.

On Dialogue, by David Bohm
This edition serves both as a practical working manual for those interested in engaging in Bohm’s conception of “dialogue” and a deeper exploration of Bohm’s dialogical world view.

Power and Love, by Adam Kahane
A new approach, proven in the field, for making progress on our most important and difficult collective challenges.

The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly, by Alan Briskin, Sheryl Ericson, John Ott, and Tom Callanan
An inspired and practical approach to developing the innate power of groups to make wise, compassionate, and creative decisions.

Presence, by Betty Sue Flowers, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski. and Peter Senge
This year-long series of conversations reveals the human capacity to “presence”—to pre-sense, to become present to an emerging future.

The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom
A pair of Stanford M.B.A.s offer a breezy and entertaining look at how decentralization is changing many organizations.

Theory U, by Otto Scharmer
By moving through the “U” process we learn to connect to our essential Self in the realm of “presencing”.

The Thin Book of Naming Elephants, by Sue Annis Hammond & Andrea Mayfield
This book shows how great companies create an environment that encourages and listens to input from all levels of the organization.

Visual Meetings, by David Sibbet (see also Visual Teams and Visual Leaders)
Visual Meetings explains how anyone can implement powerful visual tools, and how these tools are being used to facilitate both face-to-face and virtual group work.

Walk Out Walk On, by Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze
Provides an intimate experience of how seven healthy and resilient communities took on intractable problems by working together in new and different ways.