. Every week since the show's inception, Dye has brought out the best in such celebrated musicians as Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Wilco, and Beck, as well as introducing many listeners to newcomers like Damien Rice, My Morning Jacket, and Coldplay, among thousands of others.
We set up small tables in our living room and covered them with paper tablecloths. There's a problem loading this menu right now. What difference would it make to your own action choices if you viewed your workplace as a dynamic, living network of conversations and knowledge creation rather than as a traditional hierarchy (see “What We View Determines What We Do”)? 2. Hosts stay at each table to welcome guests while the other members travel to new tables to share as well as gather insights. Reaching out in ever-widening circles, members of small groups spread their insights to larger constituencies, carrying the seed ideas for new conversations, creative possibilities, and collective action (see “Conversation as a Path to Large-Scale Change”). Mexican government and corporate leaders applied The World Café to scenario planning. They have hosted Café conversations and strategic dialogues internationally in a wide variety of business and community settings. What is the most strategic use of information technology. But the process of co-creating the future through conversation is so natural we usually overlook it. The outcome was impressive with the accident rate across the company decreasing by more than 33%. It takes shared space to create shared understanding.” By providing paper and markers, we encourage the use of “shared space” where people can build on each other’s ideas, weave together their thoughts, and engage in deeper collective listening.
question relevant to your context and purpose. A Fortune 100 company is using “Creative Cafés” to explore corporate responsibility with stakeholders.
Using the Internet and other information technologies, local conversation circles feed insights back into the network, catalyzing these worldwide leadership dialogues into a growing force for societal innovation.
Consider the sewing circles and “committees of correspondence” that helped birth the American Republic; the conversations in cafés and salons that spawned the French Revolution; and the Scandinavian “study circles” that stimulated an economic and social renaissance in Northern Europe. Some degree of formality may be retained to make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak.
We are also finding that it is a provocative metaphor that can help us see organizational and societal change in a new light. Create comfortable seating. The director of global operations for a company with more than 50,000 employees suddenly jumped up from his seat and exclaimed, “Do you know what I’ve gone and done? Provide food, beverages, music, art, natural light, and greenery. Although pre-defined questions have been agreed upon at the beginning, outcomes or solutions are not decided in advance. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App.
The emphasis is on shared listening — listening for the wisdom or insight that no individual member of the group might have access to by themselves. Café hosts around the world emphasize the power and importance of creating a welcoming environment to enliven collaborative conversation. Weave and connect emerging themes and insights.
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What is the unique contribution of leadership?
In one Café session, senior leaders from major corporations were mapping the implications of taking this view. Participants can quite literally see that they are creating something new together.” Other possibilities for making collective knowledge visible include having a “gallery walk,” with participants taking a tour of the tablecloths created by the different groups; publishing a Café newspaper on the spot; and creating theater presentations that reflect group discoveries.
time to recover!” His heartfelt comments stimulated a lively conversation about the role of leaders in developing organizational strategies that honor these less visible but critical conversational and learning processes. From Fragmentation to Integration: Building Learning Communities, The Process of Dialogue: Creating Effective Communication. Humberto Maturana, a pioneering evolutionary biologist, has helped us see that human beings think together and coordinate action in and through language. It’s an efficient way to facilitate open discussions to access the “collective wisdom” in the room. We also brought in palm trees and other greenery. Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state oil company began using World Café events in its engineering and operations services division in 2003 and credited the approach to giving their staff a better understanding of how the corporate strategy linked to their roles. Our research reveals that what we have come to call “The World Café” has a unique contribution to make when the goal is the focused use of dialogic inquiry to foster collective insight around real-life challenges and key strategic questions at increasing levels of scale. Many Café events include an interactive graphics specialist, who creates large visual maps that synthesize key insights and ideas. In New Zealand, Maori leaders combined The World Café with indigenous meeting formats during regional treaty negotiations. Consider all the learning that occurs as people move from place to place inside and outside an organization, carrying insights and ideas from one conversation to another. One approach for doing this is the “World Café”. You can actually see the knowledge growing.” Participants often develop an increased sense of responsibility for making use of the practical insights they gain and for staying connected as they expand the conversation to larger constituencies. Listen Together for Patterns, Insights, and Deeper Questions. In addition, creating “storybooks” from the session allows participants to take the results of their work to larger audiences after the event. Research also confirms that the average estimate from a large group is almost always more accurate than estimates given by the majority of individuals. The World Café has led intellectual capital expert Leif Edvinsson of Sweden to observe that the office design of the past is inadequate to support effective knowledge work. At one Café in Denmark focused on improving a school system, the hosts framed the central question as “What could a good school also be?” rather than as “How can we fix the problems in this school?” In doing so, they opened up the conversation to appreciating what might be possible in the future, rather than limiting the focus to what is wrong in the present. It’s an easy to set-up workshop where people explore “questions that matter” by having several rounds of conversations in different groups.
The World Café Community is comprised of a growing global group of leaders and others committed to courageous conversations and positive futures.
The invisible connections among these conversations and the actions that emerge from them help to build the organization’s collective. Inspirational newsletter for personal development, How does digital make us review the way we work and learn together. Decorate the walls with art. For example, imagine your organization as a series of Café tables, with employees moving between functions inside the organization as well as connecting with multiple “tables” of customers, suppliers, distributors, and other conversation partners. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, + No Import Fees Deposit & $8.98 Shipping to United Kingdom. It is an innovative methodology that enhances the capacity for collaborative thinking about critical issues by linking small group and large-group conversations. (Contact info@theworldcafe.com or call 415-381-3368).
Airing weekdays on 185 radio stations nationwide from its home station of WXPN-FM in Philadelphia, it is a uniquely formatted program that features live interviews and performances with the greatest established and up-and-coming performers of today. The Best of World Cafe: Great Conversations from NPR's Most Popular Contemporary Music Show, Running Press; 1st Edition (October 23, 2007).
In her book The Quantum Society: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (William Morrow and Company, 1994), Danah Zohar states: “Social evolution requires that different points of view, different ideas, different ways of life, and different traditions recombine into larger, more complex emergent wholes.” Breakthrough thinking is more likely to emerge when diverse viewpoints and perspectives contribute to the exploration.
Host Raina Douris and Contributing Host Stephen Kallao presents elements of the daily World Cafe show while exploring trends in contemporary music & culture. Using The World Café as an organizing image allows leaders to intentionally design processes that take advantage of the natural dynamics that are already at play in order to create sustainable business and social value.
1. Strength-based or appreciative inquiry questions are a good starting point. Showing employees that their contribution is needed to help shape a positive future is a strong driver for achieving common goals. Each element of the method has a specific purpose and corresponds to one or more of the design principles.
Our interactive graphics specialist captured collective insights from the morning on a large piece of newsprint in the middle of the room.
and makes people feel at ease. paper tablecloths, coloured pencils and refreshments!
What makes such a seemingly simple practice — that of talking together about things we care about and intentionally linking the essence of our conversations with others in ever widening circles — so useful? At the end of the second round, each table in the room is cross-pollinated with input from prior conversations. The crosspollination of ideas from group to group can lead to the emergence of surprising creativity and focus as we discover innovative ways to support a “system thinking together.”.
The show is produced by WXPN in Philadelphia, PA.
We suddenly realized that we had tapped into something very simple but potentially very powerful. Collective wisdom to engage and mobilise people. It’s a great conversational method for achieving strategic dialogue and cooperative action. Executives in a high-tech corporation helped to decrease the injury rate dramatically by using Café principles to engage existing networks of conversation and introduce questions about safety risks. Stream Conversations from the World Cafe free online. Through the Café conversations, a shared knowledge base, larger than any individual or group in the room, had become accessible to us.