coevolution

Welcome to the "World as Café"!

What enables conversation to be a co-evolutionary force in our lives, fostering healthy connection and catalyzing creativity and wisdom in our organizations, communities, and cultures?

Conversation

by Tom Atlee

I want to expand the concept of conversation.

The Latin and Indo-European roots of "con" and "vers" connote "turning together".

This deeper understanding opens up new meanings.

When we speak our truths and hear each other deeply, letting each other's voices and ideas and stories and passions shift us, we turn together.

When we dance or listen to music, and our bodies and attention resonate with its shifting vibrations and emotional resonances, we turn together.

When we all share the same perspectives, hopes or horrors within the vibrational embrace of mass media and the webs of telecommunications -- 9/11, elections, earth from space -- we turn together.

When we respond adaptively to the situations we face -- individually or collectively -- we are turning together with the energies and realities that reside within those situations.

When we as a community come together in times of crisis, rather than splitting apart into adversarial or self-aggrandizing camps, we are turning together.

As all plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen, and all animals breath in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, we turn together in and as one great cycling flow of oxygen and carbon, 
releasing the energies of Life.

As our one small and beautiful planet spins out its days and nights, and circles the sun into seasons, and glides with our whole solar family on one vast arcing arm of our spiral Milky Way galaxy, we turn  together.

We are in conversation -- all of us, all the time, at more levels than we know -- turning together.

Waking up is our emerging realization that we can converse more consciously, learn to do it more knowledgeably and heartfully, inspired and inspiring, and thereby evolve together with -- and into 
-- greater wisdom, wholesomeness, and grace... turning, together.

Maturana & Humanness

I've recently returned from a week of truly inspirational and profound learning with Humberto Maturana, Ximena Davila and their colleagues at the Matriztica Institute learning about the cultural-biological foundations of human existence and our co-evolution as loving beings through the relational spaces and networks of conversation in which we participate.

Let me share a few seed ideas that relate to our work with the World Café to give you a flavor of this workshop on cultural biological matrix of human existence, and then provide a brief description of how I see the World Cafe embodying some these powerful scientific  insights about the origins and conservation of our very humanness.

Unique Opportunity: Discover the Roots of the World Cafe!

On August 3-8 in Boston I am planning to attend a powerful teaching seminar with Dr. Humberto Maturana and his colleague Prof. Ximena Davila, two pioneering Chilean cultural biologists focused on the deeper process of co-evolution and renewal in human systems. They will help us see how we, as human beings with the unique capacity for language,  reflective consciousness, and meaning making through the networks of conversation in which we participate have evolved today's world.....and what our possibilities might be for consciously co-evolving our futures together in more life-affirming ways.

Maturana's work has had a profound influence on the deeper intention of the World Cafe as an approach through which people can experience these living networks of conversation and their potential for co-evolving the futures we want rather than being forced to live with the futures we get.  I encourage any of you who want to learn the scientific underpinnings of the World Cafe to join me in this powerful joint inquiry.

For more information and how to register.

What's it All About?

Nancy Margulies sent in a link to this Art of Hosting video, which gives a great overview of the self-organizing design shared by the World Café and all living systems work:

New Frontiers in Participatory Knowledge Development

Fielding Graduate University’s Institute for Social Innovation Announces Groundbreaking Research Partnership with the World Café

By Thomas J. Hurley for the World Café Community Foundation

An exciting new partnership brings together Fielding Graduate University’s Institute for Social Innovation and the World Café Community Foundation to develop and disseminate the World Café as a methodology for participatory research and collective knowledge evolution, and to explore applications of the World Café in key areas such as change leadership, organizational development, and societal learning.

Be the Change

I get occasional mail from KarmaTube sharing inspirational videos, and this one was so good I wanted to share it with you here. The people are speaking a language I don't understand, but I love the 'conversation' that happens beyond words...

Conversation as a Radical Act

Juanita, along with a little help from GiGis (Girl Geeks) Nancy Margulies, Nancy White and Amy Lenzo, unrolled some of her recent thinking in a presentation called Conversation as a Radical Act last week at the 2007 Pegasus Systems Thinking Conference in Seattle.

The ideas focus on the nexus between issue-based content and the 'process arts' that can help us take the conversation about them to a new level, leading to action grounded in collective wisdom.

nano cafes

David Isaacs here..

just noticed this fantastic story about nano cafes that are being convened in Madison Wisconsin.

does anyone reading this blog like the idea of connecting with these nano cafe innovators?

what would be wonderful is if someone uncovered a way to introduce the principles and processes of the
World Cafe to them!!!

are you interested in making this networking connection... and suggesting to the nano cafe people that they are part of a global network at the World Café?