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.

Cooperatively discovered in 1995, the World Café is an innovative approach to hosting and harvesting collaborative conversations about questions that matter. The process is designed to evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of a group, increasing participants’ capacity to create shared meaning, discover new knowledge, and foster innovation across organizational, social, or cultural boundaries that ordinarily get in the way of collaboration. Today, this research-based and field-tested approach to strategic dialogue, multi-stakeholder engagement, intergenerational collaboration, and cooperative action has been enthusiastically embraced by people around the world, in virtually every field and all sectors, who are working to catalyze positive change. Through their efforts, innovative approaches to critical issues in socially responsible business, health care, education, environmental protection, social welfare, conflict resolution, sustainable development, and many other fields are being discovered and implemented.

The newly-announced partnership is especially appropriate given the singular role that the Fielding Graduate University has played in the development and dissemination of the World Café. Juanita Brown’s 2001 dissertation at Fielding was the basis for her award-winning book The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter (Berrett-Koehler, 2005), now available in seven languages. Fielding Trustee Bo Gyllenpalm, a member of Juanita’s doctoral committee (chaired by Libby Douvan), has used the World Café with Fielding students and faculty and pioneered the development of virtual dialogues based on the World Café process and design principles in the M.A. Program in Organization Management and Development. Current and former faculty members Fred Steier, Don Bushnell, Will McWhinney, Sara Cobb, and others have played key roles in the conceptual development of the World Café and its use as a research methodology.

“I’m excited that the work I began in my dissertation now has the opportunity to be developed in creative ways that will support both high-quality, grounded research and more powerful action in the service of life-affirming futures,” said Juanita Brown. “Around the world, there’s a growing recognition that conversation, community formation, and innovation are the living roots of transformative change in every field and system, and that the power to re-make our world lies in everyone’s hands.”

The partnership between the Institute for Social Innovation and the World Café Community Foundation will strengthen the development of the World Café as a valid methodology for co-evolving social knowledge with a strong epistemological foundation. Faculty, students, and leading practitioners from the global World Café network will collaborate on a wide range of initiatives, including dissertations that use the World Café as a primary research methodology; monographs and peer-reviewed publications; case studies; development of the next generation of World Café process tools; meetings of theorists, researchers, and practitioners, and seminars for students, faculty, and Fielding program associates. We also anticipate exploring how the World Café can contribute to special projects sponsored by the Institute for Social Innovation, such as the Democracy Action Project, the Transformative Learning and Social Justice program, and the Information Society and Knowledge Organization concentration.

“Like action research and appreciative inquiry, the World Café is a process with deep conceptual foundations that can support new and powerful approaches to research on human and organization development,” said Bo Gyllenpalm. “This partnership will strengthen both Fielding as an institution and the World Café as a social innovation in the global academic and social change communities.”

The partnership also recognizes that the World Café is both a process that fosters social innovation (catalyzing insights and generating new knowledge through interlinking conversations about questions that matter) and a social innovation itself, in terms of how the World Café process and principles, based on living systems thinking, have spread throughout the world and given rise to a rapidly growing, global community of practice. As such, a deeper understanding of the World Café’s organizing principles and patterns can contribute to the quests for new forms of leadership, new tools for innovation, and creative approaches to positive whole systems change.

For more information, please contact Bo Gyllenpalm or Samantha Tan.