The Gift of Harvesting

The essence of the World Café work is in the evocation of collective intelligence of the good of the whole - be it the ‘whole’ of each individual café, the World Café global network, or the larger communities of which we are all a part.

One very important way to contribute back to this ‘whole’ is to share the story of your own experience. Perhaps it doesn’t sound like much, but it is one of the most valuable contributions you can make.

When we read the cumulative stories of these conversations we begin to notice the patterns and ‘themes’ that are living in this community of networks. This helps us understand what these themes are telling us in relation to the ‘great narrative’ of our times and gives us an opportunity to make meaning together.

I wrote this brief overview in response to a new, next-generation host who'd asked for a little more information about harvesting before addressing her first big café, and in writing it I realized more fully just how valuable harvesting is - for all of us.

"In a World Café itself, the harvesting process is about noticing patterns that have occurred in and between the small café circles in order to help uncover the collective intelligence or wisdom, the “magic in the middle”, for the whole.

The host fulfills their role in this part by taking time at the end of the café to ask the people in the room to speak out and share what they have noticed (usually, depending on how big the group is, the participants raise their hands and someone brings them a microphone), and seeing that it gets heard and recorded by the graphic listener accurately. During this time there is usually some kind of conscious noticing of patterns that naturally appear (which the graphic recorder is picking up intuitively and depicting in images).

There is a similar harvesting that happens between World Café sessions among hosts, so that we can see the “collective wisdom” gathered from the work we are doing together in a larger sense. As a larger network we begin to develop a 'community of practice' that learns from each other and is inspired together.

That happens through sharing our stories - the host of one of the team members writes something up about their experience and then shares it, along with the graphic recordings and tabletops and photographs and any other captures that were made during the World Café experience. This harvest is circulated within the World Café global network via the online StoryNet, one of the World Café blogs, or in the newsletter so that others in the community can start to see larger patterns, and the 'magic in the middle' can begin to emerge.

From yet another perspective, there is a larger scale macro harvesting that is possible – a sharing of knowledge, and the patterns we are discovering in the World Café and all those other people and groups making a difference in the world right now. The 'collective wisdom' of the "Blessed Unrest", as Paul Hawkins calls it, that is loose among so many of us now.

In some ways Harvesting is as simple as finding the ways of communicating what has happened and what is happening with each other, so that the wisdom in the middle of the table, however large or small that table is, has a chance to be seen and noticed and integrated. That’s why our graphic recordings and stories and videos and photographs and other notes are so crucial, and why it’s so important to share them with each other.