World Cafe Community

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.

Day 3: Conversation Space Debrief

At the end of the conference, Conversation Space hosts gathered with Ginny and Janice from Pegasus, who had organized much of the conference organizers and supported this space in being created, in debriefing about the Conversation Space experience.

Day 3: Final Keynote and Closing

In the conference's last session, Peter Senge's keynote Collaboration: The Human Face of Systems Thinking, the founding chair of SoL (Society for Organizational Learning) answers the question of how this conference grew into being. After some reflection he says that on some level it is mysterious, how events like this conference come into being – the webs of connection and collaboration that just “happen”.

Peter refered to the cultural myth of being lost until a charismatic leader appears – and says that few of us actually know the meaning of the word charisma – ‘charism’ is a noun that has its roots in the church and means your gifts; so to be charismatic is to bring your gifts into the world.

Day 3: Conversation Space

In this last conversation space gathering of the conference, we took up the questions Tom and Sharon had raised in the morning's weaving and talked about what we would bring with us in the transition back to “home”. After some popcorn-style conversation we went around the circle, answering “What question will you be bringing home with you?”

Here is an image of our answers to that question:

It was created out of a vision that one of us – I think it was Teresa – shared about us sitting around the fire together here and each of us taking an ember from that fire home to put in our own grate and serve as the spark to build our own community fires, beacons to gather others around. She saw those fires, too, growing strong so that in turn they could produce new embers for others to take home to start fires in other communities.

One of the words that came from our conversation was a beautiful Sanskrit word from the popular book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert that resonated with many of us as soon as it was spoken. It was “antevassin” which means edge dweller – one who lives on the edge of the forest. That place between, where the path can be seen and is able to be shared with those others who live deeper in the forest.

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For the next part of the chronological harvest, click here for Peter Senge's keynote.

Day 3: Morning Weaving

At the last weaving session of the 2007 Pegasus Systems Thinking conference, Tom and Sharon shared some of what they’d heard in conversations throughout this event, including many comments about the loneliness of being isolated in our organizations and how good it is to be here among so many ‘kindreds’

Conversation as a Radical Act

(more videos of CARA here)

This wonderful morning break-out session at the 2007 Pegasus Systems Thinking conference in Seattle was an all-girl collaboration by Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulies and Nancy White (with me making up a silent fourth with my blog harvesting of the story).

“I grew up with crosses burned on my lawn” Juanita began, “a true child of the revolution with activist parents, but I didn’t call my talk Conversation as a Radical Act for that kind of politically radical reason. It came from a deeper exploration of what the meaning of the word radical means… which is getting down to the real root of the matter.”

Day 2: Evening

We co-hosted an informal pre-dinner reception this evening with our friends and colleagues at Berkana Institute and Art of Hosting. The room was bursting with the energy of the conference (Van Jones had just spoken) and the sense of friendship and collaboration.

In lieu of a formal welcome, an impromptu story began to weave between us, amplified by two little hand-held microphones and our deep listening as we heard of World Cafés in Saudi Arabia, China, Japan and Wisconsin, Berkana learning centers in Zambia and Art of Hosting in indigenous British Columbia.

We heard about conversations of hope – in hospitals, in business offices and jails, online and in person – and as the microphone wentaaround and the stories poured out, I experienced an ever-increasing sense of shared purpose weaving between us all at the macro-level. The form in the stories we told were quite different, but the willingness to step into the conversation about things that really matter was the same in all of them.

After the reception, many of us continued the conversation at dinner, weaving the web of relationship ever more strongly and beautifully.

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To continue reading the harvest of the 3rd and last day, click here.

Day 2: Afternoon

Coming into the afternoon session of day two, the weaving between Tom Hurley and Sharon Eakes started to thread together the themes of emerging patterns.

Tom talked about the challenge of holding the moment of stillness - presencing - in a reality that is constantly changing. He referenced his aikido master who is not always in his center, but – crucially – knows how to return to his center when he loses it. So, nurturing the practice of returning to source on the banks of the river while engaging in the flow of the stream.

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Juanita’s afternoon session, Conversation as a Radical Act, hosted in collaboration with Nancy Margulies and Nancy White was incredibly powerful and held a truly radical role for the conversational arts in the transformation of social issues. Because of its relevance to so many other conversations, I am giving it its own post to make it easier to link to, and going directly on to Van Jones' talk here.

Day 2: Conversation Space

The Conversation Space was jumping as the group began to integrate some of the powerful concepts from Otto Scharmer’s talk. Gabriel Shirley shared an insight he had about the moment of ‘now’ being not a quick blip in a continuum between past and future, as he had often imagined, but rather an expanding present, reverberating in all directions. He had a wonderful image for this insight, too – Otto Scharmer’s dot of presencing with increasingly larger parentheses echoing out on each side.

At the same time there was a whole new harvesting movement being born with Chris Corrigan beginning to identify patterns he was discerning in the graphics by ‘tagging’ them with words written on colored post-it notes. Several people were joining in, and Nancy White and I extended the practice out into the hotel's common spaces and other areas of the conference … tagging the patterns and links we saw there. At one point we got so excited we spun off into an imagine of covering each other with descriptive tags and tagging  strangers as street performance.

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To keep reading chronologically, click here for the afternoon weaving.

Day 2:AM

Tom Hurley brought us into the second day with a moment of silence, imagining ourselves standing in front of the blank canvas of the day. “Listen to the room breathing”, he muses, a line in a poem by Lorca “there are spaces that ache in the uninhabited air”, suggesting these spaces as our collective mind.

The morning’s conversation with the whole was seeded with “What are the questions in our collective mind and heart today?”

Chaiwat Thirapantu from Thailand stood up and said: “How can we make the American people be mindful when they go to the polls on election day!” which got a big laugh and many nods.

“How can we combine the breadth of social networking with the depth of stillness (presencing)?”

Day One: Evening

Monday evening we had a dinner with some special guests from Asia to honor the publication of the new Japanese and Taiwanese translations of the World Café book.

There were five members of the Japanese translation team, including Daisuke Kawaguchi, who had been my main contact throughout the process, and his colleagues Toshimitsu Kanekiyo, Kazuaka Katori, Mikako Yusa and Riichiro Oda; Stephen Meng from the Taiwan translation team was there and Chaiwat Thirapantu from Thailand, along with Alfred Hanner of Saudi Arabia.

We were all tired from a long full day and our various travels, but the energy was wonderful, the stories inspirational and the conversation incredibly rich and heartfelt. Sitting next to Japanese colleagues I learned that there is a new online World Café community being formed in Japan, and that Riichiro had himself hosted seven World Cafés in Japan this year, the most recent being one on Climate Change.

I fell in love with each of these incredibly kind and thoughtful people as I found myself relaxing after the full day, being asked wonderfully gentle and stimulating personal questions like “What is your vision of the future” and “What do you hope for in your own life?”

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To keep reading this harvest chronologically, click here for Tuesday morning's weaving and the keynote by Boeing.

Day 1: Afternoon

In the afternoon weaving Bard Hurley gave us a metaphor for what he sensed “in the field”, a beautiful image from James Mitchner about a slow accumulation, a melding of meaning like individual droplets of dew gathering together to create a river. We were invited to take a moment and reflect on the intention that had brought us each here, and then share with each other what had been meaningful in relation to that intention so far.

In my small group a bishop form NJ shared his intention as a wish to experience a “moment of light”.

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Otto Scharmer jumped right into the “Theory U and the Blind Spot of Leadership”, which offers a lens that sheds light onto a blind spot in our understanding of leadership – the crucial importance of the leader's interior condition.

Systems Thinking in Action 2007

This post is the ToC for an in-depth harvest of the 2007 Pegasus Systems Thinking in Action conference, held in Seattle, Washington.

If you were there, please use the comments link at the bottom of each post to give your own perspective or share your experiences at the conference, and if you weren't, please add your questions and ideas.
(Use the Quick Link guide below, or start at the beginning and just follow the links straight through)

Day 1: AM

Amplifying our Impact: Strategies for Unleashing the Power of Relationship, the 17th annual Pegasus Systems Thinking in Action Conference begins to weave the field even before we arrive as we connect with old friends and look forward to the new ones we’ll meet there.

On Monday morning, conference weavers Tom Hurley and Sharon Eakes opened by inviting us to “listen with all our parts” for the next few days, creating a living network of conversation with the possibility of rippling out beyond this event.

Before introducing Harvard professor Debra Meyerson, who was speaking on ‘Tempered Radicals’ for our first keynote, Tom told us that the word radical derived from the word “root” and gave us a few questions to ponder as we listen into her words …

Systems Thinking in Action 2007: Prelude

The World Café has been closely associated with Pegasus and the annual Systems Thinking conferences for a number of years. We were an active partner in this year's event, and deeply woven in to the program - David and Juanita both held pre-conference World Café community-building sessions, Tom Hurley co-hosted (with Sharon Eakes) the conference, Juanita unveiled her recent thinking on the subject of Conversation as a Radical Act at a break-out forum, we co-hosted an Open Reception with our friends at Berkana Institute and Art of Hosting, and as veteran collaborators and supporters of Pegasus and this work for well over ten years we were also formal sponsors of this year's event.