World Cafe Community

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: 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 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.

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)

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.

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