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How do we create quality time for reflections that allows us to connect the ideas and thoughts that surround us?
Especially in the Net Age, where distraction comes with just one mouse click. (May be this is just my problem that I am easily distracted by new thoughts....)
Please give me input on this!
The previous email exchange between Juanita, Phil, Anne and others inspired Toke to write this:
"Thank you Dresden, Columbus, Juanita, David, Ann, Pat, Jeff, Phil and all the rest of you hosting folks
as we in the world - slowly but surely - are beginning to remember ourselves in the world as cafe..."
Here is the poem Toke wrote:
When Juanita returned home she sent an email out to some close friends... amazing connections showed...
Hi everone,
We've recently returned from Dresden, Germany where our European Cafe kindreds hosted an amazing gathering that attracted folks from more than 15 countries! We were astounded (and you'll be happy to know that David and I did no organizing on this one--just blessing it!) at what ocurred there. Most exciting was the simultaneous hosting of eight local World Cafés throughout the greater Dresden area (on sustainable business, the arts, media, youth and education, etc.), which led key leaders in Dresden to begin envisioning Dresden as a "learning city" using conversational modalities like the World Café and others to engage citizens at all levels in conversations about the questions that matter most to them--- the "world as café" came alive in Germany!
Hallo an alle! Zwar ist Englisch die Sprache, auf die wir uns in internationalen Kontexten zur Verständigung geeinigt haben, aber wir können diesen Blog in allen Sprachen gestalten. So sind Beiträge auf Deutsch, en français, in italiano and other languages willkommen. In Dresden haben wir uns morgens in annähernd 15 Sprachen begrüßt! Lasst uns dieses Forum in den Sprachen gestalten, die uns zur Verfügung stehen. Auch das ist eine Möglichkeit, unsere unterschiedlichen Perspektiven und Beiträge zu würdigen. Wir können wir uns ja gegenseitig helfen, wenn Übersetzungen in eine andere Sprache erwünscht oder nützlich sind.
Hello all! English is the language that we agreed to use in international contexts, but let us put up this blog in the languages that we are used to speak and write. We had our good morning greetings in Dresden in 15 different languages! Contributions auf Deutsch, en français, in italiano and all the other languages are welcome. It is another way to honour our diversity. Maybe we can support each other with translations if it seems to be appropriate or useful.
Einen schönen Tag wünscht Euch ...
Have a good day!
Ulrich
In the last few weeks I contributed to a German weblog at Carl Auer Verlag about the World Café Gathering. In the next days I am going to translate my reflections into English and to post them here. Until now it was kind of having a monologue. Although there have been around 15.000 visits on that blog each week, there haven’t been any comments, and that was kind of frustrating, as the topic was on dialogue. No echoes. Maybe I was broadcasting on the wrong frequency for the systemic audience at Carl Auer, maybe it is just the way it is with blogging. Anyway I will give it another try here and see what happens.
When I was writing the reflections I realized that I have a very partial view of the gathering. As I was engaged in the different roles of being a host, I followed the dialogue on innovation only part-time as a participant. I was focused more on processes rather than on contents.
Did you ever want to do something but the risk was too great? Do you dream of taking a risk in the future but wish there was some support around you? What if the support was there already and we just needed to find it among ourselves?
Juanita said, "The whole exists in every part." I found meaning in this when looking at the different walls where we posted our personal reflections...
In the last harvest of this glorious event, one woman stood up and shared her gratitude as a native English speaker for the generosity of this group in speaking English for the last two days. I was so glad she did because it was a feeling I had many times during this gathering, and from the heartfelt applause that came from other English-speakers I see I was not alone.
There were many other words of gratitude spoken, but I'll leave them to you to report...
What are you most grateful from this gathering? What touched or moved you?
The final question this morning is: What role can World Café play to invite innovation across Europe?
Can you imagine thousand of people - a great event - in traditional customs, in conversation and then we have a party!
Now I know that you are out there; we are a network!
Let's do a Beauty Café! the beauty that is already there, all around us... beauty in the next café in the next city...
There was much, much more; but these spoke to me!
And we are already invited to come to Bilbao in May 2008!
Right now Juanita started to tell about how the World Café was born in their living room. At that time, Finn Voldtofte was staying in their home for a gathering on Intellectual Capital. At lunch time, after they had sensed that something new was being born, Finn said: Hé, we have to understand what we are doing here!” The next day they used a tape recorder to record some of what was said.
How important are the breaks!!!
We organised ourselves here on a table with all our laptops, postings these blogposts and some pictures. Teaching people about the new World Café website and how they can get onto the blog.
So here is another link from café participant Dirk Schütz, where are different comments and links to this gathering and the World Café as a whole. Check it out! German or English, as you like best.
This morning was spent on commitement and action....made possible by deep reflection.
I started the day by realising that we were talking more about inviting relationships than innovations.
How can we provide a safe/risky environment where relationships can flourish and become supportive of creativity, development, of standing still and of unfolding our personal and collective potential?
What are your experiences of such environments and your own attitudes within them? Have you lead teams or organisations towards such environments?
Please share your thoughts.
Hanno
As always, when people get to know each other and the conference is going to end, conversations at the breakfast table take some longer... Today will be a day with a lot of different things and topics.
And now we start with a little meditation...
There was a moment in one of the rounds on Friday, in response to a question about what I found personally conducive to innovation, when I was taken back to thoughts I’d been having on my way to Dresden, on using language differently.
When one uses the language of poetry, for example, one is leaving behind the way words are normally used and venturing into a realm of the ineffable, surrendering right on the edge of knowing...
To me, the hand gestures in this beautiful photograph by Ulrich Soeder capture a sense of this search for the ineffable, the yearning for something so subtle there are not yet words to speak it. For me, this is where the innovation I seek is hiding...
What about you? What uncovers your place of creativity and innovation?
After the break this afternoon, the facilitation team shared with us the model that is behind all the questions that we got to speak about so far. It is the drawing of a spiral. Starting with The Landscape of Innovation; going to Letting Go, over Letting In; and now we are in the Transformation/Dreaming.
Right now the collective harvest just started. This time the harvesters, the graphic recorders are in a dialogue with the group as a whole. They write words, they use colour, they talk with the group, all happening together! It is becoming really FUN! One of them is in conversation all the time, while drawing... I can do this blogging, I can write words in a creative way on a piece of paper, but this is a different kind of art. Beautiful!
What is FUN here is that the facilitation team really took time and effort to integrate silence, and movement in a lot of different ways. It shows in the conversations, in the harvests after the different rounds, when we come back after the breaks etc. There seems to be a willingness, an awareness growing of the intelligence of the body, and that we need it for the kind of innovation that we really want.
This afternoon we started with this question: What needs to be present in me in order to see and experience the world differently? It was an inspiring and ever deepening dialogue, like a good Café should be, so I was engaged in it and didn't take a lot of notes... here are my words...
During the harvesting of the Inviting Innovation process, I had a wonderful experience of the 4th Principle of the World Café: 'Encourage Everyone's Contribution', which responds to the question, "What if your contribution is a key ingredient?"
I heard someone I’d not yet spoken to speak my own unique phrase when asked what she’d heard that had been most impacting to her. It moved me greatly that at least two people had thought my contribution was meaningful enough to pass on to others… and I couldn’t help but wonder about the ways, perhaps most of them completely unknowable, that we have all influenced and effected each other in these days of meaning/intermingling.
Who or what has influenced you in ways they may not know?
Would you expect a World Cafe on innovation to result in a table deciding that blankness and confusion need to be present to be innovative?
Well, that's just what happened. Oh, by the way....other ideas were also mentioned:
When you are a harvester the first thing you need to learn is to be able to hold frustration! More and more we learn that if we want to harvest these big events for the 'outside world' - in real time - we need a harvesting team next to the facilitation and organisation team. My frustration now is that I lost the posting that I made this morning... too bad for you readers!
Holger Nauheimer, who was here on the first day sent us the link of two postings of him. The first one is on this initiative as a whole, the next one is about the dialogue he participated in on Leadership and Change. It is really worthwhile reading, because he gives a good background of the initiative and he covers ground that we did not over here.
When an 11 year old girl stands up and asks for the option of deciding on her own "dream" subject or class, you know education needs to rethought. And this is what we did, together with a diverse group of students, administrators, teachers and parents, during the Future of Education Cafe on the afternoon of May 3 in Dresden.
What would your dream subject or class be about?
Hanno
We just found out that other people are also blogging about this event. Carl Auer Verlag, the publisher who translated the book on World Café have just started a blog too and they wrote already a lot! For English readers, it is in German!
Hellerau, the Garden City, next to Dresden was started around the turn of the previous century (I mean: more than a hundred years ago) with people who wanted to live and work in a different way. It was a kind of alternative movement and they did a lot of work to integrate the arts and to connect with nature. They build what is now called the Festspielhaus, on the principle of ‘spatial rhythm’. Of course World War I interfered with the whole project…
The first World Café of the first day, addressing Peace & Forgiveness, was aptly housed in the crypt of the newly restored Frauenkirche, itself a powerfully vibrant example of peace and reconciliation.
This photograph by the extremely talented Ulrich Soeder captures the sense of intimacy and power in the space, and the conversation under its arches was worthy of the setting.
On the train to Dresden yesterday I asked a gentleman sitting near me for directions and it turned out that he too was coming to the World Café! Reinhard Kuchenmüller, for that was his name, is a visual facilitator coming in from Tuscany to facilitate today's World Café on Education for the Future. His work for that café will be up on the World Café Europe site soon, but for now here is one of the images he shared with me on the train (there are more of Reinhard's graphic images on the World Café Europe Flickr page):
Here I sit on a bench in the sun, outside Berlin Spandau train station. A ‘Rathaus’ with a tower is in front of me. My night train from Belgium to Berlin was delayed, so I missed my connection and have to wait. But the sun is here, beautiful: not too hot, just perfect to sit on a bench in a strange town.
This is Berlin where East and West were so close to each other; where East and West hardly could reach on another…
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