World Cafe Community

The World Cafe Community Blog Has Moved!

We've now consolidated the content of all our blogs - this Community Blog, Dialogical Leadership, Climate Change, Conversation as a Radical Act, etc. -  and moved them over to our new World Café website.

We've done our best to re-direct your favorite posts so you can still find them, but if you can't locate them, just use the search option on the new site. Please be sure to subscribe there so you don't miss any of the inspiring & informing content coming out now.

Sense-Making and Harvesting World Cafe

Canadian mate Chris Corrigan has been doing some absolutely brilliant thinking about harvesting, and publishing much of it on his blog, "Parking Lot".

His latest "Sense-making in a World Cafe" outlines a proposal for a World Cafe designed to harvest complexity. In it, Chris details a complex but very effective process that offers valuable clues for how to frame and manifest participant-driven evaluations/harvests.

A quick search for "harvesting" on Chris' blog will yield rich results of for all World Café hosts and other participatory practitioners. Start with his seminal piece on Harvesting as a verb and you'll never look back!

Alex Bretas

I was having a Skype conversation the other day with David Isaacs, co-founder of the World Cafe, and a young World Café host named Alex Bretas Vasconcelos from Sao Pablo, Brazil.  

Alex had called us together to talk about an educational initiative he's just finished crowd-sourcing funds for called "Education Outside the Box" (check out his video - it has English subtitles - and scroll down to hear a video message of support from Juanita Brown, co-founder of the World Café).

During our conversation, Alex started talking about his experience as a participant in one of the first Hosting World Café: The Fundamentals courses we hosted at Fielding. It was exciting to me to hear how strong its impact had been on him. Here's an excerpt from what he said:

 

After giving permission for me to pull out this piece of our conversation, he asked me if I wanted him to write something about his experience, so of course I said yes. Here's what he wrote:

It was a wonderful time taking the World Cafe Signature Learning Program, since it was both a challenge and an opportunity to me to get in touch with people from all around the world and practice my English. Beyond that, I was deeply curious to take a better look at the World Cafe, and at that time I was beginning my personal journey of discovery when it comes to host conversations that matter.

It was also an opportunity for me to read Juanita Brown's dissertation, a masterpiece which is always coming back at me in diverse forms. Now, I have a deeper knowledge about hosting practices both in a theoretical-reflexive level and in a experiential level, and the Signature Learning Program was co-responsible for that.

Peer-Learning

The World Cafe Hosting: The Fundamentals course we're hosting next month through the Institute of Social Innovation at Fielding Graduate University is offered in a peer-learning format.

"...What the @#!* does that mean?!" you may ask.

Well ... let's start with what peer learning ISN'T, at least in this case.  
Peer learning isn't being left to your own devices without guidance or attention. My co-presenter Bo Gyllenpalm and I will be paying close attention to your learning process, and we'll be there to respond to your questions and offer help at crucial times.

Peer learning isn't about an unstructured environment. This course has been carefully designed as an immersion into the World Cafe method, and the principles that give the method its form. Deepening your understanding of these principles will give you the solid ground you need to design, host, and harvest World Café events in any sector, and help you evolve your hosting practice no matter what your level of experience.

Peer learning doesn't use the standard one-to-many model of education, although you will have access to all the written and multi-media resources you need, as well as engagement with some of the most experienced and innovative World Cafe hosts in the world.

There will be weekly assignments and expectations, but within that structure you are the one that determines the pace, and ultimately the depth, of your learning.

But peer learning isn't just student-led learning; it's an interactive, participatory process that relies on real engagement. You have a lot of responsibility in this course - for your own learning, yes, but even more importantly, for the level of your engagement with others. In this course, your peers are your most powerful allies; the depth of your engagement with them will determine the depth of both their learning and yours.

Make no mistake - this course will ask a lot of you. It's not something you can skate through and watch a video later to catch up on. It is a robust, professional-level learning experience at a premier graduate learning university. You will come out of it with academic and professional credit, and a foundation for your World Café hosting practice that you simply could not get otherwise, even after years of practice on your own. Why? Well one reason is because you have a circle of quality peers to learn with and from.

There are research studies and significant statistics to back this up, but on one level peer learning is just common sense. If you think about, it's the way we as human beings have always learned - from and with each other. And it's one of the World Café's basic premises that together we know more than any one of us alone could possibly know.

The fact that we all learn and grow through the networks of meaningful conversation that make up our lives and work is the foundation of Conversational Leadership. And it's key to many of the principles that inform not only World Cafe hosting practice, but all participatory engagement. In other words, it's a great muscle to build and keep well-exercised.

Peer-learning is not just a one-way street, either. Bo and I both learn a LOT from participants every time we offer this course - about the course and what will make it better (this will be the 5th one we’ve offered so you KNOW it’s going to be great :-), but also about our own hosting practice and what makes us better, more effective World Café hosts.

So come join us - we look forward to learning with you! (The 2014 course starts September 28th, and the early-bird registration discount ends September 8th)

In a Place Called Home

Poem & photograph offered by David Isaacs, co-founder of the World Café

In a far away place that seems a lot like a place called Home,

there lives a small voice who speaks softly and calmly.

It says:  Awaken and Stand Up and Listen!!!

Listen to the breath of the surf lapping at the shore of your soul.

Notice its’ continuous ebb and flow....

Reflect your attention on it in the same way that the moon and sun touch its surface.

Allow it to wash over you, caress you, provide nourishment and courage

to breathe, to walk, to embrace its’ patterns of being.

In this place called Home look around again and listen again with the surf’s rhythm in the background of your awareness.  The voice speaks again:

Go forth and seek other beings who have questions
and invite them to sit with you by your hearth
Then breathe all of your questions into the fire
Allowing those few with deepest meaning to emerge
and honor them as sacred words
and allow them to enter your collective heart
and let them be there in Peace and Quiet.

Until again a new question emerges in your midst
which you may trust is one that is shared in other places
all over the Earth.
In this manner your question is mirrored by other listeners
and you may now remember into the consciousness
that these sacred questions have brought to light
in this place called Home.

This place called Home is like a cafe
where the community comes together to share
their ideas, insights, challenges, opportunities
and, of necessity, their deepest questions.

This Home Cafe has brothers & sisters coming together in countless spaces & places
The communities of Home Cafes are a World Cafe
where all conversations and questions are united
in common cause to common creativity.

In this way humanity is awakening to the nature of Home
and seeks its way forward to that memory of the future
in which we remember our connection to life
to coming Home to our community of Peace.

What's in a Name, or Label

A "Wiser Together" contribution from guest blogger Tom Beech:

A little while ago, I received an email that caught me up short.  It was from a young, 20’s-something, friend of mine.  He and I are working on a project together and he sent me a copy of a note he had written to another friend of his, a young guy he wanted me to meet.  In this email he said, “I’d like you to meet an elderly man I know.....”

OK. Well, first let’s get some facts on the table.  I’m 74 years old, in pretty good mental and physical health, retired from a long career but still active in my community. I can string several strands of thought together and keep track of most of them without losing my way or boring others. “Elderly,” is not a word I’d use to describe myself.