World Cafe Community

Conversation and Community

David Isaacs sent me this quote from Peter Block:

My belief is that the way we create conversations that overcome the fragmented nature of our communities is what creates an alternative future.

This can be a difficult stance to take for we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs.

We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list.

We want measurable outcomes and we want them now.

What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing.

We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.

This is not an argument against problem solving; it is an intention to shift the context and language within which problem solving takes place.

Authentic transformation is about a shift in context and a shift in language and conversation. It is about changing our idea of what constitutes action.

~ Peter Block from his Civic Engagement Series, sponsored by A Small Group.

Conversation

by Tom Atlee, of the Co-intelligence Institute

I want to expand the concept of conversation.

The Latin and Indo-European roots of "con" and "vers" connote "turning together".

This deeper understanding opens up new meanings.

When we speak our truths and hear each other deeply, letting each other's voices and ideas and stories and passions shift us, we turn together.

When we dance or listen to music, and our bodies and attention resonate with its shifting vibrations and emotional resonances, we turn together.

When we all share the same perspectives, hopes or horrors within the vibrational embrace of mass media and the webs of telecommunications -- 911, elections, earth from space -- we turn together.

When we respond adaptively to the situations we face -- individually or collectively -- we are turning together with the energies and realities that reside within those situations.

When we as a community come together in times of crisis, rather than splitting apart into adversarial or self-aggrandizing camps, we are turning together.

As all plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen, and all animals breath in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, we turn together in and as one great cycling flow of oxygen and carbon, 
releasing the energies of Life.

As our one small and beautiful planet spins out its days and nights, and circles the sun into seasons, and glides with our whole solar family on one vast arcing arm of our spiral Milky Way galaxy, we turn 
together.

We are in conversation -- all of us, all the time, at more levels than we know -- turning together.

Waking up is our emerging realization that we can converse more consciously, learn to do it more knowledgeably and heartfully, inspired and inspiring, and thereby evolve together with -- and into 
-- greater wisdom, wholesomeness, and grace... turning, together.

Hungarian World Café on YouTube

Here's a short film about a World Café in Hungary. It was made by two students from our Eastern European steward Agota Ruzsa's class - Pável Briggita and Tőzsér Adrienn, who then posted it on YouTube.

One of the things that's so amazing to me is how universal is this language we share - of connection and innovation and collective intelligence - and how easy it is to hear and read it wherever we are in the world.

Read more of this story in StoryNet.

Elaine Johnson on Maturana, Language, Prejudice & the Brain

These words from educator and World Café researcher Elaine Johnson:

I'm just beginning to work on a brain workshop I'm presenting to the Northwest Regional Conference of Mathematicians - and Juanita's summary of Maturana's comments touched a chord.

Maturana says that emotions and language, intertwined, shape our culture. Words especially, he points out, lead to actions. Words, then, have the power to shape our human community, our culture, our "manner of living." In fact, so inextricably bound are language and community that scientists think
the longing for community, for intimate communication, gave rise to language.

Of course Maturana, a world authority on the brain, speaks to the heart of World Café. Café allows language to bring forth new actions and inspire new communities.

However, the brain presents obstacles to a Café's success, and it is these that I wish to address. The human brain has evolved to reflect--it is the universe reflecting on itself.  The problem is that the brain does not think very well. Reason is supplanted again and again by raw emotion, or by our emotional attachment to our beliefs.  Each person's brain holds beliefs, values, and attitudes that have been shaped by parents, friends, neighbors, teachers, and even television commercials.  These beliefs and values are
actually contained in brain circuits. They're part of the physiology of the brain. As such, they act as "frames" or "schema" that shape our response to everything.  What we believe decides what we are able to see or hear or are willing to think.

Just as surely as an arm is part of us, and we will fight to protect and keep our arm, so a belief is part of us, and we will fight to keep it, even when it's wrong.  We humans are so emotionally attached to our beliefs--they are wired in our brains, remember-- that we first embrace them and later search for reasons to justify them.  We would rather be wrong than sacrifice a conviction. 

Part of the problem, as neuroscientists explain, is that communication in the brain runs mainly from the emotional center to the thinking part of the brain, and not very much in the other direction.  We feel more than we reason. We have great trouble diminishing our emotions.

One of the challenges of World Café, then, must be to see that people think well--that they are truly mindful of deep-seated biases and able, somehow, to say, "This is a prejudice, and for the sake of our dialogue, I am going to set it aside."

I teach advanced argumentation at university, and I've written about the steps involved in reasoning well. However, brain research compellingly insists that we regard the call to reason as more than an interesting
academic subject. 

Reasoning well is the only source of those words we need so badly--the powerful, true words that can guide constructive actions, actions that will allow individuals, communities, and Earth to flourish.

Helping people ask good questions, and expecting that from considering good questions insight will arise makes sense. But . . .it especially makes sense among people who in all humility recognize that they are wired with circuitry that makes them biased and narrow and who are eager to set aside their biases, at least for the sake of a rich conversation.

A hopeful discovery is that the very act of thinking can change the brain. That means that words--true and valuable words reflecting keen insights--will emerge if we use practice them.  Practice and reason lead to words that can change society.

Dialogue Project

Here is a wonderful video of an interview with David Isaacs and Juanita Brown, including clips from a World Café that David and Nancy Margulies hosted. This video was created as part of the Dialogue Project: