World Cafe Community

Balance Lost

We were kindly given permission to post the following piece by author Tom Beech.

The idea of “a more perfect union,” in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States has has always rested on the principle of balance…balance of power among the three branches of the Federal Government, between the Federal Government and the States, between freedom, individual rights, interdependence and mutual responsibility. 

Of late, it seems that we’ve lost sight of the importance of balance and in recent days, the proposed law passed by the Arizona State Legislature (mercifully vetoed by that State’s Governor) was at least for me, a stunning example of this. In the last few years our attention has been focused on the importance of “religious freedom,” the “right to bear arms,” the “rights of natural born citizens vs. those of immigrants,” the “rights of free enterprise.” 

What has been lost in the furious debate about these freedoms, one of the founding tenants of our democracy, is that one person’s freedom cannot be expressed at the expense of another person.  And we have developed amendments to the Constitution and a body of laws and regulations to safeguard this balance…balancing my freedom with yours. We have looked to government at the national, state and local levels to provide these safeguards.

What the World Café Makes Possible

From Ben Roberts of weDialogue, on what his engagement with the World Café has made possible for him:

On the occasion of this “Harvest Fund Drive,” I find myself reflecting back on what has been an incredible personal journey in which the Foundation has played a key role. A year and a half ago, I began an inquiry into the power and joy of engaging in “conversations that matter,” in the context of my involvement in the political initiatives of “the Coffee Party.” This led me immediately to The World Café as a process and to the work of the Foundation. There I found an inspiring array of resources and an incredibly responsive, sincere, generous and dedicated community of practice that was eager to support me. Talk about “creating hospitable space!” You can read a series of posts in the StoryNet section of our wonderful Online Community describing my efforts; here are links to part 1, part 2 and part 3).

As I learned more about the magic of large group dialogic processes, my interest quickly morphed from excitement about finding a set of tools to apply to this specific political initiative to a sense that I had discovered new and fertile ground for my life’s work in a much broader context. I became especially taken with the possibility for weaving these processes together with the incredible convening power of the internet. Here, the Foundation’s director of global communications Amy Lenzo proved to be particularly supportive. One of the world’s most experienced hosts of emergent dialogue online, Amy generously volunteered to teach me, connect me with resources and even to co-host many of my earliest efforts in convening virtual conversation.

The Way the World Café Spreads

World Cafe Community Foundation Board President Tom Hurley leads off Week Two of our Harvest Fund Drive with this thoughtful post about the power of cross-pollination:

"I'm continually astonished by how the World Cafe spreads...

• As when it moves virally through a community, conversations in one place sparking dialogues in others. A World Café at the National Native American Economic Policy Summit inspired tribal leaders to take the process home and convene their own Cafés on key tribal concerns.


• As when there's a slow, steady uptake, word percolating through a company about a better way to address key business issues. Over the last year, we've hosted a series of World Cafés for Marathon Petroleum as one leader after another has called after hearing about how colleagues have used the process to engage collective intelligence and shape collaborative action in their teams.


• As when one World Café host seeds transformative conversations around the world, in new and sometimes surprising places. After a World Café training we did for Dr. Jessica Thompson and her Climate Change Education Partnership team at Colorado State University, she hosted Cafés in national parks around the United States and then with communities in Mongolia as well!

Help keep this gift moving. For over sixteen years, those stewarding the World Café have ensured that the core ideas and process are freely available, helping people change the conversation in order to change their world.

Now the World Café Community Foundation needs your help. Please make a donation to help ensure that "the gift continues to move" -- especially if you’ve ever used the World Café and found value in it for yourself, your organization, or your community.

I'm giving. I hope you do, too.
~ Tom Hurley

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Our immediate goal is to raise $25,000.00 by November 4, 2011.

Thank you to all of you who have already joined us in making this Harvest Fund Drive a great success. Please make your valuable contribution to the World Café Community Foundation now.

You'll be helping to catalyze the most critical conversations of our time.

We Are Not Ants

We're pleased to note that the World Café has been mentioned in the 2011 Spanish language edition of We Are Not Ants (No Somos Hormigas), a collaboration by four young people from Spain who took Mahatma Ghandi's challenge to "be the change you want to see" seriously.

We Are Not Ants champions positive change in a number of ways - first and perhaps most powerfully it is written from the standpoint of Appreciative Inquiry, and focuses primarily on what is working. They wanted to write a book "against the current zeitgeist of pessimism and world-weariness", calling it a "guide-book for the well-informed optimist on the state of humanity".

The book has three chapters - "Things That Work", "Things That Go Wrong and Need To Be Fixed", and "Initiatives Decicated to Positive Change". Their piece on World Café is in the third chapter, listed under new ways of Communication. 

The authors of We Are Not Ants are converting the ideas in the book into a crowd-sourced directory of social innovation projects or organizations like the World Café Community Foundation that either

• generate new opportunities for people
• promote a more efficient use of material and intellectual resources
• enable a more sustainable use of natural resources

They've invited readers to submit new social innovation projects and groups for publication in future printings, including the English language edition they are currently seeking a publisher for.

We thank them for the shout out and wish them all the best!

World Cafe and MaestroMonth

What's easier than picking up the phone to connect and get people talking to each other?

Nothing, right?! Well, what if we could meet for a World Cafe on the phone - break out into small groups with touch of a button and then come back to the large group to share the highlights and harvest our conversations? What if we could experience the intimacy and collective excitement of a face-to-face World Cafe, on the phone?

Well, now we can!

Amy Lenzo, Christine Whitney Sanchez and Gabriel Shirley are hosting a special series featuring interactive events from Juanita Brown & Nicole Boyer, David Isaacs, Christina Whitney Sanchez, David Copperrider, Diana Whitney and Harrison Owen. This series, called Beyond Facilitation: Accessing Collective Wisdom, is one week of October's MaestroMonth, which launches MaestroConference, the company behind this revolutionary new phone-based interactive technology.

These 5 events, like all the events in MaestroMonth are FREE. Most of them start at 9am and go through to 11am. For more information about each event and/or to register, go to MaestroMonth.com, scroll down to the event you're interested in and then click the "Details" or "Register" button beneath each one. It's that simple.

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The full MaestroMonth schedule features an array of luminaries across several fields, including many of our close friends and colleagues. :

Business: T. Harv Eker, Michael Port, Robin Sharma, Lance Secretan, Chip Conley, Ray Blanchard, Jeff Hoffman, David Finkel, Lynne Twist, Mari Smith, DC Cordova, Cynthia Kersey, Charlotte & Laura Shelton, James Malinchak, Bettie Spruill, Rinaldo Brutoco
 
Health: Deepak Chopra, John Gray, Candace Pert, Olivia Newton John & John Easterling, Judith Orloff, Joan Borysenko, Norman Shealy, Eric Pearl, Len Saputo, Mary Shomon, Jennifer MacLean, Lee Gerdes, Mona Lisa Schulz
 
Personal Growth: Debbie & Arielle Ford, Dan Millman, John Assaraf, Hale Dwoskin, Vishen Lakhaini, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dave Ellis, Brian Johnson, Mike Robbins, Tripp Lanier & Jayson Gaddis, Zen DeBrucke, Amy Ahlers
 
Societal Change: Gregg Braden, Seane Corn, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jean Houston, Starhawk, Aqeela Sherrils, Azim Khamisa, Steve Bhaerman, Fred Johnson, David Cooperider, Anodea Judith, Lynne McMullen, Richard Rudd, Miki Kashtan, Stacey Lawson
 
Spirituality: Marianne Williamson, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Andrew Cohen, James Twyman, Genpo Roshi, Andrew Harvey, Carter Phipps, Lisa Schrader, Ron Alexander, Lauren Mackler, Paul Hoffman, Paul & Patty Richards, Ellen Debenport, Nicole Daedone, Stephen Dinan & Devaa Haley Mitchell
 
Special Track for Entrepreneurs: Sharon Drew Morgen, Morgana Rae, Ken Foster, Leesa Barnes, Garrett Sutton, Larry Ousley, James Burgin & John Ward, Steve Maxwell, Leslie Grossman, Brian Burt
 
Special Series for Change Leaders: Harrison Owen, Juanita Brown & Nicole Boyer, David Isaacs, Diana Whitney, Christine Whitney Sanchez

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.

From John Inman

John Inman sent in this story of a World Cafe he and his colleague John Blakinger hosted in Oregon recently:

"I hosted a café with John Blakinger of Bend. We both were participants at the annual Symposium sponsored by The Performance Center and we partnered to deliver a powerful café on letting loose of the old story and moving to the new story. There were only 15 of us but the café was excellent.

John and I opened with a series of slides to frame the conversation with a theme that I drew from Peter Senge’s and Betty Sue Flower’s presentation at the 08 Pegasus conference. Based on this and some other concepts that John wove into the introduction, we had each table formulate a question that mattered based on what they drew from the slides. John and I participated at tables as well so a small café can and will work very well.

Of course we had paper on each table and markers. Dishes of smooth rocks instead of flowers set the stage for the peaceful setting.

Then rather than choose a question, we embraced all four questions and build conversations around the question at each table and allowed the learning to blend the insights organically.

After three rotations, we convened in circle and shared. I first led the team in a conversation to draw out insights from the process and reflect on the learning, companionship, and insights gained from the process. Then John led the team through sharing of the insights gained from each table based on each question.

I had not used the variation of the process before and was fascinated that see that each tables presentation overlapped so much based on the blending of ideas that we could barely discern that the questions being answered at each table were different. Wonderful process."

Be the Change ... But How?

This story is about the Santa Cruz World Café held on March 24th, 2009
By Nicole Boyer and Brooking Gatewood, of Adaptive Edge

On a beautiful spring evening in Santa Cruz about two-dozen people gathered at The Empty Boat, an atmospheric little teahouse on Squid Row for a World Café dialogue on the timeless and timely questions: how do we “be the change”? What’s the relationship between our “inner work” and “outer work”— between personal transformation and transforming the world?

Why we did this
The first impetus to host this session was simple.  Brooking and Nicole wanted an opportunity to do a dialogue session together.  Since Santa Cruz was Brooking’s home turf, we thought that was a good place to start. 

Then, the more we talked about it, the more reasons we found to do this.

The obvious hit us right away. For decades, Santa Cruz has been a hotbed of innovation for personal transformation work and world-changing activism, making this a fitting and fecund nexus for this conversation.   “Location, location, location!” we chimed. 

Nicole was also looking for inspiration for a book project called “Personal Futures”, which had been gestating, for too long, on the sidelines of her work.  Then something clicked into place, an “ah-hah” that the café format could be a form of participatory research, a way to frame and understand the questions people were holding.  All of sudden, this café became a pilot conversation for something much bigger, with a full day workshop being the intention for the summer.

Our civic instincts were powerful drivers as well— perhaps the most deeply held of all. At this moment of deep transition and uncertainty, we felt in our bones the importance of getting people to talk about these questions, to be more actively engaged in how to “be the change.”  For it's moments of systemic change, when everything is in flux that individuals can make the most difference in influencing events and the future.   So for a little investment in time and tea, we figured it was well worth doing… and it was.

Why people came—and who showed 
As people gathered around 5:30pm, it was clear that many came out of sheer curiosity, drawn in by these powerful questions and the promise of something a bit different.   Not many people in the room knew each other, a surprise given that many folks were long-time residents, and most had no clue what a World Café was or would be.  As one person said later on, “I had no idea what this would be about, but instead of watching TV, I thought this would be a different kind of entertainment.  And it was! It was best way to spend the evening!”

 Serendipity also played a helpful role.  Many in the room showed up because of Brooking’s excellent networking (often in person at her local café, Asana), and through the help of Daniel Blumberg, an amazing “connector” in the community with deep experience and passion for these questions.  This café wouldn’t have been possible without them.

Our group was diverse for Santa Cruz, and delightfully so.  We had therapists, energy healers and body workers to professionals in sustainability, real estate, financial planning, logistics, and marketing— plus a few people from San Francisco.  Many people came with years of personal and professional experience with this subject matter, and others were in early phases of their own inner explorations.   Beginner minds helped seasoned practitioners and vice versa.

What we did
The introductions, alone, would have met our expectations.  Already a palpable energy was building in the room as everyone realized what an amazing group had been gathered— a buzz that continued well into the evening thanks to abundant quantities of pu-erh tea expertly brewed and served by Noah, a linguistics student at UCSC.  

Once we explained the World Café principles, we spent the next two-and-half hours, at four lively tea tables, intimate and low to the ground, exploring our questions in 30-minute rounds, in the following sequence: 

1. Why is this important? How does “inner work” translate into world-changing action?

2.  What enables this to happen— i.e. the nexus between inner work and changing the world? What key factors need to align for real transformation to happen?

3. What are the barriers?   What gets in the way of inner work translating into world-changing work? And what is the shadow side of all of work?

When the rounds were complete, people shared what was emerging for them.  The key themes included: the importance of having good tools for these transformation processes; creating “containers” or safe spaces for the often painful and frightening explorations that can lead to inner change; creating community and support networks for birthing more whole leaders and supporting their work in healing each other and our planet.  “What if our political leaders had to go through personal rites of passage before taking office,” said one person, “how world-changing would that be!”  Many participants also expressed appreciation (and pleasant surprise) for the organization and structure of the World Café process itself, which was a living example of the kind of “containers” we need in the world.

(click the image to see it full size, or download the pdf)

Lastly, the group also recognized a great power in itself— perhaps the most important insight of all. Many participants were already engaged in great work that the rest of the group was eager to explore and help support, and a “yahoo group” will likely be created to help the participants continue to connect and support each other’s personal and professional journeys. The sense of excitement, shared-interest and connection was so strong afterwards that many of the participants went out for a late dinner, and dancing ensued well into the evening! We were thrilled to see this happen as a result of a three hour World Café process and are planning to host similar events on this subject in other locations later this year.   Once again, we’re reminded that it’s the simplest of things that change the world.

 - - - - - - - - - - - -
The co-hosts: The co-hosts were Brooking Gatewood and Nicole Boyer of Adaptive Edge, a "better futures" organization based in San Francisco.  Brooking lives in Santa Cruz and is a long time environmental activist and is involved locally in dance church, women’s work, and co-operative living. Nicole lives in San Francisco and has spent her career engaged in futures thinking, strategic foresight, and scenario planning work.  As her book project alludes to, she is deeply committed to helping people discover their best “personal future”.  Nicole is also a steward of The World Café, and is working with its founders and foundation on its long-term sustainability.

Interview with Nancy Margulies

World Cafe host (and so much more) Nancy Margulies, interviewed by Nicole Anne Boyer:

NAB: When and how did you first become involved in TWC?

NM:  About the time Juanita and David were figuring this out, they came out to Sundance where Margaret Wheatly was doing a workshop.  I was up there working with her, doing workshops on chaos, complexity, and self-organization. She had just written her foundational book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. 

When I heard Juanita describe the World Café as a process and a way of understanding the power of conversation, I immediately said “I want to work with you and support you in any way I can” because we had been talking about this “other way of being together”, of being part of a healthy living system, but didn’t have a a specific way to practice it— it was all theoretical. To me Open Space and the World Café were good examples of what Margaret’s theory suggests.

Juanita and I put a poster together, and I started to illustrate and host cafés myself and developed my own variations, like the “Passion Cafes” – think of Open Space meeting TWC where people define their topics and the café tables are organized around those topics. And then the Climate Change café started.  I also used TWC in New Orleans to help the recovery process, and then to help people around the country consider what we can learn from what occurred in New Orleans.