What is the World Café?
The World Café began with rain.
In 1995, Juanita Brown and David Isaacs were hosting a meeting at their home in California. The plan had been to hold one large conversation outside around a large table but the rain put a stop to that so people headed indoors and improvised. They settled around small tables, talked together about the questions that mattered to them and scribbled their ideas on makeshift paper tablecloths. Every so often, they changed tables, taking ideas from one conversation into the next.
THE ORIGIN
From accident to approach
Something rather wonderful happened.
Ideas travelled, connected and grew. The conversations produced insights that no one person had brought into the room. Brown and Isaacs went on to explore what had made this possible, eventually developing the seven design principles of the World Café.
At the heart of the approach are two beautifully simple ideas:
People like talking about things that matter to them.
There is great and undiscovered wisdom in a collective conversation.
WITH STUDENTS
What happens in the room?
And then the ideas begin to grow. One person offers a thought. Someone else adds to it, questions it or connects it to something happening at another table. Participants do not simply tell me things they already know. Through talking together, they discover things that none of us could have seen quite so clearly alone.
WHAT EMERGES
Dialogic expansion
dialogic expansion:
ideas get bigger and innovation emerges through conversation
This is the particular magic of the World Café.
It is not simply information-sharing.
It is invention.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING