The World Cafe refers
to both a vision and a method of dialogue. It evolved out of conversations
and experimentation one evening at the home of consultants Juanita
Brown and David Isaacs.
Juanita Brown describes the vision:
We are not powerless to make a difference to the future of our families, our communities, our organizations, and our world. We have always brought forth the future through webs of personal commitments born through human conversation. By choosing to focus on questions worth asking we are changing the conversation. As we change the conversation, we are beginning to change our common future.
Through mutual listening and a spirit of discovery, a certain type of magic appears -- the magic of a new collective intelligence arising from the individual minds present in the conversation. Reaching out in ever widening circles, participants of such conversations are experiencing the magic pollinating larger constituencies, carrying the seed ideas for new conversations, creative possibilities and collective action. This generative source of collective intelligence, of collective awareness, of our capacity for 'knowing together' is our lifenet -- a fertile field of unforeseen possibilities emerging in courageous conversation, from which new futures are born and new worlds brought into being.
Our local conversations are connected and linked to others occurring in many simultaneous places. All these conversations and our awareness of their connectedness constitute The World Cafe. And all over the world the lifenet and the magic serve as the fertile soil which nourish conversations at local tables in The World Cafe.
The process of The World Cafe -- the thing that happens at those
"local tables" -- mimics the larger global dance of
interlinking conversations, of which it is a part. Although it
has many variations, the core process goes something like this
(compiled from an email from Nancy Margulies, another co-creator
of The World Cafe):