World Cafe

The World Café is a method for creating a living network of collaborative dialogue around questions that matter in real life situations.  It is a provocative metaphor...as we create our lives, our organizations, and our communities, we are, in effect, moving among ‘table conversations’ at the World Café.  (From The World Café Resource Guide at www.theworldcafe.com)

What is World Café Good For?

A World Café is a great way of fostering interaction and dialogue with both large and small groups. It is particularly effective in surfacing the collective wisdom of large groups of diverse people.  The café format is very flexible and adapts to many different purposes – information sharing, relationship building, deep reflection exploration and action planning.

When planning a café, make sure to leave ample time for both moving through the rounds of questions (likely to take longer than you think!) and some type of whole-group harvest.

Operating Principles of World Cafe: 

  • Create hospitable space
  • Explore questions that matter
  • Encourage each person’s contribution
  • Connect diverse people and ideas
  • Listen together for patterns, insights and deeper questions 
  • Make collective knowledge visible

Assumptions of World Cafe:

  • The knowledge and wisdom we need is present and accessible.
  • Collective insight evolves from honoring unique contributions; connecting ideas; listening into the middle; noticing deeper themes and questions. 
  • The intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways.

General Flow of a World Café:

  1. Seat 4-5 people at café-style tables or in conversation clusters. 
  2. Set up progressive rounds of conversation, usually of 20-30 minutes each – have some good questions!
  3. Ask one person to stay at the table as a “host” and invite the other table members to move to other tables as ambassadors of ideas and insights
  4. Ask the table host to share key insights, questions, and ideas briefly to new table members, and then let folks move through the rounds of questions.
  5. After you’ve moved through the rounds, allow some time for a whole-group harvest of the conversations.


Materials Needed:

  • Small tables (36-42”), preferably round
  • Chairs for participants and presenters
  • Tablecloths
  • Flip chart paper or paper placemats for covering the tables
  • Markers
  • Flip chart or large butcher paper for harvesting collective knowledge or insights
  • Posters/Table Tents of Café Etiquette
  • Materials for harvest

World Cafe overview

A brief guide for hosting a World Cafe

cafe_to_go.pdf
File Size: 604 kb
File Type: pdf
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Further resources

The World Cafe community has a beautiful online presence and share many resources and tools online.
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The World Cafe User's guide, containing practice stories and application tips.