Page 10 - The World Cafe

Special Report – Hosting Strategic Conversations 9
They may doodle on the paper as they talk to capture some ideas that way.
At the end of this time, one person is asked to stay as table host, while the other 3-4 individuals each migrate to separate new tables. The table host welcomes the new participants at his or her table.
In the second round, the café hosts ask the participants to share the themes that arose in their first table. They may also offer a second question to focus the conversation. What happens at this stage is that ideas start to cross-pollinate between tables, and shared ideas start to grow at multiple tables. Once again, participants are asked to look at common elements and at what is arising at the center of the table.
Generally there will be at least a third round to allow further cross-pollination of ideas, and to allow the synthesis of the work into focused concepts. It is truly amazing how quickly ideas and themes migrate around a room of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of participants.
In a simple café, themes and learnings are often harvested at this point to close the session. There are many ways of doing this. It could be as simple as individuals at each table standing to share their insights and ideas, and these are captured in some form, often by an artist capturing the flow of the day on a mural.
Café can be as simple as three rounds, or it could continue in different iterations, or in conjunction with other hosting processes such as Open Space to do strategic planning or to be the process for a full conference. Some conferences have been run solely as cafés, with no speakers, while
others have some speakers, who then step into the audience and join a café to discuss the ‘so what’ relevance to the audience of what (s)he has shared. Key here, again, is that the wisdom is not in the ‘expert’, but rather in the audience.
The bottom line for the café process is that it actively builds the commitment of a wide range of stakeholders to a solution that works for all concerned, rather than a small group of individuals mandating a solution that they feel is best. It taps into our natural processes of sharing through conversation and allows understanding and insight to be the bridges to new ways of thinking and acting.
While the process may seem disorderly, it is really ‘controlled chaos’, and it is truly amazing the connections, insights, learnings and breakthroughs that arise. It taps our natural tendency to work in living systems that freely adapt and flow to deal with changes in the internal and external environment, as opposed to unnatural, mechanistic, fixed hierarchical structures and org charts that choke the life out of us. It is those structures that have created many of the problems that we face today in all aspects of work and the rest of life.
As Einstein himself said, the solution to a problem cannot be found at the same level at which it was created. The solutions we need lie not in new org charts, but rather with new ways of thinking
We are living systems, and we work best in living systems, and café and other hosting strategies tap those elements to create the breakthroughs we need.
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