Page 4 - The World Cafe

Special Report – Hosting Strategic Conversations 3
There are seven basic principles for conversations that matter, as laid out by Brown and Isaacs. These are:
1. Set the context. Be absolutely clear on the purpose, parameters and participants that you want to engage.
2. Create hospitable space. Create a welcoming environment that allows for personal comfort and mutual respect, and that enables participants to put down their defenses and speak freely.
3. Explorequestionsthatmatter. Develop and focus attention on powerful questions that enable collaborative engagement.
4. Encourage everyone’s contribution. Create processes that allow full participation and mutual sharing, with no barriers such as position, rank, gender, age or culture.
5. Cross-PollinateandConnect Diverse Perspectives. Use living system dynamics to create new connections between participants and ideas while maintaining a common focus on core questions.
6. Listen Together for Patterns, Insights, and Deeper Questions. Listen actively and look for connections and shared ground between perspectives.
7. HarvestandShareCollective Discoveries. Allow the larger group to share insights from each
discussion to enable direction and action to emerge.
These basic principles apply to many different approaches for hosting conversations, including open space, world café, future sensing and our own Genesis breakthrough facilitation process.
Appreciative Inquiry
If you focus on dealing with problems and things that can and will go wrong, you’ll find more things that go wrong. We’ve become a culture of problem solvers and, as a result, we’ve found (or created) successively greater problems in our work, our communities and globally that we are now challenged to resolve.
Typically, we look at what’s not working in an organization and assign a small group to fix it. The implicit assumption is that something is wrong, and if you look for what’s wrong, you’ll find it. Simply put, what you focus on grows, as illustrated in this simple exercise in an earlier article.
Instead of focusing on problems, if you take the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach (originated by Dr. David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University) and focus on what’s working and what’s good, you find more and more that it’s working and, as has been proven in a growing number of organizations and communities, you create new, inspiring organizations that realize potential unattainable by organizations of problem-solvers.
AI engages all stakeholders to find the systemic strengths and take those to the
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