The seven World Café design principles
(Following are excerpts from the book The World Café.)
(For more about the process and the book, see www.theworldcafe.com)
Principle 1: Set the CONTEXT
Set the context for Café conversations: purpose, participants, parameters. Clarify the purpose, why are we bringing people together?
Principle 2: Create hospitable SPACE
The Invitation helps set the expectation that this will be a different kind of meeting where everyone will have an active opportunity to contribute. Include an initial question or theme important to invitees. A question should arouse curiosity and open the way for more conversation. Include references to on-line info. Invite the spectrum of folks from the community. Diversity of thought and experience is perhaps the single most important criterion for gaining new insight and accessing collective wisdom. Craft your invitation to convey that participants can expect to have fun, be engaged, and learn new things. When sending a written invitation, find ways to make it stand out from the usual e-mail or written correspondence by making it informal, creative, personal, and visually interesting.
Have music playing when people arrive. Create a conversational environment by making the venue look like a cafe. Arrange the room to be as welcoming as possible. Natural light and an outdoor view are always inviting. Plants and greenery enliven a space. Transform a dull meeting room with pictures or posters on the walls. Hospitality and community thrive on food and refreshments.
Make introductory comments at the Café that include context, Café etiquette, and process description. A brief reading of the “Café Etiquette” and “Café Assumptions” should be enough to spark a cooperative atmosphere in the room. Emphasize that everyone's experience and ideas are a valuable contribution to the whole.
As a host, be open and curious about how things are actually unfolding. Good hosting is a privilege, not a job. It's very important leadership work. Trust yourself to open up space for everyone to give their best. Be the best host you can, and then trust the process. As a host, ask yourself: "What can I do to make whomever I am with feel physically comfortable, emotionally safe, and intellectually challenged? How can I support members in discovering a deeper understanding and appreciation for each other and for the questions we're exploring? How can I engage the Café participants themselves in hosting each other and in discovering the magic in the middle of their conversations?"
Provide ways for people to share ideas (overhead projector, large paper sheets taped to walls, real-time electronic voting, etc.)
Principle 3: Explore QUESTIONS that matter
The questions pursued during a Café are critical to its success. A powerful question:
- is simple and clear;
- is thought-provoking;
- generates energy;
- focuses inquiry;
- surfaces assumptions;
- opens new possibilities.
Open-ended questions invite exploration, inquiry and discovery rather than advocacy and advantage. Test questions before using them. The most energizing questions are those that engage people's values, hopes, and ideals -- questions that relate to something that's larger than themselves, to which they can connect and contribute. A good question is like a seed crystal that starts a conversation that begins to take on a more complex, richer form. It grows in amazing and unpredictable ways. It attracts and generates energy, it opens up possibilities, it invites deeper exploration, all while being simple. "What do we not know, that if we did know, could transform this situation for the better?" Genuine questions are open invitations to innovation, calling forth ideas and insights that don't yet exist.
Principle 4: Encourage everyone's CONTRIBUTIONS
The experts' analysis is framed as a resource to provide food for thought.
As the hosting team, ask the group to honor a few simple agreements -- confidentiality, making sure there is a space for each person to speak, and listen with respect.
Be open to changing things if the Café isn't going as planned. How can we get back to the purpose we're here for? Notice if things are not working, or just uncomfortable. Sometimes the uncomfortable is necessary to break through to new thinking and knowledge.
Honor and encourage each person's contribution to create the relationship between the I and the we. One way is to invite each participant to write or say a question that matters to them.
Café hosts should focus on "being" rather than specific tools. Be yourself rather than some formal role; being yourself encourages participants to be themselves and share more openly. Likewise, hosts invite and encourage contributions. Be available for people in a spirit of service.
Link people, perspectives, and world views. Focus on discovering the common ground and collective wisdom that can be accessed by moving beyond the political, social, economic, and organizational categories that so often narrow our field of vision and action.
A "talking stone" is a way to encourage better listening and avoid arguments and defensive positions. By allowing only the person holding to stone to speak, it allows that person to stop and take a breath while thinking about what they really want to say rather than babbling so someone else won't cut in before the thought is finished. (and allows the thought to hang there for a moment).
Principle 5: Share PERSPECTIVES
Cross-Pollinate and Connect Diverse Perspectives
Co-intelligence is an apt description of the magic that World Café hosts and participants experience. It is the creative cross-pollination of people and ideas combined with the disciplined use of questions as attractors that is perhaps the World Café's defining contribution to dialogic learning and collective intelligence.
Encourage personal stories and experiences within the weave of the conversation.
Changing the table host after the second round (so each host can also experience being a traveler), helps build a web of new relationships and fosters a sense of community.
Principle 6: LISTEN together for insights
LISTEN together for Pattern, Insights, and Deeper Questions
Prior to the large-group sharing of insights and discoveries, prepare the group with some combination of music, poetry, silent reflection and jotting a few notes about what has impressed them during their earlier conversations.
Use mind-mapping techniques to display patterns.
Consider questions that explore what people appreciated, deeply felt, overlooked, or think requires a deeper level of understanding or clarity.
Principle 7: Share collective DISCOVERIES
Harvest and share collective discoveries.
The conversation of the whole - which comes at the end of a sequence of Café rounds - is a key element in the harvesting and sharing of collective discoveries. Designing and facilitating this conversation requires special artistry and care. The goal is to continue to nurture a spirit of authentic dialogue while creating the opportunity to evoke collective insight in the larger group.
Use graphics, cards, sticky notes, voting dots, keypad voting technology or the table cloths to share insights and ideas. When people can see graphically what they hold in common, they can begin to connect the dots.
Encourage expression of participants’ personal experience of what's at the center of our collective conversations so we can tap into the "heart wisdom" in the room. And if that sharing takes a form different from the standard bullet point presentation, all the better because other forms of visual language, theater, poetry, artistic expression can play powerful roles in enhancing our capacities for thinking together about complex issues.
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