The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
- 4h 44m
- David Isaacs, Juanita Brown
- Berrett-Koehler Publishers
- 2005
The World Cafe is a flexible, easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue, sharing mutual knowledge, and discovering new opportunities for action. Based on living systems thinking, this innovative approach creates dynamic networks of conversation that can catalyze an organization or community's own collective intelligence around its most important questions.
Filled with stories of actual Cafe dialogues in business, education, government, and community organizations across the globe, this uniquely crafted book demonstrates how the World Cafe can be adapted to any setting or culture. Examples from such varied organizations as Hewlett-Packard, American Society for Quality, the nation of Singapore, the University of Texas, and many others, demonstrate the process in action.
Along with its seven core design principles, The World Cafe offers practical tips for hosting "conversations that matter" in groups of any size- strengthening both personal relationships and people's capacity to shape the future together.
About the Authors
Juanita Brown, Ph.D. is co-originator of the World Café and has served as a Senior Affiliate at the MIT Sloan School’s Organizational Learning Center (now Society for Organizational Learning), as a Research Affiliate with the Institute for the Future and as a Fellow of the World Business Academy.
David Isaacs is President of Clearing Communications and designs strategic dialogue forums with senior leaders in the U.S. and abroad. David is also a co-originator of the World Café and serves as adjunct faculty with the University of Texas Business School’s Executive MBA Program.
The World Café Community is made up of organizational and community leaders and others who are fostering conversational leadership across the globe.
In this Book
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Foreword—We Can Be Wise Only Together
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Introduction—Beginning the Conversation—An Invitation to the World Café
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Seeing the Invisible—Conversation Matters!
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Conversation as a Core Process—Co-Creating Business and Social Value
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Principle 1—Set the Context
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Principle 2—Create Hospitable Space
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Principle 3—Explore Questions That Matter
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Principle 4—Encourage Everyone's Contribution
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Principle 5—Cross-Pollinate and Connect Diverse Perspectives
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Principle 6—Listen Together for Patterns, Insights, and Deeper Questions
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Principle 7—Harvest and Share Collective Discoveries
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Guiding the Café Process—The Art of Hosting
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Conversational Leadership—Cultivating Collective Intelligence
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The Call of Our Times—Creating a Culture of Dialogue
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Epilogue—How Can We Talk it Through?
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Afterword—Discovering the Magic of Collective Creativity
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Resources and Connections
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Bibliography
