World Café

"Conducting an exciting World Café is not hard - it’s limited only by your imagination! The Café format is flexible and adapts to many different circumstances. When these guidelines are used in combination, they foster collaborative dialogue, active engagement and constructive possibilities for action."

--Quote from Café to Go, the World Café manual

World Café is a creative process to create a dialogue in a group and to share knowledge about a certain theme. What is essential is to create an atmosphere of informality; this occurs by splitting the participants into smaller groups of about vour persons, who discuss the chosen topic around small café-style tables. The make-up of these conversations changes each round, because during a number of short conversation rounds (20 to 30 minutes), participants shift to another table. However, one participants always remains at the table as a host or hostess. In this way, a large amount of information is exchanged in a short amount of time, creating shared knowledge by means of cross-pollination. During the conversation, ideas and insights are jotted down on the table cloth (a large piece of paper, e.g. from a flipchart). At the start of each conversation, the host or hostess welcomes the new participants to his or her table, offering a short summary of the most important ideas and themes of previous conversations. At the end of the process, the table cloths are gathered around and the results are shared during a plenary session.

World Café was born in 1995 during a two-day dialogue of an international multi-disciplinary group known as the 'Intellectual Capital Pioneers'. Impressed by the depth and creative power of their collaboration, they wondered: ‘What is it that has allowed us to have such powerful conversations and deep insights?’. Reflecting on their largely improvized process lead them to develop seven design principles and a first draft of the ‘Café etiquette’. In 2005, David Isaacs and Juanita Brown co-wrote a book on the World Café. These authors are regarded around the world as the founders of the method and related facilitation processes.

Contact and more information

Realize! uses the World Café directly and indirectly in its Team development and Organization development services. If you're interested in hearing more, or in a workshop using the World Café, contact us at info@realize.nl.