Any dinner can be transformed easily into a conversation dinner. All you need is a conversation menu.
In November 2011, I spent two enjoyable days in Turin with the European Training Foundation (ETF).
I was mainly there to host a Knowledge Café at a conference they held. The Café was slightly unusual in that it was held in three languages: English, French, and Russian, but that’s another story.
On the evening before the first day, a small dinner was held for the participants of a Knowledge Management workshop that was to be held the following day, of which my Knowledge Café was a part.
One of the organizers, Ian Cumming, who had attended a Knowledge Café masterclass of mine in London a few weeks before, had heard me talk about Theodore Zeldin’s conversation dinners. Inspired by this, he created a conversational menu for the evening.
As you can see below, it was somewhat different from Theodore’s menu but served its purpose.
I was a little concerned that no one would select a question from the menu to discuss as there were many of them, and they were all work-related.
I was proven wrong in part. There were three tables in the dining room, each seating about six people. My table was the only one that drew some of our conversations from the menu (and that was not my doing).
What surprised me was how well it worked. Given that it was a social evening, we did not stick too closely to the questions, and there was a lot of laughter and banter. Still, the conversation was valuable nevertheless.
If you get the opportunity, try it. But don’t include too many questions; keep them short and light-hearted.
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