The World Café Juanita Brown (2001)

The World Café is an innovative methodology for dialogic inquiry, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation. It is also an evocative metaphor enabling us to notice the generative power of conversation in human systems at increasing levels of scale. The World Café illuminates the ways in which dynamic networks of conversation and social learning enable us to create “living knowledge,” particularly in large group settings.

It describes the underlying principles that allow leaders to engage and focus these living networks in the service of institutional and societal renewal. The study calls on the lived experience of a global community of World Café practitioners including line executives, educators, and organizational strategy specialists who are using Café learning in a wide variety of cross-cultural community, government, and business contexts.

It also calls on interdisciplinary insights from living systems and the new sciences, community development, strategy innovation, consciousness studies, dialogue, and organizational learning.

Using “conversational inquiry,” a research method grounded in narrative, heuristic, and hermeneutic traditions, the author joins with other collaborators as storytellers on a mutual journey of discovery. Through including and connecting creative modes of expression as well as diverse voices and multi-disciplinary insights, the author illuminates Café learning as a method for collaborative inquiry and, at the same tine, engages the World Café as a provocative organizing image for large-scale change. The collaborative research process itself reflects the living systems principles that are embodied in Café learning, thus making a substantive contribution to both generative theory as well as to “new ways of knowing” in the social sciences.

The study’s findings articulate four simple operating principles that, when used in combination, support a “system thinking together” in order to access collective intelligence, discover shared meaning, and bring forth desired futures. Seeing organizations as dynamic networks of conversation and meaning-making provides the opportunity to re-conceive organizational learning, strategy innovation, technology design, and leadership development based on the ways living systems co-evolve the systemic intelligence they need to learn, adapt, and thrive.

Author

Juanita Brown

Paper