The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter [Paperback]

This book provides all of us the opportunity to embrace the future and let go of the past.

The World Café serves as an inspiration to help make greater mutual understanding across social and cultural differences possible.

Understanding the processes that constitute the World Café’s conversation network is essential for understanding life and leadership in human organizations.

I urge line leaders to employ this simple, but powerful approach for thinking together which ultimately improves the bottom line.

"The World Cafe" is an easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue and creating innovative possibilities for action particularly in large groups. Anyone interested in creating "conversations that matter" can engage the World Cafe approach, with its' seven simple design principles, to improve people's collective capacity to share knowledge and shape the future together. Using the World Cafe process and principles empowers leaders and other professionals to intentionally create dynamic networks of conversation around an organization or community's real work and critical questions, improving both personal relationships and collective performance.Part of "Berrett-Koehler's" series of books on the most popular, participative, engaging methods of changing communities and organizations, this title introduces readers to, the World Cafe, a simple, yet powerful process for catalyzing and leading catalytic conversations that has been used by tens of thousands of people around the world to tackle real life issues and questions. It includes real-world stories - from widely varied geographical, cultural, business, government, non-profit, community and educational settings, including Hewlett-Packard, Saudi Aramco, the nation of Singapore, the University of Texas and many others - show how the Cafe process produces business and social value.It breaks new ground in offering an almost infinitely scalable design for creating constructive dialogue both in very large groups and with people who have not had prior dialogue training. It clearly articulates seven key design principles that, when used in combination, create the conditions for breakthrough thinking. It includes a foreword by Margaret J.Wheatley, author of the bestselling "Leadership and the New Science", "A Simpler Way", and "Turning to One Another"; and an afterword by Peter Senge, author of "The Fifth Discipline".

Juanita Brown, Ph.D. is cooriginator 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 Communityis made up of organizational and community leaders and others who are fostering conversational leadership across the globe.