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JUANITA BROWN, KEN HOMER, AND DAVID ISAACS

The World Café

In the new economy conversations are the most important form of work.

—Alan Webber, Harvard Business Review

What We Know About How Organizations Learn

Several years ago, Meg Wheatley and Juanita Brown, under the auspices of the Berkana Institute, were cohosting a program on living systems. They introduced an innovative approach to large group dialogue, called the World Café. Bob Veazie, an engineer at Hewlett Packard, was among the participants that day. Deeply touched by the experience, here’s how he recalls the Café’s impact:

The core question posed for the Café was, “What do we believe we know about how organizations learn?” We had twenty minutes or so for each table of four to explore the question. Then one person stayed at the table and the rest moved to other Café tables, met new people and continued the dialogue. Everyone was very actively involved, the energy and volume were high, and people brought different aspects of what they learned from their last tables to their new conversations. It was very exciting, but very disturbing at the same time.

Something profound happened that day. For those few hours, I experienced something utterly new and yet completely familiar that challenged everything I thought I knew about how the world works. I realized that my organization functions differently from how it looks on the formal organization chart—that underneath those boxes might be more natural conversations than anything that can be formally “managed” in the way we, as leaders, normally think about it. I could see that each day we engaged in conversations around different questions, just like these small table conversations in the Café—and that we moved between those “tables” as we did our work. It became clear that the World Cafe wasn’t just a classroom experience. This is how life actually works! We just don’t ordinarily have the nice tables and the flowers.

I can’t honestly say that I knew immediately what the implications of seeing in this new way were for me as a leader. That came later. But that day, the World Café shifted how I saw the world. I started to wonder: If conversations are the heart of our work, then how am I, as a leader, relating to this natural set of conversations going on? Am I contributing to it or am I taking energy away from it? Are we using the intelligence of just a few people when we could gain the intelligence of hundreds by focusing on key questions and including people more intentionally as we did in that World Café conversation? These questions haunted me. My first World Café experience brought up deeper systemic issues that I’m still thinking and learning about to this day.

About a year and a half after his first World Café, Bob was leading a project on reducing the accident rate among 50,000 employees at Hewlett Packard. Using World Café principles, he and his team reduced the company-wide accident rate more than 33 percent by engaging people at all levels in connected conversations about the questions that mattered most to them about safety.

The Basics

WHAT IS THE WORLD CAFÉ?

Through both our research¹ and a decade of practice, we have come to view the World Café as a conversational process, based on a set of integrated design principles that reveal a deeper living network pattern, through which we coevolve our collective futures.

As a conversational process, the World Café is a simple methodology that can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, increasing people’s capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims. One reason for this is that regardless of the size of the Café, participants experience each conversation at their table as linked and connected to the unfolding conversation in the room as a whole. We have successfully used it with groups from 12 to 1,200. The integrated design principles evoke collective intelligence through dialogue. These principles can be used in a plethora of settings, helping people at all levels of a system develop greater collective capacity to shape their futures through conversations that matter.

As a living network pattern, the World Café provides a lived experience of participating in a dynamic network of conversations that continually coevolves as we explore questions that matter with family, friends, colleagues, and community. The metaphor of the “World as Café,” helps us notice these often-invisible webs of dialogue and personal relationships that enable us to learn, create shared purpose, and shape life-affirming futures together.

WHEN IS THE WORLD CAFÉ USEFUL AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

A well-designed Café is useful whenever you wish to access the intelligence and best thinking of groups. Tens of thousands of people on six continents have experienced the World Café in settings as disparate as multinational corporations, small nonprofits, government agencies, community-based organizations, and educational institutions.

In a World Café conversation, four people sit at a café-style table or in a small conversation cluster to explore a question or issue that matters to their life, work, or community. Other participants seated at nearby tables or in conversation clusters explore similar questions at the same time. As they talk, participants are encouraged to write down key ideas on large cards or to sketch them on paper tablecloths that are there for that purpose.

After a 20- to 30-minute “round of conversation” in an initial intimate group of 4 or 5 members, participants are invited to change tables—carrying key ideas and insights from their previous conversation into a newly formed small group. One “host” stays at each table to share with new arrivals the key images, insights, and questions that emerged from their prior dialogue. This process is repeated for several (generally three) rounds and is followed by a harvesting of the dialogue to which all participants contribute.

Given the purpose and design of the Café, the whole process can occur successfully in as little as two hours, while more in-depth explorations may take up to several days. The World Café fosters new connections. Each table and Café round is a self-contained conversation that becomes linked to the larger conversation taking place among all participants. The cross-pollination of perspectives that results is one of the hallmarks of the World Café. As people and ideas become ever more richly connected during progressive rounds of conversation, latent, collective knowledge becomes visible. A growing sense of the larger whole transforms how participants see themselves and their relationships. Collective intelligence grows and evolves, and innovative possibilities for action are brought forward.

Café conversations are designed on the assumption that people already have within them the wisdom and creativity to effectively address even their most difficult challenges. The World Café works because it is based on something we all know how to do—engage in a good conversation. It draws on the quintessential processes by which people around the world naturally think together, create shared meaning, strengthen community, and ignite innovation.

The World Café enables leaders in any setting to create generative networks of conversation focused on the questions that are critical to the real work of their organization or community. Given the appropriate framing and focus, Café conversations allow participants to access mutual intelligence in the service of desired outcomes. Those using it often report an unexpected leap in their collective capacity to establish trust, nurture relationships, expand effective knowledge, and create new possibilities for action, even among people with no previous history of working together. Consequently, the World Café and its design principles have immediate, practical implications for meeting and conference design, strategy formation, knowledge creation, innovation, and large-scale systems change.

In each conversation, individual contributions are focused on questions that matter.

People build on one another’s ideas—everyone contributes from their own perspective to create new understanding.

As people make new connections sparks of insight begin to emerge that no one would have alone.

The whole continues to evolve into greater coherence—the discovery of collective intelligence.

As people share insights between tables, the “magic in the middle” and a sense of the whole becomes more accessible.

As a metaphor, the “World as Café” helps illuminate a core process that underpins large-scale organizational and societal change. Throughout history, new ideas have been born through informal conversations in cafés, salons, pubs, places of worship, kitchen tables, and living rooms. Major change efforts often begin when the people most affected by an issue simply start talking together. Members of these small groups then share the questions and ideas that touch them with others, who do the same. Over time, sometimes quite rapidly, the exploration ripples out and engages ever-larger constituencies in widening circles, stimulating new conversations, creative possibilities, and collective action.

The World Café offers an easily accessible experience of how conversations create shared meaning, which in turn shapes individual and collective behavior. For example, our colleague, Carlos Mota, brought diverse stakeholders together for a World Café in Mexico. High government officials were seated with rural farmers and city-dwelling businesspeople and invited to engage questions vital to their collective future. These diverse voices cross-pollinated their perspectives through multiple rounds of conversation contributing substantially to the direction and focus that Mexico’s National Fund for Social Enterprise undertook as a result. Imagine the resulting behavior had the conference been dominated by academic experts presenting papers to a passive audience of government representatives!²

Table of Uses

Getting Started

The most effective way to plan a World Café is to gather a design team and use the principles of the World Café (see “Conditions for Success,” below) in conceiving the event. The first three principles are particularly important for the designers: Set the Context, Create Hospitable Space, and Explore Questions That Matter.

A strong design team usually involves: skilled Café host(s); the sponsor of the Café (i.e., senior executive, department head, community leader, or credible third party) who will issue the invitation; and the convener of the Café (the person or persons responsible for translating the outcomes of the Café into actionable approaches to daily life and work). These roles may overlap. Other individuals who can make valuable contributions to the design team are those with a sense of the organization’s history and those who can voice various stakeholder concerns.

SETTING THE CONTEXT

This is the first design task. Illustrative questions to explore include: What is our purpose in convening the Café? What outcomes do we hope to achieve? What range of perspectives and voices need to be included in the conversation to achieve our goals? Who are the people that embody the necessary knowledge, expertise, and experience? What are the parameters—in terms of time, money, physical constraints, and other operational or strategic factors—that we must keep in mind during the design?

CREATING HOSPITABLE SPACE

This principle begins with the invitation that people receive. Great Café invitations alert people that this is not a business-as-usual meeting. Hospitable space also means attending both to the physical space and to the way people are invited to participate before, during, and after the Café. The impact of the environment on the conversation cannot be overstated. A room set with small tables that seat four or five people produces a profoundly different conversation than one set with tables that seat ten. Likewise, ensuring that natural light, windows, flowers or plants, and refreshments are present creates an atmosphere that nourishes good conversation.

EXPLORING QUESTIONS THAT MATTER

Formulating appropriate questions is more art than science. Each group and each Café is a unique gathering of minds and needs careful consideration when selecting powerful questions that can engage participants in uncovering new insights, knowledge, and innovation. There is no magic formula for crafting questions that matter, but as David Cooperrider³ has observed, people grow in the direction of the questions they ask. In a Café, questions that are appreciative and that evoke participants’ sense of possibility generate more energy and engagement than questions posed from a deficit perspective. Questions that are clear, connected to purpose, and meaningful to participants in practical ways catalyze more creativity than questions that are unfocused, overly general, or abstract. Optimally, the design team spends considerable time in a question discovery phase.

The questions below can help you craft questions for your Café (thanks to Sally Ann Roth of the Public Conversations Project⁴).

• What question, if explored thoroughly, could provide the breakthrough possibilities we are seeking?

• Is this question relevant to the real life or real work of the Café participants?

• Is this a genuine question to which we really don’t know the answer?

• What work do we want this question to do? What kind of conversation, meanings, and feelings do we imagine this question will evoke in those who will be exploring it?

• What assumptions or beliefs are embedded in the way this question is constructed?

• Is this question likely to generate hope, imagination, engagement, new thinking, and creative action, or is it likely to increase a focus on past problems and obstacles?

• Does this question leave room for new and different questions to be raised as the initial question is explored?

Careful, up-front design deepens the experience of participants at all levels, and contributes to the likelihood the Café will have lasting beneficial effects.

Roles and Responsibilities

THE CAFÉ SPONSOR/CONVENOR

This is the person or group within an organization or community who authorizes and supports the World Café process. Ideally, the sponsor sees beyond the mechanics of the Café process to notice the power of conversation to surface new insights, coordinate actions, make sense of experience, and bring forth the future—as Bob Veazie did in the opening story. He or she commits to fostering the capacity for “good conversation” in service to the organization or community’s larger goals.

THE DESIGN TEAM

The role of the design team is covered in the “Getting Started” section.

THE CAFÉ HOST(S)

World Café conversations are hosted, not facilitated in the traditional sense. Attempting to “facilitate” Café conversations has a deleterious effect on the natural exuberance and generative nature of the gathering. The role of the host is to work with the design team in creating a hospitable space for lively conversation. During the Café, the host is responsible for clearly communicating the details of the process and answering questions related to the “what” and “how” of the Café. He or she is responsible for posing the questions the participants will explore, for making the context of those questions clear, and for the skillful harvesting of themes, insights, and deeper questions that arise during the Café. The host also helps ensure that the collective knowledge that emerges during the Café becomes visible to the whole group.

Table 1. Roles and Responsibilities

A REFLECTIVE GRAPHICS PROFESSIONAL

Whenever possible, graphic professionals map the Café conversation as it is shared in the whole group conversation. Also known as graphic recorders, graphic facilitators, or visual practitioners, they act as the visual cortex of the collective mind of the group. They record voices and create images to reflect key substantive ideas, map previously invisible connections, and illuminate relationships between different perspectives. The maps are valuable records of the Café and create an image of the whole that can highlight both the rich diversity and overall coherence of participants’ contributions.

THE CAFÉ PARTICIPANTS

Every conversation has some etiquette associated with it, and the World Café is no exception. Over the last decade, we have evolved a set of practices that link with the design principles to foster the conditions for powerful conversations. Participants use the Café Etiquette to support each other in speaking and listening authentically.

Conditions for Success

In our research, we discovered that the following seven principles, when engaged as an integrated whole, create the conditions that enable the “magic” of Café dialogues to emerge and unfold.

1. Set the Context: Clarify the purpose and parameters within which the dialogue will unfold.

2. Create Hospitable Space: Assure the welcoming environment and psychological safety that nurtures personal comfort and mutual respect.

3. Explore Questions that Matter: Focus collective attention on powerful questions that attract collaborative engagement.

4. Encourage Everyone’s Contribution: Enliven the relationship between the “me” and the “we” by inviting full participation and mutual giving.

5. Cross-Pollinate and Connect Diverse Perspectives: Use the living system dynamics of emergence through intentionally increasing the diversity of perspectives and density of connections while retaining a common focus on core questions.

6. Listen Together for Patterns, Insights, and Deeper Questions: Focus shared attention in ways that nurture coherence of thought without losing individual contribution.

7. Harvest and Share Collective Discoveries: Make collective knowledge and insight visible and actionable.

In addition to the synergy of engaging the Café principles as an integrated whole, the art of hosting—which involves invitation, welcoming, offering, and honoring—is essential to liberating the creative energy, intelligence, and relational capacity of participants. A skillful host engages participants in “listening for what is emerging” by appreciating how each perspective contributes to an understanding that is larger than any single position could reveal.

Theoretical Basis

The World Café is an emergent process for thinking together focused on creating coherence without control. We first experienced the Café pattern in early 1995 during a two-day dialogue among a group known as the Intellectual Capital Pioneers. Impressed by the power, depth, and innovative quality of these conversations, we asked, “What happened here that fostered such an illuminating conversation?” Reflection on the largely improvised process, and the subsequent research it spawned, resulted in the distillation of the World Café principles and etiquette. The continuing development and use of those principles has given rise to a growing global community of collaborative inquiry and practice.

Today, the community of World Café practitioners includes thousands of people. Juanita Brown’s global research and doctoral thesis illuminates the principles underlying the World Café and the many fields of inquiry that are woven into its tapestry of conversations that matter. Juanita addresses both the theoretical and practical bases of the World Café in her dissertation:

This study calls on the lived experience of a global community of World Café practitioners including line executives, educators and organizational strategists 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.⁵

Table 2, while not exhaustive, illuminates key fields of inquiry and process domains that inform the theory and practice of the World Café.

Domain of Practice/Inquiry	Representative Authors
Appreciative Inquiry	David Cooperrider, Diana Whitney
Architectural Theory	Christopher Alexander
Biology, Evolution, and Cognition	Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela
Chaordic Systems	Dee Hock, Tom Hurley
Collaborative Spaces	Michael Schrage
Collective Consciousness	David Bohm, Duane Elgin, Peter Russell
Collective Intelligence	Tom Atlee, George Por, Finn Voldtofte
Communities of Practice	Etienne Wenger
Community Development	Saul Alinsky, Paulo Friere
Complexity and New Sciences	Mitchell Waldrop, Margaret Wheatley
Dialogue	Linda Ellinor, Glenna Gerard, Bill Isaacs
Future Search	Sandra Janoff, Marvin Weisbord
Knowledge Theory	Verna Allee, Leif Edvinsson, Charles Savage
Leadership and Systems Thinking	Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley
Living Systems	Fritjof Capra, Michael Hoagland, Danah Zohar
Open Space	Peggy Holman, Harrison Owen
Organizational Learning	Chris Argyris, Edgar Schien, Peter Senge
Social Constructivism	Linda Lambert et al., Kenneth Gergen
Strategic Questioning	Marilee Goldberg, Fran Peavey, Eric Vogt
Strategy	Gary Hamel, C. K. Prahalad
Visual Language	Robert Horn, Nancy Margulies, David Sibbet
Wisdom Circles	Christina Baldwin, Charles Garfield et al.

Table 2. Key Fields of Inquiry and Process Domains

Sustaining the Results

The two most critical factors in sustaining the results of a World Café are: (1) a shift in the way the organization and its leaders understand the role of conversation as a core process, and (2) how participants of the Café come to appreciate the centrality of networks of conversation for community/organizational development and well-being.

The traditional view of conversation is suggested by the dictum, “Stop talking and get to work.” We now know this reflects a false and potentially fatal dichotomy. As Boston College professor of management Bill Torbert has pointed out: “During the industrial age and the current electro-informational age, we have become technically powerful, but have not cultivated our powers of action. People who speak of moving from talk to action are apparently not awake to the fact that talk is the essence of action. We are, in fact, deeply influenced by how we speak to one another.”⁶

The organizations that have been most successful in using the World Café are those that have adopted the metaquestion: “What would it mean for us to see our organization as a living network of conversations focused on our most important questions?” This was Bob Veazie’s breakthrough insight, which resulted in his inviting people throughout Hewlett Packard into transformative dialogues that dramatically improved safety. Through this lens, convening a World Café creates a space for possibility and connection where participants discover a sense of shared meaning, generate new knowledge, establish or deepen trust, and access levels of highly focused creativity that are energizing and exciting. The entire experience fosters a strong sense of shared commitment to and ownership of the outcomes of the process.

The process invites people to focus awareness not just on a given topic, but also on the way in which they speak about that issue. Participants often report a deeper appreciation for the previously unacknowledged assumptions and contexts that shape each other’s stance and perspectives.

The experience of intentionally surfacing, honoring, and cross-pollinating diverse perspectives to discover a larger whole is also quite striking for many participants. Moreover, it is an experience that people seek to repeat since it is invariably accompanied by feelings of possibility, excitement, and solidarity. If, as Meg Wheatley posits, “intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways,”⁷ then the process of participating in a World Café provides a direct experience of a growing collective intelligence to which all contribute but which is greater than any single perspective or individual in the room. Experiencing a World Café conversation in action also helps individuals make better personal choices about how to participate creatively in the ongoing conversations that shape our lives.

Participation in an effective World Café usually stimulates new insights. In our experience, key insights require at least three key supporting factors to be turned into embodied knowledge: a hospitable space for exploring their dimensions, a set of practices to ground them in daily life or work, and a community of supportive coexplorers to provide feedback and guidance. This highlights, again, the centrality of making conversation a core business process and fostering the development of collective capacities for collaborative dialogue throughout the organization.

As David Cooperrider⁸ and Humberto Maturana⁹ have pointed out, language does not mirror the world out there, but rather language coordinates our actions. We “bring forth a world” through the networks of conversation in which we participate. The lessons and perspectives of Maturana’s evolutionary biology and Cooperrider’s Appreciative Inquiry often come together quite powerfully for the participants of a World Café as they experience the role conversation plays in shaping our collective lives.

Burning Questions

When people ask us about the World Café, their most common question is, “Will it work in our organization?” The answer is “It depends.” The World Café is not a panacea for every organizational ill. The Café offers a process for integrating the diverse aspects and participants of an organization or community into a coherent, self-organizing whole, a set of principles for evoking collective intelligence, and a perspective on the central importance of conversation in transforming how we live and work together.

Another question we are often asked is, “How does the World Café relate to other conversational processes?” In our experience, what distinguishes the World Café is the use of Café Etiquette and the conscientious application of all seven World Café design principles. Other processes may feature one or more of the principles and related practices (such as speaking and listening from the heart, or using small tables and timed rounds), but the integrated application of all the principles results in a qualitatively distinct experience capable of delivering the results we have outlined above.

The last few years have seen an increase in the cross-pollination of the World Café with other large group processes such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, and Future Search. There is fertile soil to cultivate here. We often get questions on how to integrate various methodologies and, again, the answer is context-dependent. We’ve discovered that much of the success depends on the experience of the practitioner and his or her willingness to experiment. We welcome these experiments in cross-pollination.

World Café

Concluding Comments

Architect and philosopher Christopher Alexander¹⁰ has deeply influenced our thinking. He points out that living systems are made up of wholes at every level of scale—from the individual to the family to complex organizational systems such as towns, cities, and societies. He suggests that life-enhancing improvements arise not from grand plans or edicts from a central authority, but from small acts of collaboration based on a repetition of life-affirming patterns, like the pattern of engaging in conversations that matter. Alexander notes how millions of these tiny acts, carried out locally in any living system, can over time spread their effects to transform the character of the system as a whole.

We invite you to consider that each time you host, convene, and participate in courageous conversations about questions that matter to you (including World Café conversations), you contribute to creating a culture of dialogue that can tap the collective wisdom needed to create a legacy of hope for future generations.

About the Authors

Juanita Brown, Ph.D. ([email protected]), co-originator of the World Café, collaborates as a thinking partner and design advisor on key change initiatives with senior leaders across sectors—creating and hosting innovative forums for strategic dialogue on critical business and societal issues. Juanita has served as a senior affiliate with the MIT 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.

Ken Homer ([email protected]) is a World Café host and designer. Ken joined with Juanita and David in 1997 and has been an integral part of the team involved with the evolution of the World Café and its global community. Ken is the webmaster for the World Café Web site and has collaborated on Café designs with the University of California, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Natural Strategies, Royal Roads University (Canada), Business for Social Responsibility, and a range of other clients.

David Isaacs ([email protected]) is president of Clearing Communications, an organizational and communications strategy company working with senior executives in the United States and internationally. He has collaborated with corporate clients including Alaska Airlines, Ericsson, GlaxoSmithKline, Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Sanofi-Aventis. David’s nonprofit work has included hosting World Café dialogues with the Shambhala Institute, Kellogg Foundation, and Society for Organizational Learning. He also serves as adjunct faculty for University of Texas San Antonio Business School’s Executive MBA program.

Where to Go for More Information

REFERENCES

Alexander, C. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Brown, J. “Conversation as a Core Business Process.” The Systems Thinker 7, no. 10 (1996).

———. The World Café: A Resource Guide for Hosting Conversations That Matter. Mill Valley, CA: Whole Systems Associates, 2002.

———. “The World Café: Living Knowledge Through Conversations That Matter.” Doctoral dissertation, Whole Systems Associates, Mill Valley, CA, 2001.

Brown, J., D. Isaacs, and the World Café Community. The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005.

Cooperrider, D., D. Whitney, and J. Stavros. Appreciative Inquiry Handbook. Bedford Heights, OH, and San Francisco: Lakeshore Communications and Berrett-Koehler Communications, 2003.

Holman, Peggy, and Tom Devane, eds. The Change Handbook: Group Methods for Shaping the Future. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999.

Wheatley, M. J., and M. Kellnor-Rogers. A Simpler Way. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996.

INFLUENTIAL SOURCES

Adams, M. G. Change Your Questions Change Your Life. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004.

Atlee, Tom. The Tao of Democracy. Cranston, RI: The Writer’s Collective, 2003.

Lambert, L., et al. The Constructivist Leader. New York: Teachers College Press, 1995.

Levine, R., et al. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. New York: Perseus Books, HarperCollins, 2000.

Peavey, F. “Strategic Questioning: An Approach to Creating Personal and Social Change.” In By Life’s Grace: Musings on the Essence of Social Change, 86–111. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994.

Schrage, M. Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration. New York: Random House, 1990.

Vogt, E., J. Brown, and D. Isaacs. The Art of Powerful Questions: Catalyzing Insight, Innovation and Action. Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications, 2003.

Webber, A. “What’s So New About the New Economy?” Harvard Business Review (January/February 1993): 24–42.

Wheatley, M. J. Leadership and the New Science. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992.

ORGANIZATIONS

Pegasus Communications—www.pegasuscom.com

Distributor of the World Café book, dissertation, hosting guides, and other materials.

Whole Systems Associates—[email protected]

For World Café and other strategic dialogue consulting. Tel: (415) 383-0129.

The World Café—www.theworldcafe.com

The best place to go for the latest World Café information, including stories, articles, and hosting resources.

The World Café Community Foundation—[email protected]

Nonprofit foundation whose mission is to develop and disseminate World Café and other innovative dialogue approaches for positive futures. Tel: (415) 339-8714.

The World Café Online Community of Inquiry and Practice—www.theworldcafe.com or www.theworldcafecommunity.net

Where World Café hosts share stories, learning, and mutual support.

The authors wish to extend their gratitude to Tom Hurley for his invaluable help in the creation of this article.

1. J. Brown, with D. Isaacs and the World Café Community, The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005).

2. Ibid. See chapter 3 for full details.

3. P. Holman and T. Devane, eds., The Change Handbook (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999).

4. The Public Conversations Project can be reached at: http://www.publicconversations.org.

5. J. Brown, “The World Café: Living Knowledge Through Conversations That Matter” (Doctoral dissertation, Whole Systems Associates, 2001). Available from Pegasus Communications: http://www.pegasuscom.com.

6. As quoted in Leverage Points, Issue 60, March 25, 2005, published electronically by Pegasus Communications. Archive available at: http://www.pegasuscom.com/levpoints/lp60.html.

7. M. J. Wheatley and M. Kellnor-Rogers, A Simpler Way (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996).

8. D. Cooperrider, D. Whitney, and J. M. Stavros, Appreciative Inquiry Handbook (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003).

9. H. Maturana and F. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (Boston: Shambhala, 1987).

10. C. Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).