Consider, for a moment, that the most widespread and pervasive learning in your organization may not be happening in training rooms, conference rooms, or boardrooms, but in the cafeteria, the hallways, and the cafe across the street. Imagine that through e-mail exchanges, phone visits, and bull sessions with colleagues, people at all levels of the organization are sharing critical business knowledge, exploring underlying assumptions, and creating innovative solutions to key business issues.

Imagine that “the grapevine” is not a poisonous plant to be cut off at the roots, but a natural source of vitality to be cultivated and nourished. Imagine that its branching, intertwining shoots are the natural pathways through which information and energy flow in the organization.

Consider that these informal networks of learning conversations are as much a core business process as marketing, distribution, or product development. In fact, thoughtful conversations around questions that matter might be the core process in any company — the source of organizational intelligence that enables the other business processes to create positive results. A more strategic approach to this core process can not only appreciate an organization’s intellectual capital, but can also create sustainable business value in the knowledge economy.

The Power of Conversation

All of us have, at one time or another, experienced a conversation that has had a powerful impact on us — one that sparked a new insight or helped us see a problem in a radically different light. What sets apart this type of generative, transformative conversation from the many exchanges that occur on a daily basis at our workplaces and in our homes? What are the qualities that make it worthwhile?

We have posed this question to hundreds of executives and employees in diverse cultures around the globe. While we have seen a wide range of individual experiences, common themes include:

• There was a sense of mutual respect between us.
• We took the time to really talk together and reflect about what we each thought was important.
• We listened to each other, even if there were differences.
• I was accepted and not judged by the others in the conversation.
• The conversation helped strengthen our relationship.
• We explored questions that mattered.
• We developed shared meaning that wasn’t there when we began.
• I learned something new or important.
• It strengthened our mutual commitment.

When we consider the power of conversation to generate new insight or committed action, its importance in our work lives is quite obvious. Fernando Flores, one of the first to highlight this crucial link has said that “an organization’s results are determined through webs of human commitments, born in webs of human conversations. ”We share a common heritage as fundamentally social beings who, together in conversation, organize for action and create a common future.

Yet this view of conversation as a way of organizing action contradicts a basic tenet in many organizational cultures — one based on the edict, “stop talking and get to work!” The underlying belief is that conversation takes time away from the more “important” work of the organization (see “Discovering Your Organization’s Capabilities”).

Paradoxically, what we are discovering is that the talking — the network of conversations — actually catalyzes action. Through conversation we discover who cares about what, and who will take accountability for next steps. It is the means through which requests are initiated and commitments made. From this perspective, a more useful operating principle for organizational life might be “start talking and get to work!”

Discovering Communities of Practice

Etienne Wenger and his colleagues at the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL), an outgrowth of Xerox’s pioneering Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), confirmed the centrality of collaborative conversation when they studied how learning actually takes place in an organization. Using interdisciplinary teams of anthropologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, and technology specialists, IRL has found that knowledge creation is primarily a social rather than an individual process. People learn together in conversation as they work and practice together. Therefore, important innovations are constantly being created at the grass-roots level, on the periphery, and at the local level, as people share common questions and concerns.

“Communities of practice” is what IRL calls the foundation for this social process of learning. In our own large-systems change work, we have called them “work communities.” These self-organizing networks are formed naturally by people engaged in a common enterprise — people who are learning together through the practice of their real work.

Conversation as a Core Process

IRL has found that the knowledge embodied in these communities is usually shared and developed through ongoing conversations. Because of this, John Seeley Brown, chief scientist at Xerox PARC, sees a critical need to develop systems and processes that “help foster new and useful kinds of conversations in the workplace.”

The MIT Center for Organizational Learning (OLC) has also been pursuing this challenge through ongoing research into the role of conversation in business settings. For several years, the study and practice of dialogue — a process of collective thinking and generative learning based on the seminal work of David Bohm — has been a central part of the Center’s action research and training efforts. In collaboration with the OLC, we are now developing principles and practices to support strategic conversation as a key business leverage.

In addition, Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz, innovators in the field of “groupware” technologies, have initiated a multi-company Community of Inquiry and Practice focused on supporting coherent conversations in cyberspace. Group members are actively experimenting with ways of strengthening the conversational practices of on-line communities, including the use of formal dialogue and inquiry mapping. Underlying all these activities is the belief that collaborative conversation is a strategic asset for supporting organizational learning infra-structures.

Alan Webber, in his pioneering Harvard Business Review article “What’s So New About the New Economy,” goes one step further and asserts that conversation is the lifeblood of the knowledge economy. Where information is the raw material and ideas are the currency of exchange, he explains, good conversations become the crucible in which knowledge workers to share and refine their thinking in order to create value-added products and services. In his assessment, “The most important work in the knowledge economy is conversation.”

Tools and Technologies That Support Good Conversation

Given that many organizations still operate from a “stop talking and get to work” mentality, it will take some focused attention to create an environment that recognizes and supports conversation as a core process. Toward this end, many companies are beginning to experiment with collaborative technologies and process tools that encourage the development of knowledge capital.

For example, one major consumer products company has instituted an innovative planning process throughout its sales organization. The process begins with an extensive situation analysis, in which management and field personnel explore all facets of the current business and competitive environment. From this analysis, they frame several core questions that will guide their subsequent strategic conversations. By encouraging the sales staff to develop a more disciplined focus on asking essential questions, the organization is encouraging the use of an inquiry model for business planning.

Other companies are exploring ways to create physical environments that encourage knowledge-generating conversations. For example, Steelcase Corporation has created office areas designed as “neighborhoods” where product and business teams work together in close proximity. Adjacent to these office neighborhoods are community “commons,” where informal conversation and community interaction occur. In similar style, SAS Airlines in Stockholm has a “central plaza” in the midst of its corporate headquarters. The plaza contains shops and a cafe where people from all levels and functions are encouraged to visit and share ideas.

Other organizations are developing sophisticated tools for collaborative work. For example, Buckman Laboratories International has created a worldwide intranet that enables its global sales force in 90 countries to engage in ongoing conversations about meeting customer needs. Users can contribute to the conversations at any time, from any place, and in several different languages. The system automatically updates the evolving “knowledge threads” as questions are explored and answers discovered.

With a simple and consistent focus on questions that matter, casual conversations are transformed into collective inquiry.

Likewise, Xerox is experimenting with Jupiter, a “virtual social reality” computer system that its designers hope will “support the organizational mind.” Jupiter comes complete with virtual white boards, personal offices, meeting rooms, and “lounges” where members can take a break and bump into a friend from a completely different city. In this environment, people can participate in larger community conversations as well as work in small groups on specific projects. Michael Schrage, in his book Shared Minds, points out that such collaborative tools and techniques “will transform both the perception and reality of conversation, collaboration, innovation, and creativity.”

Questions That Matter

Developing processes and infrastructure for tapping into the collective intelligence in an organization is an important part of establishing conversation as a core business process. But one area of activity that is just as crucial is honing the skill of discovering and exploring questions that matter. Why? Because the quality of our learning process depends on the quality of the questions we ask. Clear, bold, and penetrating questions that elicit a full range of responses tend to open the social context for learning. People engaged in the conversation develop a common concern for deeper levels of shared meaning.

Focusing on essential questions enables us to challenge our underlying assumptions in constructive ways. With a simple and consistent focus on questions that matter, casual conversations are transformed into collective inquiry. As these questions “travel” throughout the system, they enable creative solutions to emerge in unexpected ways.

Leading Inquiring Systems

What skills, knowledge, and personal qualities will be required in the more collaborative, networked organizations of the future? What are the emerging leadership capabilities that will foster the evolution of inquiring systems— systems that strengthen their capacity to learn, adapt, and create long-term business and social value? We believe there are several capabilities that will be essential to this process.

Framing Strategic Questions. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, launched that company to its preeminent market position by posing a simple but powerful question to his colleagues: “How can we assure a consistent hamburger for people who are traveling on the road?”

Mastering the art and architecture of framing powerful questions that inspire strategic dialogue and committed action will be a critical leadership skill. Strategic questions create dissonance between current experiences and beliefs while evoking new possibilities for collective discovery. But they also serve as the glue that holds together overlapping webs of conversations in which diverse resources combine and recombine to create innovative solutions and business value.

Convening Learning Conversations. As another core aspect of this new work, leaders will create multiple opportunities for learning conversations. However, authentic conversation is less likely to occur in a climate of fear, mistrust, and hierarchical control. The human mind and heart must be fully engaged in authentic conversation for new knowledge to be built.

Thus, the ability to facilitate working conversations that enhance trust and reduce fear will become an important leadership capability. To succeed in this pursuit, leaders will need to strengthen their skills in the use of dialogue and other approaches that deepen collective inquiry (see “Improving the Quality of Learning Conversations”).

These skills include:

• Creating a climate of discovery;
• Suspending premature judgment;
• Exploring underlying assumptions and beliefs;
• Listening for connections between ideas;
• Honoring diverse perspectives; and
• Articulating shared understanding.

In this process, the authenticity, integrity, and personal values of leaders will become central to their role as “conveners and connectors”—of both people and ideas. Strengthening personal relationships through networks of collaborative conversations will be essential for building intellectual capital.

Supporting Appreciative Inquiry.

Becoming open to the multiple possibilities that conversations create will require a shift in leadership orientation from focusing on what is not working and how to fix it, to discovering and appreciating what is working and how to leverage it. Appreciative inquiry was developed by David Cooperrider and his colleagues at Case Western University as a powerful business process for valuing previously untapped sources of knowledge, vitality, and energy. When used in a disciplined way, this type of inquiry stimulates lively conversations about fundamental organizational values, and uncovers hidden assets that create sustainable business and social value.

Shifting the focus in this direction enables leaders to foster networks of conversations focused on leveraging emerging possibilities rather than just on fixing past mistakes. This attitude creates a “generative field” of mutual trust and appreciation, in which groups feel encouraged to discover and share their unique contributions in order to build their collective intellectual capital.

Fostering Shared Meaning. As organizations enter the 21st century, leaders will discover that one of their unique contributions is to provide “conceptual leadership” — creating a larger context within which groups can deepen or shift their thinking together.

To build shared context, we must first understand the importance of language for shaping our thought. We make meaning of our experiences through stories, images, and metaphors. To tap into this pool of shared meaning, leaders need to put time and attention into framing common language and developing shared images and metaphors. This can be done by constructing compelling scenarios — “stories of the future” that provide shared meaning and collective purpose across organization boundaries. In addition, it is important to incorporate time for system-wide reflection, to enable the collective “sense-making” that is essential in times of turbulence and change.

Nurturing Communities of Practice. Much of the learning and knowledge creation in an organization happens through informal relationships. But few of today’s executives and strategists have been trained to notice and honor the social fabric of informal “communities of practice.”

Nurturing and sustaining these learning communities will be another core aspect of the leader’s new work. Principles of community organization — including recruiting volunteers, convening gatherings, developing partnerships, and hosting celebrations — will be essential to this practice. Finally, the existing communities of practice need to be taken into account when reengineering work processes, so new work flows do not destroy the collective knowledge that is woven into them.

Using Collaborative Technologies. The notion of personal computing is fast giving way to “interpersonal computing.” New collaborative technologies create possibilities for different kinds of conversations. People can “see” innovative ideas pop up on their computer screen or on large wall murals created by graphics specialists. Such multisensory, interactive conversations enable people to share their thoughts and create knowledge in ways that have rarely been possible before.

As these tools become more widely available, the notion of “leadership” will expand to include facilitating on-line conversations and supporting the design of integrated learning systems that enable the co-creation of products and services among widely distributed work groups.

Creating the Future

Where collaborative learning and breakthrough thinking are requirements for a sustainable business future, the development of appropriate tool and environments to support good conversations are also essential. Indeed, it is the network and nature of those conversations that will help determine the organization’s strategic capacity to create the future it wants, rather than being forced to live with the future it gets.

Seeing the systemic ways in which conversation helps a learning organization evolve, and utilizing process principles, tools, and technologies to support this evolution, are everyone’s responsibilities. For only in this way can organizations cultivate both the knowledge required to thrive today and the wisdom needed to ensure a sustainable future.

Juanita Brown and David Isaacs (Mill Valley, CA) are also senior affiliates at the MIT Center for Organizational Learning. They serve as strategists and thinking partners with senior leaders, applying living systems principles to the evolution of knowledge-based organizations and large-scale change initiatives.

The authors would like to thank the Intellectual Capital Pioneers Group as well as Jennifer Landau and Susan Kelly of Whole Systems Associates for contributions to the development of their recent thinking.

Editorial support for this article was provided by Sue Wetzler of Whole Systems Associates and Colleen Lannon of Pegasus Communications.

The post Conversation as a Core Business Process appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Many of our current cultural stories seem to reinforce a belief that challenge and conflict lead to collapsing systems. Stories of breakdown are everywhere — a struggling economy, political polarization, declining high school graduation rates. Yet even as these systems falter, new beginnings are all around us. The more we look for stories of innovations launched and challenges overcome, the more visible they become.

When we allow ourselves to look through this lens, we see that a renewal is under way, a modern renaissance fueled by the passion and commitment of many who have dared to pursue a dream. In communities, organizations, industries, and other social systems, new ways of living and working are flourishing. For example, many consider journalism to be an industry in decline. But even as traditional forms of journalism are dying — because they aren’t serving us well — I see signs of rebirth every day. Bold experiments are underway. Spot.us uses “crowdfunding,” in which community members pool money to support investigative reporting. News Trust, which rates the news for accuracy, fairness, and other criteria, is drawing increasing readership and participation to its site. Similar innovations are arising in other areas, ranging from healthcare to politics.

Given these parallel dynamics of collapse and rebirth, what can we do to help the systems of which we are part move toward productivity and resilience?

For more than 50 years, experiments in organizations and communities and across social systems have shaped practices for “whole systems change” — methods for engaging the diverse people of a system in ways that lead to unexpected breakthroughs. In 1992, Margaret Wheatley’s groundbreaking Leadership and the New Science contributed to theory by connecting our changing understanding of science to human systems. As the current generation of whole systems change practitioners mix and match methods such as Open Space Technology, The World Café, Future Search, and Appreciative Inquiry, many of us have been seeking a deeper understanding of the patterns that make these practices work.

My quest to unlock the mystery of what is involved in changing whole systems began in the late 1980s. I thought that understanding how change works was key to creating a world that works for all. I still do. I started noticing shifts in how change occurs when using whole systems change practices. See “Traditional and Emerging Ideas About Change” for examples.

Born from my own practice, my interactions with friends and colleagues, and my immersion in what science has taught us about chaos, complexity, and networks, I noticed a pattern of change through the lens of emergence — increasingly complex order self-organizing out of disorder. What follows describes that pattern, along with questions, principles, and practices for successfully engaging with upheaval.

The Nature of Emergence

Emergence is nature’s way of changing. We see it all the time in its cousin, emergencies. What happens?

A disturbance interrupts ordinary life. In addition to natural responses, like grief or fear or anger, people differentiate — take on different tasks. For example, in an earthquake, while many are immobilized, some care for the injured, others look for food and water, a few care for the animals. Someone creates a “find your loved ones” site on the Internet. A few blaze the trails and others follow. They see what’s needed and bring their unique gifts to the situation. A new order begins to arise.

This pattern of change flows as follows:

• Disruption breaks apart the status quo.
• The system differentiates, surfacing innovations and distinctions among its parts.
• As different parts interact, a new, more complex coherence arises.

(See “A Pattern of Change.”)

In journalism, cracks began to appear in the 1990s as newspaper readership declined. This disruption was generally correlated with the rise of the Internet. Worse, advertisers, who provide a principle source of revenue for journalism, started to leave. When the economy came to the precipice in 2008, the decline became an avalanche (Johnny Ryan, Newspaper circulation decline).

With the ability for anyone to publish made possible through increasingly sophisticated online tools, the assumptions about what journalism is and how it is done are in flux. A myriad of experiments are testing those assumptions — the relationship between journalist and audience, the economic model, even the purpose of journalism itself. These experiments shed light on what to conserve from traditional journalism that still serves us well and what to embrace that wasn’t possible before. Journalism is differentiating into its elemental nature, helping us understand new ways in which news and information is created, distributed, and digested.

While a new coherence has not yet arisen and likely won’t for a while, we do have clues. We know it is more of a conversation than a lecture. It still is about making sense of our complex world so that we can make wise individual and collective decisions. And it calls for a broad-based digital literacy movement, similar to the literacy movement sparked by the coming of age of newspapers that served the formation of democracy in the U. S.

People often speak of a magical quality to emergence, in part, because we can’t predetermine specific outcomes. Emergence can’t be manufactured. It often arises by drawing from individual and collective intuition — instinctive and unconscious knowing or sensing without deduction, reasoning, or using rational processes. It can be fueled by strong emotions — excitement, longing, anger, fear, grief. And it rarely follows a logical, orderly path. It feels much more like a leap of faith.

Emergence is always happening. If we don’t work with it, it will work us over. In human systems, it often shows itself when strong emotions are ignored or suppressed for too long. While emergence is natural, we don’t always experience it as positive. Erupting volcanoes, crashing meteorites, and wars have brought emergent change. Yet even wars can leave exciting offspring of novel, higher-order systems. The League of Nations and United Nations were unprecedented social innovations from their respective world wars. New species or cultures fill the void left by those made extinct.

Emergence seems disorderly because we can’t discern meaningful patterns, just unpredictable interactions that make no sense. But order is accessible when diverse people facing intractable challenges uncover and implement ideas that none could have predicted or accomplished on their own. Emergence can’t be forced. It can, however, be fostered.

Why Does Engaging Emergence Matter?

Emergence isn’t just a metaphor for what we are experiencing. Complexity increases as more diversity, connectivity, interdependence, or interactions become part of a system. The disruptive shifts occurring in our current systems are signs that these characteristics are on the rise.

Today’s unprecedented conditions could lead to chaos and collapse, but they also contain the seeds of renewal. We can choose to face our seemingly intractable challenges by coalescing into a vibrant, inclusive society characterized by creative interactions among diverse people. In many ways, this path is counterintuitive. It breaks with traditional thinking about change, including the ideas that it occurs top-down and that it follows an orderly plan, one step at a time.

We don’t control emergence. Nor can we fully predict how it arises. It can be violent, overwhelming. Yet we can engage it, confident that unexpected and valuable breakthroughs can occur.

Benefits of Engaging Emergence

Although specific outcomes from emergence are unpredictable, by engaging with it some benefits are foreseeable. To illustrate these benefits, I draw from Journalism That Matters, an initiative that convenes conversations among the diverse people who are shaping the emerging news and information ecosystem.

Individually, we are stretched and refreshed. We feel more courageous and inspired to pursue what matters to us. With a myriad of new ideas and confident of the support of mentors, collaborators, and fans, we act. At an early Journalism That Matters gathering, a recent college graduate arrived with the seed of an idea: putting a human face on international reporting for U. S. audiences. At the meeting, she found support for the idea. Deeply experienced people coached her and gave her entrée to their contacts. Today, the Common Language Project is thriving, having received multiple awards.

New and unlikely partnerships form. When we connect with people whom we don’t normally meet, sparks may fly. Creative conditions make room for our differences, fostering lively and productive interactions.

A reluctant veteran investigative reporter was teamed with a young digital journalist. They created a multimedia website for a story based on a two-year investigation. Not only did the community embrace the story, but the veteran is pursuing additional interactive projects. And the digital journalist is learning how to do investigative reporting.

Breakthrough projects surface. Experiments are inspired by interactions among diverse people.

The Poynter Institute, an educational institution serving the mainstream media, was seeking new directions because its traditional constituency was shrinking. Because Poynter served as a cohost for a JTM gathering, a number of staff members participated in the event. They listened broadly and deeply to the diverse people present. An idea emerged that builds on who they are and takes them into new territory: supporting the training needs of entrepreneurial journalists.

Community is strengthened. We discover kindred spirits among a diverse mix of strangers. Lasting connections form, and a sense of relationship grows. We realize that we share an intention—a purpose or calling guided by some deeper source of wisdom. Knowing that our work serves not just ourselves but a larger whole increases our confidence to act.

As a community blogger who attended a JTM conference put it, “I’m no longer alone. I’ve discovered people asking similar questions, aspiring to a similar future for journalism. Now I have friends I can bounce ideas off of, knowing we share a common cause.”

The culture begins to change. With time and continued interaction, a new narrative of who we are takes shape.

When Journalism That Matters began, we hoped to discover new possibilities for a struggling field so that it could better serve democracy. As mainstream media, particularly newspapers, began failing, the work became more vital. We see an old story of journalism dying and provide a place for it to be mourned. We also see the glimmers of a new and vital story being born. In it, journalism is a conversation rather than a lecture. Stories inspire rather than discourage their audience. Journalism That Matters has become a vibrant and open conversational space where innovations emerge. New language, such as news ecosystem — the information exchange among the public, government, and institutions that can inform, inspire, engage, and activate — makes it easier to understand what’s changing. People say, “I didn’t know I could be effective without a big organization behind me. Now I do.”

These experiences show that working with emergence can create great initiatives, the energy to act, a sense of community, and a greater view of the whole — a collectively intelligent system at work.

As more people engage emergence, something fundamental changes about who we are, what we are doing, how we are with each other, and perhaps what it all means. In the process, we tear apart familiar and comfortable notions about how change works. We bring together unlikely bedfellows and re-imagine and re-create the organizations, communities, and social systems that serve us well.

Three Questions for Engaging Emergence

Three questions can help us think about how to work with change:

• How do we disrupt coherence compassionately?
• How do we engage disruption creatively?
• How do we renew coherence wisely?

Like all appreciative questions, these direct our attention toward possibilities and open us to exploration. They are posed as questions rather than statements to remind us that when the terrain is uncertain, focus and fluidity both support us to be nimble in our response.

You can use them as you might an affirmation. Just as affirmations help us attend to what we wish to create, these questions help us adapt to the specifics of our situation. We can connect our circumstances with the flow of change by prefacing each question with, “In this situation…”

These questions create temporary shelter for us to consider the challenges of a changing system. They help us experience and offer compassion in disruption, engage creatively with difference, and support both personal and collective renewal while potentially wise responses coalesce.

If you are familiar with Zen Buddhism, think of the questions as koans — paradoxical riddles or anecdotes that have no solution. They may — if you seek to understand them in an intuitive way and work with them in your life — provide flashes of insight into what’s going on and how to engage it.

Principles for Engaging Emergence

A principle is a fundamental assumption that guides further understanding or action. Principles help us make order out of chaos. They describe the landscape, enabling us to discern useful characteristics so that we can make useful choices. Principles support us in designing our initiatives, organizing our work and ourselves, determining what to do and how best to do it. For example, a commonly cited medical principle is “first, do no harm.” This fundamental understanding guides life-and-death decisions without prescribing a specific approach.

I derived the principles for engaging emergence listed below by connecting my understanding of whole systems change processes with what science tells us about the dynamics of emergence (see “Principles for Engaging Emergence”). In short, scientists frequently cite four dynamics of emergence:

• No one is in charge. No conductor is orchestrating orderly activity (ecosystems, economic systems, activity in a city).
• Simple rules engender complex behavior. Randomness becomes coherent as individuals, each following a few basic principles or assumptions, interact with their neighbors (birds flock; traffic flows).
• Feedback. Systems grow and self-regulate as the output from one interaction influences the next interaction. (We talk to a neighbor, who talks to a neighbor, and suddenly everyone in town knows a story.)
• Clustering. As we interact, feeding back to each other, like attracts like, bonding around a shared characteristic. (Small groups of women meeting in living rooms grow into the women’s movement.)So if emergence occurs through these dynamics, what are the implications for how we engage with it?

These five principles are my answer to this question:

• Welcome disturbance. Disruption indicates that the normal behavior of a system has been interrupted. If we ignore the disturbance, chances are conditions will get worse. If we get curious about it, the disruption could lead to breakthroughs.
• Pioneer! Break habits by doing something different. Prepare and jump into the mystery, working with the feedback that comes.
• Encourage random encounters. Remember, no one is in charge. More accurately, we never know which interactions will catalyze innovation. Maximize interactions among diverse agents, knowing unexpected encounters will likely trigger a shift.
• Seek meaning. Meaning energizes us. As we discover mutuality in what is personally meaningful, we come together. Like clusters with like. Shared meaning draws us to common awareness and action. When shared meaning is central, we organize resilient, synergistic networks that serve our individual and collective needs.
• Simplify. Principles — simple rules — equip us to work with complexity. When principles break down and the situation grows chaotic, what is essential? What serves now? As answers coalesce, we become a more diverse, complex system around re-formed principles at the heart of the matter.

These principles help us work with the flow of emergence. Welcoming disturbance encourages us to begin, knowing all change starts with disruption. To support differentiation, pioneering guides us in thinking about what to do. Encouraging random encounters reminds us to consider who to involve. Seeking meaning provides a thread of coherence by helping us clarify why. And simplifying helps coherence emerge by guiding us to the how.

Practices for Engaging Emergence

If principles help us sort through what to do, practices guide us in how to do something. A practice is a skill honed through study and experimentation. The practices for engaging emergence are rooted in the skills of everyday conversation (see “Practices for Engaging Emergence”). As such, we all know something about them. They are our birthright. When issues are complex, stakes are high, and emotions are right below the surface, these practices help us engage with each other.

Because working with emergence has nothing A-to-B-to-C about it, no one right way exists to use these practices. They help us identify what to notice, what to explore, what to try. They are helpful hints for flying by the seat of our pants.

Just as scales prepare a musician and drills train an athlete, these practices equip us for the challenging conversations, the ones that involve disruption, difference, and the unknown. They are the conversational backbone for improvisation, enabling us to stay in the flow even if we don’t know the specific path we’re taking. Honing these conversational skills is a great way to engage emergence.

I organize the practices into four groups:

Prepare to Engage Emergence

• Embrace mystery, choose possibility, and follow life-energy to cultivate a composed state of mind, alert to aliveness and potential. This enables us to face whatever shows up with equanimity or even delight.

Host Emergence

• Clarify intentions and welcome people. These are skills of being a good host. In exercising them, you create a “container” — a hospitable space for working with whatever arises. These practices are the yin and yang of hosting. One provides focus — clear direction and purpose. The other ensures fertile ground for relationships and connection.
• Invite diversity to encourage people to look beyond our habitual definitions of who and what makes up a system. Doing so prepares us for innovation by increasing the likelihood of productive connections among people with different beliefs and operating assumptions. Inviting diversity is one of the most time consuming, challenging, and critical activities of engaging emergence.

Engage

• Take responsibility for what you love as an act of service. This practice is a game-changing skill. It liberates our hearts, minds, and spirits. It calls us to notice what deeply matters to us and to put our unique gifts to use for ourselves, others, and the systems in which we live and work. The more this practice becomes our operating norm, the more innovation, joy, solidarity, generosity, and other qualities of well-being appear. The capacities for listening and connecting grow through this practice.
• Stepping in to inquire appreciatively is a second game-changing skill. The questions we ask determine the answers we uncover, shaping our experience, actions, and outcomes. Typically, the more positive the inquiry, the more life-affirming the outcome.
• Open yourself to the unknown. This practice is an act of faith. Once open, we can’t go back. It may be the most counter-cultural practice of them all, requiring the courage to be vulnerable.
• Reflect, name, and harvest — these can be sacred acts. They call forth that which previously didn’t exist. The arts — music, movement, visual arts, poetry, film — often enhance the effectiveness and reach of these practices.

Iterate: Do It Again . . . and Again

This practice reminds us of the never-ending nature of change. It takes time and perseverance to make its mark. Because our attention tends to get caught in our routines, iteration is the most elusive of the practices. Together, these practices form a system for acting, providing insight into what our role is, how we support others, and what we can do together.

What’s Possible Now?

Whenever we work with this pattern of emergent change, a turning point occurs as coherence arises. We experience ourselves as part of something larger. Perhaps our voice rises in harmony, a sweet blend of each and all. Or we overcome an obstacle because we used our different skills and abilities to accomplish something together that none of us could have done alone. We change through such experiences. The principles and practices I’ve described help us break through habits of separation that keep us fragmented. Our personal stories become a doorway into the universal.

Joel de Rosnay, author of The Symbiotic Man: A New Understanding of the Organization of Life and a Vision of the Future (McGraw-Hill, 2000), introduced a notion I find promising called the macroscope. Just as microscopes help us to see the infinitely small and telescopes help us to see the infinitely far, macroscopes help us to see the infinitely complex. Rather than a single instrument, they are a class of tools for sensing complex interconnections among information, ideas, people, and experiences. Maps, stories, art, media, or some combination could be used as macroscopic tools that would help us to see ourselves in a larger context. For example, consider the brilliant use of technology in a sports stadium. We are able to experience the game from many angles. At a glance, the scoreboard tells us the state of play. Cameras zoom in so that we can see the action not just on the field but also in the audience. Television dramatically extends the reach of the event. And a history of statistics available online lets both professional commentators and ordinary people put the activities in perspective. We can immerse ourselves in the experience and understand it from many perspectives. Imagine applying such thoughtfulness to making the state of the economy, education, or a war visible to us all.

Both microscopes and telescopes sparked tremendous innovation. Macroscopes have such potential today. As we appreciate our interconnectedness, our sense of who is our community expands. The conditions for greater trust and courage emerge. We act, knowing something about the collective assumptions and intentions we share. We become better equipped to work with upheaval and change.

Let us put these notions to work so that we fully engage with the nascent renaissance that is underway. Begin simply, wherever you are. I offer three suggestions:

• Be compassionate disrupters, asking possibility-oriented questions.
• Creatively engage, interacting with people outside our comfort zone.
• Support wise renewal, telling stories of upheaval turned to opportunity.

Peggy Holman has designed and hosted meetings for diverse groups handling complex issues since 1992, including the National Institute of Corrections, Microsoft, and the Associated Press Managing Editors. In the second edition of The Change Handbook, Peggy and co-authors Tom Devane and Steven Cady profile 61 change methods, including Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, and the World Café. Her new book, Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity (Berrett-Koehler, 2010), dives beneath these change methods to make visible deeper patterns, principles, and practices for change that can guide us through turbulent times.

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knowledge and shape its future. But the process of co-creating the future through conversation is so natural we usually overlook it.

Since our early ancestors gathered in circles around the warmth of a fire, conversation has been a primary process for making sense of our world, discovering what we value, sharing knowledge, and imagining our future. Small groups exploring important questions — and connecting with other groups that are doing the same — have always played a major role in social and institutional renewal. Consider the sewing circles and “committees of correspondence” that helped birth the American Republic; the conversations in cafés and salons that spawned the French Revolution; and the Scandinavian “study circles” that stimulated an economic and social renaissance in Northern Europe. Reaching out in ever-widening circles, members of small groups spread their insights to larger constituencies, carrying the seed ideas for new conversations, creative possibilities, and collective action (see “Conversation as a Path to Large-Scale Change”).

Today, especially with the advent of the Internet, we are becoming increasingly aware of the power and potential of these dynamic networks of conversation and their systemic importance for large-scale collaboration, learning, and change. The crosspollination of ideas from group to group can lead to the emergence of surprising creativity and focus as we discover innovative ways to support a “system thinking together.”

What if we could create an intentional, simple, and effective approach for fostering greater collaborative learning and coherent thought than is often available in large group settings? Our research reveals that what we have come to call “The World Café” has a unique contribution to make when the goal is the focused use of dialogic inquiry to foster collective insight around real-life challenges and key strategic questions at increasing levels of scale.

What is The World Café? It is an innovative methodology that enhances the capacity for collaborative thinking about critical issues by linking small group and large-group conversations. In the process, knowledge grows, a sense of the whole becomes real, and new possibilities become visible. The World Café utilizes the principles of dynamic networks and living systems to access a source of deeper creativity and shared knowledge that might not be available through more traditional approaches to collaborative work.

The World Café is also an evocative metaphor that enables us to pay attention to aspects of organizational life that are often invisible, hidden by formal structures and policies. It highlights the naturally occurring networks of conversation and social learning through which we access collective intelligence, create new knowledge, and bring forth desired futures. Using The World Café as an organizing image allows leaders to intentionally design processes that take advantage of the natural dynamics that are already at play in order to create sustainable business and social value.

How The World Café Was Born

Several years ago, we serendipitously discovered the unique power of Café style conversations. One rainy morning, we wanted to provide a comfortable setting for participants in a global dialogue on intellectual capital to enjoy their coffee while waiting for the session to begin. We set up small tables in our living room and covered them with paper tablecloths. We added flowers and set out colored crayons, like in many neighborhood cafés.

People were delighted and amused. They got their coffee and gathered in small, informal groups around the tables. Soon, everyone was deeply engaged in conversation. As they talked, people scribbled ideas on the tablecloths. After a while, someone expressed curiosity about what was happening in other conversations. One person agreed to stay at each table as a host while others traveled to other tables to discover what interesting ideas were pollinating there.

People buzzed with excitement. At a certain point, they decided to leave a new host at each table. The other members traveled to new tables, connecting ideas, testing assumptions, and adding to each other’s diagrams and pictures on the tablecloths.

As lunchtime drew near, we took a “tour” of all the tablecloths, seeing what new connections and questions had emerged. Our interactive graphics specialist captured collective insights from the morning on a large piece of newsprint in the middle of the room. We suddenly realized that we had tapped into something very simple but potentially very powerful. Through the Café conversations, a shared knowledge base, larger than any individual or group in the room, had become accessible to us. Our unique contributions had combined and recombined into rich new patterns of living knowledge and innovative thought that had not been visible when we started.

The World Café As Methodology

What makes such a seemingly simple practice — that of talking together about things we care about and intentionally linking the essence of our conversations with others in ever widening circles — so useful? We think it’s because Café conversations offer us the opportunity to notice the possibilities for mutual insight, innovation, and action that are already present in any group, if we only knew how to access them. We are discovering that this process offers a unique mixture of freedom and focus, of coherence without control. Depending on an organization’s needs, Café events can be designed around particular themes or topics. The Café format is flexible and adapts to different circumstances, based on a few simple practices and principles (see “Café Hosting Tips”).

Groups as small as 12 and as large as 1,200 from around the world have engaged in Café learning conversations in a wide range of settings. In a global consumer products company, executives from over 30 nations used Café principles to integrate a new worldwide marketing strategy. In New Zealand, Maori leaders combined The World Café with indigenous meeting formats during regional treaty negotiations. Mexican government and corporate leaders applied The World Café to scenario planning. A Fortune 100 company is using “Creative Cafés” to explore corporate responsibility with stakeholders. And faculty members in the U. S. and Europe are creating virtual online “Knowledge Cafés” to conduct distance-learning programs.

After participating in Café conversations, members share comments such as, “I developed productive relationships and learned more from others than I ever expected. You can actually see the knowledge growing.” Participants often develop an increased sense of responsibility for making use of the practical insights they gain and for staying connected as they expand the conversation to larger constituencies.

The practice of The World Café is based on a set of working assumptions that we continue to explore:

• The future is born in webs of human conversation.
• Compelling questions encourage collective learning.
• Networks are the underlying pattern of living systems.
• Human systems — organizations, families, communities — are living systems.
• Intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways.
• We collectively have all the wisdom and resources we need.

Five Key Operating Principles

We are discovering that the unique contribution of Café learning seems to come from translating these working assumptions into the following five operating principles that, when used in combination, increase the likelihood of generating breakthrough thinking.

Create Hospitable Space. Café hosts around the world emphasize the power and importance of creating a welcoming environment to enliven collaborative conversation. We thrive and are better able to confront difficult questions, explore underlying assumptions, and create what we care about in surroundings that evoke warmth, friendliness, and authenticity than in those that are less hospitable to the human spirit. Most meeting places are sterile, cold, and impersonal. Consider choosing environments with natural light. Create comfortable seating. Honor our traditions of human hospitality by offering refreshments. Play soft music as people enter. Decorate the walls with art. Hospitable space means “safe” space — where everyone feels free to offer their best thinking.

Hosts can create hospitable space even in large, impersonal venues. For instance, at a conference for 1,000 people, we asked the hotel staff to set up small, round cocktail tables instead of rows of chairs in the cavernous ballroom. We then decked out each table with a red-checked tablecloth and a vase of red and white carnations. Volunteers placed sheets of white paper over the tablecloths and left small containers of colored markers for doodling. We also brought in palm trees and other greenery. When people entered the room, they were greeted by soft jazz music. The buzz of conversation almost instantly filled the space.

Knowledge emerges in response to compelling questions that “travel well” as they attract collective engagement and exploration throughout a system.

Explore Questions That Matter. One of our most important learnings in working with The World Café is that discovering and exploring “questions that matter” opens the door to catalytic conversation, insight, and innovation. Knowledge emerges in response to compelling questions that “travel well” as they attract collective engagement and exploration throughout a system. Powerful questions provide focus and coherence to networks of conversation that might otherwise spin off in random directions. Well-crafted strategic questions define intention, focus energy, and direct attention toward what really counts.

Hone the skill of shaping open-ended questions that are relevant to the group’s real-life concerns. These questions need not imply immediate action steps or problem solving. Allow the questions to invite inquiry and exploration. At one Café in Denmark focused on improving a school system, the hosts framed the central question as “What could a good school also be?” rather than as “How can we fix the problems in this school?” In doing so, they opened up the conversation to appreciating what might be possible in the future, rather than limiting the focus to what is wrong in the present.

Connect Diverse People and Perspectives. “Intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in diverse and creative ways,” according to Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science (Berrett-Koehler, 1992). By cross-pollinating ideas among tables in several rounds of conversation, we intentionally invite a more accelerated and richer network of dialogic interactions on a larger scale than is common in most dialogue circles.

One technique for enriching the ways in which the system connects to itself is to vary the different rounds of conversation. Hosts stay at each table to welcome guests while the other members travel to new tables to share as well as gather insights. Travelers might then return to their home Cafés or continue to move from table to table for several iterations. Sometimes the hosts change, with the first host becoming a traveler during the second cycle. Or several members might stay at the table while the others go out for brief visits as “ambassadors” to other tables, collecting new seed ideas that bring diverse perspectives to the home table.

Additionally, all living systems — including human systems — benefit from diversity. In her book The Quantum Society: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (William Morrow and Company, 1994), Danah Zohar states: “Social evolution requires that different points of view, different ideas, different ways of life, and different traditions recombine into larger, more complex emergent wholes.” Breakthrough thinking is more likely to emerge when diverse viewpoints and perspectives contribute to the exploration. For example, “Strategy Cafés” that engage multiple stakeholders, including employees from all levels as well as customers and suppliers, can offer richer opportunities for innovation than traditional strategic planning activities among senior executives alone.

Listen Together for Patterns, Insights, and Deeper Questions.

Through Café conversations, participants often discover coherent patterns of meaning in what may appear, at first glance, to be a chaotic and messy self-organizing exchange of ideas and perspectives. The emphasis is on shared listening — listening for the wisdom or insight that no individual member of the group might have access to by themselves. To that end, invite members to offer their unique perspectives and listen for new connections in the “space in-between.” Allow for silence and reflection. Ask members to notice what’s evolving in the middle of the table. By focusing on these special qualities of collective attention, we have a greater opportunity to experience what our Danish colleague Finn Voldtofte calls “the magic in the middle.”

For example, in Sweden, hosts of a multi-stakeholder forum used Café conversations to clarify areas of inquiry that could influence the future of both the information/communications industry and the environment. They began the first round of conversation by giving each table of participants a “talking stone.” Each member took the talking stone in turn and presented his or her key insights, thoughts, or deeper questions about the query “How can information technology contribute to a sustainable future?”

The three other participants at each table were to listen carefully and draw any connections they noticed between ideas in the middle of the tablecloth. In the second and third rounds, the Café hosts asked everyone to begin listening as a group for the deeper assumptions underlying their perspectives and to write them on the tablecloth as well. When the final round was over, the group pooled the collective insights and “ahas” that had emerged from linking the small-group dialogues from Café tables and creating a “conversation of the whole.” Through this intentional process of discovering and connecting underlying assumptions and insights, participants who might have opposed each other in a different setting came to a mutual appreciation of the deeper questions they faced together in contributing to a sustainable future.

Make Collective Knowledge Visible to the Group. We’ve come to realize that the simple act of scribbling ideas and pictures on a paper napkin or tablecloth so that the others at the Café table can literally “see what you mean” is integral to knowledge creation and innovation. As Michael Schrage says in Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration (Random House, 1990), “The images, maps, and perceptions bouncing around in people’s brains must be given a form that other people’s images, maps, or perceptions can shape, alter, or otherwise add value to. . . . It takes shared space to create shared understanding.” By providing paper and markers, we encourage the use of “shared space” where people can build on each other’s ideas, weave together their thoughts, and engage in deeper collective listening.

Many Café events include an interactive graphics specialist, who creates large visual maps that synthesize key insights and ideas. Commented Nancy Margulies, who has hosted many Cafés, “It’s like having a big ‘tablecloth’ in the middle of the whole group. Participants can quite literally see that they are creating something new together.” Other possibilities for making collective knowledge visible include having a “gallery walk,” with participants taking a tour of the tablecloths created by the different groups; publishing a Café newspaper on the spot; and creating theater presentations that reflect group discoveries. Each of these techniques allows participants to capture and build on the momentum and ideas that emerge. In addition, creating “storybooks” from the session allows participants to take the results of their work to larger audiences after the event.

The five operating principles seem quite simple, but embodying them as an integrated practice demands creativity, thoughtfulness, artistry, and care. The creativity of the host can make the difference between an interesting conversation and the magic of experiencing what our colleague Tom Atlee calls co-intelligence in action.

Conversation As Action

But is all of this talk just that, talk? What about the urgent need for action in our organizations today? We have found that, by its nature, The World Café challenges the ways most of us think about creating desired results in organizational and community life. Many leaders still preach that we should “stop talking and get to work” — as if talk and work were two separate things. Humberto Maturana, a pioneering evolutionary biologist, has helped us see that human beings think together and coordinate action in and through language. Conversation is “real work.” Through conversation people discover who cares about what and who will be accountable for next steps. We are finding that when people come to a new level of shared understanding around real-life issues, they want to make a difference. When participants return from Café conversations, they often see additional action choices that they didn’t know existed before.

Café As Metaphor

As reported by members of Café events, The World Café is a powerful methodology for collaborative learning and knowledge evolution. We are also finding that it is a provocative metaphor that can help us see organizational and societal change in a new light. How might the metaphor of “The World as Café” invite us to think differently about ways to catalyze system-wide innovation and action?

We are learning that Café conversations are based on a larger natural process of mutual inquiry and discovery that does not depend on small, round tables and red-checked tablecloths. By experiencing the power of focused networks of conversation on a small scale, members see how they might utilize this strategic insight in the larger systems they are part of. What if conversation were as much a core business process as marketing, distribution, or product development? What if it were already the core process — the source of organizational intelligence that allows all of the others to generate positive results?

For example, imagine your organization as a series of Café tables, with employees moving between functions inside the organization as well as connecting with multiple “tables” of customers, suppliers, distributors, and other conversation partners. What difference would it make to your own action choices if you viewed your workplace as a dynamic, living network of conversations and knowledge creation rather than as a traditional hierarchy (see “What We View Determines What We Do”)?

Based on an understanding of The World Café, leaders can take greater responsibility for designing infrastructures that bring coherence and focus to organizational conversations. For example, they come to recognize the key role they play in discovering “the big questions” and hosting strategic conversations with multiple stakeholders. This shift of lens also has practical implications for how leaders work with strategy formation, organizational learning, information technology, the design of physical space, and leadership development.

In one Café session, senior leaders from major corporations were mapping the implications of taking this view. The director of global operations for a company with more than 50,000 employees suddenly jumped up from his seat and exclaimed, “Do you know what I’ve gone and done? I’ve just reorganized my entire global operation. I’ve broken up the informal knowledge networks and relationships that have developed over the years. If I had looked at my reorganization through these glasses, I would have done it a lot differently. It’s going to take us a long

time to recover!” His heartfelt comments stimulated a lively conversation about the role of leaders in developing organizational strategies that honor these less visible but critical conversational and learning processes.

We’re seeing many practical examples of how people are intentionally using the metaphor of The World Café to guide strategic work in larger systems. Executives in a high-tech corporation helped to decrease the injury rate dramatically by using Café principles to engage existing networks of conversation and introduce questions about safety risks. The World Café has led intellectual capital expert Leif Edvinsson of Sweden to observe that the office design of the past is inadequate to support effective knowledge work. In response, he has engaged leading-edge architects in alternative space design.

World Café principles are also being used to redesign a Museum of Science and Industry in Florida to highlight not only formal exhibits but also learning conversations as doorways to discovery. And the initiative From the Four Directions: People Everywhere Leading the Way is intentionally weaving a global network of conversations among leaders of all ages on several continents. Using the Internet and other information technologies, local conversation circles feed insights back into the network, catalyzing these worldwide leadership dialogues into a growing force for societal innovation.

Creating Sustainable Value

The World Café is one path for stimulating courageous conversation about questions that matter to our lives and work—especially in large group settings. We are now seeing the systemic ways in which focused networks of conversation, especially with the support of collaborative technologies, can help organizations and communities evolve. Using The World Café as a methodology and as a metaphor offers a practical yet innovative way to cultivate both the knowledge required to thrive today and the wisdom needed to create the futures we want, rather than being forced to live with the futures we get.

Juanita Brown and David Isaacs serve as strategists and thinking partners with senior leaders, applying living systems principles to the evolution of knowledge-based organizations and large-scale change initiatives. They have hosted Café conversations and strategic dialogues internationally in a wide variety of business and community settings. (Contact info@theworldcafe.com or call 415-381-3368). The World Café Community is comprised of a growing global group of leaders and others committed to courageous conversations and positive futures. We thank Anne Dosher, Ken Homer, Susan Kelly, Janice Molloy, Nancy Margulies, Karen Speerstra, and Sue Wetzler for their special contributions to this article.

The post The World Cafe: Living Knowledge Through Conversations That Matter appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Strategic learning can occur, not only through formal planning activities, but also through webs of informal conversations and networks of relationships, both within an organization and among key stakeholders. Choosing to ask and explore “big questions” — questions that matter to the future of the organization — is a powerful force.

When people frame their strategic exploration as questions rather than as concerns or problems, a conversation begins where everyone can learn something new together, rather than having the normal stale debates. In effect, people begin looking at “the map of the territory” together. The questions encourage them to wonder “What is the map telling us?” rather than to push preconceived ideas of what they think it shows.

Why Don’t We Ask Better Questions?

If asking good questions is so critical, why don’t we spend more of our time and energy focused upon discovering and framing them? One reason may be that much of our Western culture is focused on knowing the “right answer” rather than discovering the “right question.” Our educational system focuses more on memorization and static answers rather than on the art of seeking new possibilities through dynamic questioning. We are rarely taught how to ask powerful questions. Nor are we often taught why we should ask compelling questions in the first place. Quizzes, examinations, and aptitude tests all reinforce the value of correct answers, usually with only one correct answer for each question asked. Is it any wonder that most of us are uncomfortable with not knowing?

Perhaps our aversion to asking creative questions stems from our emphasis on finding quick fixes and our attachment to black/white, either/or thinking. Often the rapid pace of our lives and work doesn’t provide us the opportunity to be in reflective conversations where creative questions and innovative solutions can be explored before reaching key decisions. This dilemma is further reinforced by organizational reward systems in which leaders feel they are paid for fixing problems rather than fostering breakthrough thinking. Between our deep attachment to the answer — any answer — and our anxiety about not knowing, we have inadvertently thwarted our collective capacity for deep creativity and fresh perspectives in the face of the unprecedented challenges we face, both in our own organizations and as a global human community.

The World’s Best Industrial Research Lab

One of the best corporate examples of how a “big question” — a truly strategic question — can galvanize collective conversation, engagement, and action occurred at Hewlett-Packard. The director of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories wondered why HP Labs was not considered the best industrial research lab in the world. As he thought about it, he realized that he did not know what being the “World’s Best Industrial Research Lab” (WBIRL) really meant.

One key staff member was charged with coordinating the effort. Instead of looking for “answers” outside the company, she encouraged the director to share his “big question” with all lab employees around the world. Instead of organizing a senior executive retreat to create a vision and then roll it out, she encouraged organization-wide webs of inquiry and conversation, asking people what WBIRL meant to them, what it would mean personally for their own jobs, and what it might take to get there. She invited the entire organization to join in exploring the question through informal, ongoing conversations; and she took advantage of more formal internal survey and communication infrastructures. When the lab director acknowledged his “not knowing” — an uncommon stance for a senior executive — an open field was created for multiple constituencies and perspectives to be heard.

The conversation continued for several months. The WBIRL leader developed a creative “reader’s theater” piece which reflected 800 survey responses, detailing employee frustrations, dreams, insights, and hopes. Players spoke the key themes as “voices of the organization,” with senior management listening. That made a difference to everyone’s thinking by literally putting a variety of points of view on stage together. But it wasn’t the only venue in which the “big question” was explored. Senior management met in strategic sessions, using approaches such as interactive graphics and “storytelling about the future” to see new opportunities that crossed functional boundaries. In these strategic conversations, they considered core technologies that might be needed for multiple future scenarios at HP Labs to unfold.

People throughout the labs, meanwhile, were initiating projects at all levels, resulting in significant improvement in key areas of the lab’s work. Weekly Chalk Talks for engineers, “coffee talks,” an Administrative Assistant Forum, and a Community Forum created opportunities for ongoing dialogue, listening, and learning. A WBIRL Grants Program provided small stipends for innovative ideas, enabling people to act at the corporate grassroots level, taking personal responsibility for work they believed in. In all of these efforts, the leader of the WBIRL project spent most of her time “helping the parts see the whole” and linking people with complementary ideas.
And yet, while productivity was improving rapidly, something was missing. During an informal conversation while planning for a “Celebration of Creativity” to acknowledge what had already been accomplished, one of the lab engineers spoke up. She wondered what was really different about HP that distinguished it from any other company that wanted to be the best in the world. She said, “What would get me out of bed in the morning would be to become the best for the world.”
Suddenly a really “big question” had emerged. What would it mean for HP Labs to be the best both in and for the world? (See “What Makes a Powerful Question?”)

Stakeholders in any system already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges.

A senior engineer created an image of what “for the world” meant to him. It was a well-known picture of the founders of HP looking into the backyard garage where the company began. He added a beautiful photo of Earth placed inside. This picture became the symbol of “HP for the World.” A “town meeting” of 800 Palo Alto employees with live satellite hook-ups enabling a global conversation focused on the question, “What does ‘HP for the World’ mean to you?” The “HP For the World” image spread throughout the company — appearing in lobbies, featured in recruiting brochures, and offered as executive gifts. More than 50,000 posters were purchased by HP employees around the world, stimulating a growing network of conversations about the meaning of the big question for the future of the company.

In the course of this exploration, people rediscovered that the company founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, had always maintained a commitment, as Packard put it, that “the Hewlett-Packard company should be managed first and foremost to make a commitment to society.” Growing numbers of people throughout HP reconnected to that founding governing idea — stimulating investigations into breakthrough technologies for education, remote medical care for third-world nations, and global environmental issues.

As part of this effort, the same senior engineer who had created the “for the world” poster image was persuaded to pursue a 25-year old dream: To create a mile-long educational diorama, placing human life in the context of evolutionary history. In 1997, this work — “A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us” — was featured at the annual State of the World Forum. There, the question of what it means to be for the world was posed to global leaders gathered from every continent. Public and private partnerships evolved from these conversations. Clearly, this is a powerful question that “travels well.”

Big Questions and Strategic Thinking

This approach to discovering and asking the “big questions” — strategic questions for which we truly do not have answers — is grounded in the assumption that stakeholders in any system already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges. Given the appropriate context and support, members of an organizational community can often sense where powerful strategic possibilities and opportunities for action may lie. Is it simply “luck” that enables us to stumble onto questions that really matter for strategic thinking? Or can we actually design processes that make it more likely for those questions to emerge? (See “How to Use Questions Effectively” on page 4.)

“Discovering strategic questions,” says one colleague, a senior executive at a major multinational corporation,

“is like panning for gold. You have to care about finding it, you have to be curious, and you have to create an anticipation of discovering gold, even though none of us may know ahead of time where we’ll find it. You head toward the general territory where you think the gold may be located, with your best tools, your experience, and your instincts.”

To evoke strategic thinking based on discovering powerful questions, several activities may be useful. They

may not apply to all situations and they may not always follow the same sequence, but they suggest ways that formal and informal processes can evolve together to support individuals as well as teams in discovering “gold” for themselves.

Assessing the Landscape. Get a feel for the larger context in which you are operating. Scan the horizon, as well as the contours of the current business and organizational landscape, related to the system or project you are working with. Like trackers in the mountains, look for obvious and subtle indicators that point to storms as well as to sunny skies. Allow your curiosity and imagination to take the lead as you begin to identify the many questions that the business landscape reveals. It will be tough, but important, to frame your findings as questions, rather than as concerns or problems. To help in framing those questions, ask yourself: “How does A relate to C and what questions does that suggest? If X were at play here, what would we be asking? What is the real question underneath all this data?”

Discovering Core Questions. Once you think you’ve posed most of the relevant questions (and there may be many of them), look for patterns. This is not a mechanical process, even though it can be disciplined and systematic.

You are on a treasure hunt, seeking the core questions — usually three to five — which, if answered, would make the most difference to the future of your work. Cluster the questions and consider the relationships that appear among them. Notice what “pops up” in order to discover the “big questions” that the initial clusters reveal.

Creating Images of Possibility. Imagine what your situation would look like or be like if these “big questions” were answered. Creating vivid images of possibility is different from pie-in-the-sky visioning, especially if people with a variety of perspectives have participated in the earlier stages of the conversation. This part of the conversation can also provide clues for evolving creative strategies in response to the “big questions.” It often reveals new territory and opportunities for action while remaining grounded in real life.

Evolving Workable Strategies. Workable strategies begin to emerge in response to compelling questions and to the images of possibility that these questions evoke. Of course, the cycle is never complete. Relevant business data, ongoing conversations with internal and external stakeholders, informal conversations among employees, and feedback from the environment enable you to continually assess the business landscape revealing new questions.

Many organizations are stuck in a “problem-solving orientation” when it comes to strategy. They can’t seem to shake the focus on fixing short-term problems or seeking immediate (but ineffective) solutions. Simply by moving their attention to a deliberate focus on essential questions, they can develop an inquiry-oriented approach to evolving organizational strategy (see “How Can I Frame Better Questions?”). In a knowledge economy, this approach provides an opportunity for developing the capability of strategic thinking in everyone, and for fostering sustainable business and social value.

How Can Leaders Use Powerful Questions?

In today’s turbulent times, engaging people’s best thinking about complex issues without easy answers represents one key to creating the futures we want. Leaders need to develop greater capacities for fostering “inquiring systems” in order to learn, adapt, and create new knowledge to meet emerging needs (see “Is Your Organization an Inquiring System?”).

The leadership challenges of the next 20 years are likely to revolve around the art of catalyzing networks of people rather than solely managing hierarchies as in the past. The ability to bring diverse perspectives to bear on key issues both inside and outside the organization and to work with multiple partners and alliances will be a critical skill for effective leaders. We believe the following core capabilities, rarely taught in today’s MBA or corporate leadership programs, will help define leadership excellence:

Engaging Strategic Questions. In a volatile and uncertain environment, one of the most credible stances leaders can take is to assist their organizations in discovering the right questions at the right time. A key leadership responsibility is creating infrastructures for dialogue and engagement that encourage others at all levels to develop insightful questions and to search for innovative paths forward. Leaders also need to consider reward systems that provide incentives for members to work across organizational boundaries to discover those challenging questions that create common focus and shared forward movement.

Convening and Hosting Learning Conversations. A core aspect of the leader’s new work is creating opportunities for learning conversations around catalyzing questions. However, authentic conversation is less likely to occur in a climate of fear, mistrust, and hierarchical control. The human mind and heart must be fully engaged in authentic conversation for the deeper questions to be surfaced that support the emergence of new knowledge. Thus, the ability to facilitate working conversations that enhance trust and reduce fear is an important leadership capability.

Supporting Appreciative Inquiry. Opening spaces of possibility through discovering powerful questions may require a shift in leadership orientation from what is not working and how to fix it, to what is working and how to leverage it. Shifting the focus in this direction enables leaders to foster networks of conversation based on leveraging emerging possibilities rather than just on fixing past mistakes. Leaders who ask, “What’s possible here and who cares?” will have a much easier time gaining the collaboration and best thinking of their constituents than those who ask, “What’s wrong here, and who is to blame?” By asking appreciative questions, organizations have the opportunity to grow in new directions.

Fostering Shared Meaning. Leaders of organizations in the 21st century will discover that one of their unique contributions is to provide conceptual leadership — creating a context of meaning through stories, images, and metaphors within which groups can discover relevant questions as well as deepen or shift their thinking together. To tap into this pool of shared meaning, which is the ground from which both powerful questions and innovative solutions emerge, network leaders need to put time and attention into framing common language and developing shared images and metaphors.

Nurturing Communities of Practice. Many of the most provocative questions for an organization’s future are first discovered on the front lines, in the middle of the action of everyday life. Key strategic questions that are critical for creating sustainable value are often lost because few of today’s leaders have been trained to notice, honor, and utilize the social fabric of learning that occurs through the informal “Communities of Practice” that exist throughout an organization. A Community of Practice is made of up people who share a common interest and who work together to expand their individual and collective capacity to solve problems over time. Nurturing these informal learning networks and honoring the questions they care about, is another core aspect of the leaders new work.

Using Collaborative Technologies. Intranet and groupware technologies are now making it possible for widely dispersed work groups to participate in learning conversations and team projects across time and space. As these tools become even more widely available, leaders will need to support widespread online conversations where members throughout the organization can contribute their own questions and best thinking to critical strategic issues. The Hewlett Packard case shows how important enabling technology infrastructures are for strategic innovation. Collaborative tools will be a critical factor in how well strategic questions travel both within the organization and among customers and other stakeholders who are key to success.

Co-Evolving the Future

It is quite easy to learn the basics of crafting powerful questions. However, once you have begun down this path, it’s hard to turn back. As your questions broaden and deepen, so does your experience of life. There is no telling where a powerful question might lead you. Transformative conversations can result from posing a simple question such as: “What questions are we not asking ourselves about the situation in the Middle East?” Tantalizing possibilities emerge from the simple act of changing a preposition from “in” to “for” as in the HP example. Profound systemic change can emerge from creating a process for discovering and acting on the “big questions” within a business setting.

Where collaborative learning and breakthrough thinking are requirements for a sustainable business future, asking “questions that matter” and engaging diverse constituencies in learning conversations are a core process for survival. Because questions are inherently related to action, they are at the heart of an organization’s capacity to mobilize the resources required to create a positive future. Seeing the organization as a dynamic network of conversations through which the organization evolves its future encourages members at every level to search for questions related to their real work that can catalyze collective energy and momentum. It enables each one of us to realize that our thoughtful participation in discovering and exploring questions that matter — to our team, to our organization, and to the larger communities of which we are a part — we can make a difference to the whole. For it is only in this way that organizations will be able to cultivate both the knowledge required to thrive today and the wisdom needed to ensure a sustainable future.

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The planning team, comprised of five internal stakeholders from both companies, realized that in order to transcend the barriers that existed between the two organizations, participants had to come together in conversation. Working with Laurie Durnell from the Grove Consultants International, Lenny Lind from Covision, and me from Conbrio, team members chose a bold design that combined graphic facilitation, computer-assisted fast-feedback technology, World Café principles, and Storymapping in ways that created a whole much larger than the parts. This combination of tools, the planning team reasoned, would prompt breakthrough conversation and ultimately a commitment to invest time and resources in resolving key issues.

That’s exactly what happened. “It turned out the synergy of the design elements coming together created a unique situation beyond what we or anybody else expected,” said Lenny. “The amount of work accomplished was enormous.” By the end of the conference, participants mapped out specific action plans in five categories. What follows is what Laurie, Lenny, and I saw and heard, the discoveries we made, and the questions we’re still living with.

At a Snail’s Pace

First, some background. For the two companies (they want to remain anonymous), the walk toward convergence began five years ago, when both sought to solve the problem of providing superior service to the world’s largest companies in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The companies are in an industry where it’s difficult to grow organically. At the same time, neither wanted an outright merger with the other. Their solution was to strike a partnership. Two years ago, they decided to strengthen that partnership and to both market and serve clients as if they were one organization.

Since making the agreement, implementation moved slowly so slowly that frustration boiled up in both companies. Negotiations on branding and a short list of other items necessary for a successful joint venture slowed to a snail’s pace. There was talk, some of which leaked to outsiders in Europe, that one company would spurn the other for a better match. It became clear that the December meeting would be vital for moving the partnership forward.

I began my work with the two companies in the spring of 2005, in time to participate in the May semi-annual meeting. The meetings were started three years earlier to bring together large account managers and leaders from both companies across the globe to build relationships so they could better team to seek new and serve existing customers. More than a hundred people participated in each of these events.

The May conference was a dud. A meet-and-greet affair, it was long on long-winded speeches and short on participation by attendees. A barely understandable economist held forth on the state of the world. An interminable panel discussion tried and failed to shed light on customer needs. A tour of locations around the city offered little insight into markets. One guest sitting next to me whispered, “This is a lot to go through for a free drink.” A U.S. participant was so disgusted that he bailed 36 hours after arriving and flew home.

A Fresh Start

The client planning team vowed then and there that the December meeting would be more focused and engaging. In July, when the five members gathered in San Francisco with the consulting team, they began to make good on that vow. They decided on a real give-and-take meeting, where podium time for talking heads would be at a minimum, computers would capture and share participants’ thinking, and graphics would play an important part in showing the whole picture. The team would hand-pick participants, keeping them to senior leadership and those who could actually make things happen – fewer than 100 were to be invited.

The meeting design drew on our consulting team’s collective experiences. Laurie and the Grove have a decades-long history of working with groups using visuals and visual language, including graphic facilitation. She says, “Visuals, graphics help draw people out, communicate ideas, and organize information.” Since 1992, Lenny has used computers in large group meetings to speed feedback among participants. The technology he has developed, called Council, allows people to enter ideas or view-points into computers and then instantly displays them to everyone in the room. And having used the World Café process several times, I knew the seven café principles – clarify the context, create a hospitable environment, explore questions that matter, encourage everyone’s contribution, connect diverse perspectives, listen together for insights and deeper questions and harvest and share collective discoveries would work well in this context.

All three of us agreed that any one methodology, one process, one tool graphics alone, for example wouldn’t be quite enough because, in Lenny’s words, “It would leave this other thing, like need for information or outlet for planning, that wouldn’t be addressed.” Together, however, Lenny’s technology and Laurie’s graphics combined with our collective sensitivity to group dynamics and our ability to blend, orchestrate, and facilitate elements would allow us to cover all the key areas of presentation of issues, discussion, and action planning.

Once we had established the tools we thought would be effective, the next step was to ask, What exactly will the people at the meeting talk about? What issues needed to surface? Where was the line they could not cross? What could this December conversation accomplish? In our July meeting, Laurie helped the client planning team untangle these questions. She drew simple star people with thought bubbles coming from their heads, one for each stakeholder, seven in all, with outcomes in each of the bubbles. Leaders, for example, needed to better understand the business case for the two companies moving closer together, while company reps in Europe and Asia needed to learn what American clients expect.

Now that they could see the outcomes, the planning team was able to go forward to rough out the hour-by-hour first draft of a three day agenda. They decided to use a custom-drawn “infographic” to visually portray the results of a client survey they would present to spur the first day’s discussion. And they agreed that since all the outcomes couldn’t be fully realized in one meeting, they would focus the conversation on making the case for change. Subsequent meetings would delve more deeply into how they would implement the agreed-upon changes.

COMPUTERS AND CONVERSATION

Participants sat three to a table. This setup facilitated both the Café discussions and teams’ use of computers to input responses. The infographic, which was positioned along a wall, provided a context for the process.

Drafting a minute-by-minute agenda was the next big task. This process guided the subsequent rounds of discussions with the planning committee. Like a script used by a stage manager to call a Broadway musical, the final agenda – 20 pages long contained directions for times, speakers, room set-ups, props, and other notes. Lenny, Laurie, and I used the agenda to work out how we would blend the details of the technology, the graphics, the World Café, and other elements. It also included a mock competition designed to show off the companies’ differences from its competitors and a panel of account supervisors who would illuminate customer service issues. “The planning was 40 to 50 percent of the intervention,” Lenny recalled. “The strong upfront process allowed us to design the session step-by-step so that it achieved all of the planning team’s goals while deeply engaging participants in creating a new future for the organizations.”

After the usual opening segments, results of a customer survey would be the main event of the first day. We would use the infographic to focus the presentation and then shift to World Café conversations. Lenny’s computers would capture reactions, quickly feeding them back so that participants, and especially key leaders, could see the collective thinking that emerged in the room. This back-and-forth between presentation and feedback was the structure that allowed creative problem-solving to emerge over the course of the meeting. The next day, we would start more café dialogues then move to a panel discussion, the mock competition, and more café conversations focused on action. Action planning in breakout groups would end the second day. The same groups would continue their action planning the morning of the third day. The conversation would wrap up at noon.

The planning team took those first minute-by-minute drafts and, in a series of meetings and conference calls with us during the fall, made them their own. They wrote, rewrote, and wrote again the café questions. They changed and changed again the infographic. They flipped and reflipped agenda activities. They ordered more implementation planning. They let more presentation time creep in, then, reluctantly, pulled it out on our recommendation. They settled on the final draft just days before the event.

The Main Event

The conversation opened just past noon in a ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. Participants entered to find the room set up with small, three-foot-diameter round tables, three chairs per table. Lenny put a computer at each table on top of a large sheet of paper that participants could use to take notes. We placed three dots one red, one blue, one green on the paper. Participants had one of the three colored dots on their name tags. In changing from table to table during café rounds, they could sit only at places where the dots on the table matched the dots on their name tags. The dots were meant to mix participants from different parts of the globe and different ranks in the organization (see “Computers and Conversation”).

Lenny, Laurie, and I went round and round on table size. The ideal number of people per computer is three. Lenny had been used to seating six people per table with two computers, partly because of wiring issues. Café discussions are best when four people sit at a small table because all can easily participate in the conversation. My fear was that larger tables would stifle discussion. I sought out Juanita Brown, co-creator of the World Café, who settled the issue when she advised us that three people per table would work much better than six.

As part of the first hour of the conversation, Lenny introduced his Council technology with three icebreaker questions. This process familiarized participants with the technology. Everyone could see all the answers on their screens, displayed without attribution. The anonymity continued throughout and allowed for an open and honest exchange.

Laurie explained the 14-foot-long infographic, how it was put together to tell the story of worldwide trends, what customer needs resulted from those trends as reported in the customer survey, the companies’ combined response to those needs, and the gaps between needs and responses. Then leaders began their presentation, using the infographic to which the group had just been oriented.

The first café round came after the first half of the presentation. It was a two-question round with participants entering their responses into their computers by table as they neared the 15-minute limit for conversation. Another round came after the second part of the presentation, this time with three questions. The final question was “What’s important for you as a group to explore further and understand?” At the end of each round, four participants, whom we dubbed the “Theme Team,” sorted through the answers, distilling them into themes, key questions, and comments.

The next morning started with the “Deep Dive Café.” Participants tackled three more questions, designed to support disclosure of the deeper issues, rotating to new seats after each question. The questions were straight-forward:, “What’s taking shape? What are the unsaid issues around these themes? What’s the most important insight from our discussions so far?” Table groups entered answers to the last question into their computers.

A Pivotal Moment

It was during the Deep Dive Café that one of the most senior leaders became anxious and nearly cancelled the rest of the event because the discussion strayed into areas of overall strategy. The client planning team pushed back, pointing out the concerns voiced in conversations at the tables and through the computer were overwhelmingly similar and reflected what people were really thinking. The leader allowed the meeting to continue. “The planning team’s work ahead of time combined with the theme team’s work during the conversations gave the team’s members complete confidence in addressing this leadership challenge,” said Laurie. “They understood how things flowed, and when things got rocky over the issues in the room, it allowed them to remain calm, convince the leader to continue, and then successfully complete the agenda.”

Now past the pivotal point, the attention turned to learning more about the gaps between customer needs and service capability. Four representatives who led global customer service teams told of their triumphs and frustrations. Participants both posed questions and made comments through the computer. Following lunch, participants broke into three groups to simulate a sales pitch. One of the three played the role of competitor and soundly beat the other two because, as one integrated global company, it had more and better services to offer the prospective client and in a way that better met the client’s needs. Through the computer, participants identified gaps in each team’s service offerings.

Each of the processes works well alone, but in combination, the strengths were maximized and the weaknesses minimized.

Participants went next into the Action Café. Again rotating between questions and entering answers into the computer, participants chose the three most critical gaps to work on for the rest of the conference. And they suggested specific areas that might be improved branding, for example, and global project tracking. Drawing from the responses, participants broke into nine different groups to plan how to close the gaps over the next six to 18 months. They worked on the specifics through the end of the day and throughout the next morning, focused by wall sized versions of a planning tool developed by the Grove called the “Graphic Roadmap” (see “Graphic Roadmap Template”). Each breakout group presented their plans to the rest of the participants before the final café rounds closing the conference.

GRAPHIC ROADMAP TEMPLATE

Designed by the Grove, the Graphic Roadmap is a large-format worksheet of actions and target dates for deliverables on a project or an organization change process. A signature element is the identification of “milestones.” These are the key dates for events and deliverables that everyone will work to achieve.

“Softening Hard Soil”

In analyzing the conference results in a conversation with Laurie, Lenny, and I, Juanita Brown saw that the combination of the visuals, the World Café process, and the Council technology “heightened the possibility of collective intelligence. One of the big things we find over and over in café work,” she said, “is this very intentional cross-pollination of mix, mix, mix. It’s softening hard soil, so the soil can be receptive to new ideas.”

The computers served as the “common tablecloth on the café table of conversation,” Brown said, that everyone in the room could refer to. It made the collective knowledge visible and led to an accepted conclusion in the whole room at a much earlier stage than is the case in many meetings. In a normal café dialogue where there aren’t any computers, she said, people sense their common conclusions, but they don’t have the level of detail to support them that the computer feedback supplies. The anonymity of the answers also helped with the positive meeting result, Brown said. “You don’t know where the ideas are coming from, so people can more easily accept innovative thinking as it is revealed in the spaces among participants. The space between the ‘me’ and the ‘we’ becomes more fluid and the ‘magic in the middle’ has the opportunity to emerge more easily.”

Conference attendees were just as enthusiastic. As they moved to close the conference, participants answered one last question through the computer: How did this conference compare to the last? “Phew! We had to work this time. The format, structure, people were spot on.” Said another, “It was great!”

So what did we learn? What questions remain unanswered? We learned the whole was far greater than the sum of its parts. Each of the processes works well alone, but in combination, the strengths were maximized and the weaknesses minimized. Also, we confirmed again risk-taking combined with collaborative planning are important. So is quickly creating a sense of “we” in a room divided into many camps.

Will the agreements made, the visions offered, hold up? We don’t know. The big question is how a process can further deepen commitment to action, and how, really, conversation in big groups can ultimately lead to significant action.

Bill Bancroft (bbancroft@conbrioamericas.com) is founder and principal of Dallas-based Conbrio. He designs and leads conversations for companies, organizations, and communities to help leaders with strategy, team building, communications, culture, and other organization issues.

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The World Café is an innovative approach to large-group dialogue that has been widely adopted around the world. In this process, groups—often numbering in the hundreds of people—participate together in evolving rounds of dialogue at small café- style tables while at the same time remaining part of a single, larger, connected conversation. Participants record key insights in words and pictures on paper tablecloths. Intimate conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into questions or issues that are important in their life, work, or community. As the network of connections increases, knowledge sharing grows. The collective wisdom of the group becomes more accessible, and innovative possibilities for action emerge.

Sounds simple? It is, and yet there is a depth of living systems theory and experience that underpins the successful operation of Café processes and influences what emerges from their use. This philosophical framework is woven throughout the book and is what distinguishes the World Café from many other conversational approaches.

Beginnings

In an early chapter, co-author David Isaacs relates the story of the origins of the World Café. On a rainy day in January 1995, a group gathered at a home in San Francisco as part of an ongoing session to explore a particular question. To create a welcoming environment, the organizers hurriedly brought out T. V. tables, festooning each with a large sheet of paper, crayons, and a small vase of flowers.

When people arrived, they sat in informal groups around the tables and immediately started talking about the question they had been addressing the day before. As people traveled from table to table to share ideas—something that one of the participants had suggested—Juanita and David noticed a palpable energy in the room that they had never experienced before. Later, they joined with others to reflect on the conditions that led people to engage with each other so spontaneously, naturally, and in such depth in that setting.

In their subsequent research with Café hosts and participants around the world, Juanita and her colleagues have discovered a set of principles that underpin the practice of a successful World Café:

1. Set the Context
2. Create Hospitable Space
3. Explore Questions That Matter
4. Encourage Everyone’s Participation
5. Cross-pollinate and Connect Diverse Perspectives
6. Listen Together for Insights, Patterns, and Deeper Questions
7. Harvest and Share Collective Discoveries.

Much of the book is devoted to exploring the precise meaning and implication of these principles. Each chapter begins with a quotation, an illustration, and a question. These are followed by personal stories of Cafés in action, guidelines, Juanita’s perspectives, and questions for reflection.

For example, “Connecting the Parts and the Whole: The Financial Planning Association” illustrates the spirit reflected in the case studies and describes just one of the creative ways in which groups have started to apply the principles. In this section, Kim Porto and Sean Walters describe an innovation they have invented for harvesting and sharing individual and collective discoveries from the Café process: what they call the Gallery Walk. During a Café, facilitators collect and post emerging questions; participants then walk from question to question, adding their comments and insights on sticky notes. According to Kim and Sean, “One of the aspects we think makes this particular approach to whole-group synthesis so engaging and useful is that people have control over what they contribute . . . each person gets the opportunity (and has the responsibility) to contribute exactly what is most meaningful to him or her, and put it exactly where he or she feels it best fits in the overall synthesis.”

At the Core

This case study extends some of the ideas put forth in the book’s Foreword, written by Margaret Wheatley. Meg says, “The World Café process reawakens our deep species memory of two fundamental beliefs about human life. First, we humans want to talk together about things that matter to us. In fact this is what gives satisfaction and meaning to life. Second, as we talk together, we are able to access a greater wisdom that is found only in the collective.”

Thus, the essence of this book is the observation that whenever people converse and treat each other well in the course of addressing questions that matter, they are likely to achieve constructive outcomes. If you are familiar with the work of Humberto Maturana, you will not be surprised to learn that the authors reference it in several places. Juanita speaks eloquently about coming to recognize, through Maturana’s work, that Conversation is our human way of creating and sustaining—or transforming —the realities in which we live.” Looking through this lens, she became aware of what key thinkers were saying about what happens when people feel secure and respected for expressing what they think is important. Juanita also came to understand that conversation is at the center of a wide range of fields that are integral to our everyday lives, such as strategy, information technology, conflict resolution, and global affairs.

One of the main components of conversation is listening. The book includes numerous references to how Café processes promote attentive listening—and how this process affects both speaker and hearers. A poignant comment by Lloyd Fell illustrates. When he was present at his first Café, he felt “a tremendous wave of energy …right across the room. It was as if something had suddenly been unleashed by the invitation to speak freely in the more intimate setting of the café tables.” Lloyd also noted his feeling of being heard. “I am never the first to enter into a group conversation, but I found myself listening with interest and beginning to feel that I wanted to join in. After a time I did and the respect with which my words were treated had a warmth and friendliness about it that I have never experienced at a meeting.”

The Café process also highlights the importance of questioning. Questions are the trigger for inclusive, respectful, purposeful, and animated conversing. The book is rife with examples of powerful questions, such as “What could a good school also be?” or Hewlett-Packard’s famous “How can we be the best industrial research lab for (instead of in) the world?” One of the key lessons from the Café is that genuine questions, questions to which we don’t know the answers, release energy in a way that focusing on “problems” or “answers” never could.

Creating Life-Affirming Futures

In addition to providing guidelines for action in our organizations and groups, this book’s most important contribution may lie in the insights it offers on how we may begin to address some of the global issues that have come into our consciousness in recent years. With regard to this big picture, the authors state, “Our deeper intention in a Café conversation is for people to experience themselves being an integral part of a living web/network of relational thinking and of experiencing conversation itself as a co-evolutionary force for accessing co-intelligence on behalf of life-affirming futures and the conscious evolution of social systems.” Could the Café process contribute by helping people everywhere see themselves as being interconnected cells in a complex organism, with all the duties and rights of an individual as well as the concomitant responsibilities for the health of the greater whole?

In his Afterword, Peter Senge shares that the power and potential of the “collective creativity” that arises in World Café conversations is seldom realized in most of our daily conversations—yet! He characterizes the ways in which we currently express our needs as “being too small, too self centered, too disconnected from the desires of others.” But using Café and other dialogue processes to expand our global vision and collectively address bigger questions could create a world engaged in conversations on questions that have real heart and meaning for us all—one conversation at a time. The prospects of such a dream coming to life—through the creation of intentional contexts such as Café conversations and other forms of dialogue—are much enhanced by the availability of this book.

Alan Stewart, Ph. D., refers to himself as a “professional conversationalist”—a facilitator of collaborative conversational processes. His report on a public consultation that he hosted for a local council in Australia has drawn wide interest (www.theworldcafe.com/storyconversing.html). Alan has been a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University. He is now promoting what he calls “Qin Tan Conversation,” or “Pure Talk,” in Hong Kong, where he now resides. For more information, go to www.creativestate.biz.

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