David Isaacs is co-founder of The World Café and President of Clearing Communications, an organizational and communication strategy company working with senior executives in the U.S. and internationally. He has collaborated with a wide range of corporate clients including Chevron, Cargill, Ericsson, GlaxoSmithKline, Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Sanofi-Aventis.
David´s not-for-profit work has included the design and hosting of World Cafe dialogues with the Institute for Noetic Sciences, Shambhala Institute, Kellogg Foundation, and Society for Organizational Learning. He serves as an adjunct faculty for the University of Texas, San Antonio Business School´s Executive MBA program. With partner Juanita Brown, David co-authored The World Café - Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter.
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KE: Conversational Leadership - what does that term mean to you?
DI: Conversational leadership is an essential strategy for cultivating collective intelligence and innovation and it starts with the assumption that in organizations, communities and businesses there is such a thing as collective capability, collective creativity, collective intelligence and the way that it is evoked or co-evolved or generated is by leaders literally designing, convening and hosting conversations around their organization´s most important questions.
KE: You have a unique lens through which you view conversational leadership. It´s called The World Café. Please tell us about The World Café and also what's unique about it.
DI: The World Café is a very simple process by which people of all stripes, of all capabilities, at any level in a system can have a conversation around an important question having to do with its future. It´s essentially a small group conversation that has no limit to scale. In other words, we seat people with tables of four and have a conversation around a question that matters to that community of practice using some very clear but simple design principles, which we will speak about in a little bit. They engage in a conversational process that evokes the lifeblood of the individuals and more importantly, the collective capability in the community that leads to potentially the co-evolution or the generation of collective intelligence.
And it starts with the assumption that the collective intelligence is already present. It builds on the Carl Jungian concept that there is such a thing as a collective unconscious and that by being in a café conversation around a simple, but elegant question, that collective unconscious can become conscious and the collective innovation and creativity shows through. That serves to create value for the community, the organization, or the business that is using it.
KE: I´m curious, why did you choose the word café?
DI: Well it was quite remarkable. About 12 years ago, we were involved in a conversation in our living room in which we had set up some TV tables to start the day over coffee and Danish. All of a sudden we recognized that people were going much deeper and they started to write on napkins and on the table cloth and then one person said, "Well, I want to know what's going on over there." There were about six groups of four in our living room and that was the beginning, because what we did is we left one person at each of the little group of tables. Three people from each table traveled to three other tables and continued the conversation and it was so magical, it lasted all morning. At the end of the time we looked at each other, all of us, as we said, "What happened?" We knew that we knew how to have good conversations, but this conversation went deeper and higher and was more creative and innovative and enthusiastic and what we have recognized is that we had tapped into perhaps the humanity or the human´s unique capacity to create new knowledge. In other words, humans have always been in conversations, in small circles.
Our ancestors sat in circles on the ground and as a means of survival moved from circle to circle taking what they were learning and it became, we believe, a social gene if you will, the capability to be in conversations about our most important questions. We believe that we rediscovered that in this small café in our living room. We named it The World Café because we believe that everyone has the capability to engage in these conversations. So we developed some simple design principles, which are not rocket science, and encourage people to practice, to name your conversations like the café conversation. It takes very little infrastructure and people are able to create value very quickly.
KE: You mentioned design principles, why don´t we look at some of those principles now?
DI: The first principle is so simple that we didn´t see it until the end and it is: Set the context. Why are we having the gathering, or meeting or café? What's the purpose? What's the mission? Why do we want it? The second principle is again simple but very often neglected as a design principle. It´s to create a hospitable space or environment, with tablecloths, music, and food - a welcoming space with a spirit of invitation. Then to identity, what are the most important questions that we need to engage in this conversation? Why are we having this conversation? What do we want and need to learn?
And then the fourth principle: Encourage everyone's contribution. This is the diversity design principle. It assumes that everyone in the organization or everyone at the café has a unique contribution and in small tables of four it´s very easy for everyone to contribute. Then, there is the important design principle of: Connecting diverse perspectives and we do that by moving people from table to table, at least twice, if not three or four times, connecting the ideas, connecting the questions, connecting the people literally from table to table. Then evolving directly out of that is the design principle of listening together for insight, for deeper questions, for creativity, for innovation. This starts with the capability of listening into the center of the conversation, of the table and moving away from what I am thinking to listen for what we are thinking together.
And then lastly, and in some cases most importantly, harvest and share and gather the collective discoveries and insights of the conversations at the café table. Very often these discoveries are captured with table graphics and/or using a professional graphics person, then digitizing through photography what's learned and then sharing it with the community of practice. So, used together in a reflective design process before the meeting or gathering, these seven World Café design principles for hosting and convening the conversation creates some very special creativity that everyone can learn how to do.
KE: I can see so much value simply in applying these principles to any meeting of any size. Very powerful. How are World Café conversations being used?
DI: It was very clear right from the beginning that what we had uncovered was not ours. That these principles and this work have always been present and all we did was gather the insights together and give it some form and some infrastructure and then share it out in the world through our website and through our book. And the important thing of all of that is that in sharing this information people have said, "Oh! I can do that, I can do that in my school in Sri Lanka, I can do that in my hospital in Pennsylvania, I can do that in my government ministry or in the military in Singapore, all I need to do is to design with my client or my peers a series of meetings or gatherings in which we explore what it is that we don´t know."
By the way, this is a really important point, Karen. Leaders are hired very often because they have a lot of experience, they have a lot of knowledge and education, but what we are discovering in this work is that it´s the leader´s capacity to be in conversations about what they don´t know that makes a difference. They do not know the answers, but what they have identified is what they need to learn in order to create innovation and new possibilities that create value to the bottom line and to the stakeholders of the organization.
KE: What led you originally to this work, David?
DI: My partner, Juanita, and I have had the privilege of working with large organizations (for profit and not for profit) for quite a long time and we identified very early on that the most important work that we did was getting leaders and other people out of the office to talk about what they cared about, what's important to them. Why they care? What kind of legacy do they want to leave in addition to having a positive bottom-line or creating value in their organization? We recognized very early that in developing relationships of mutual trust and respect with clients and client systems and with corporate and organizational leaders, we were able to support them in creating value. We never believed that it was us that brought the knowledge in and so we discovered early on that the work was to evoke the individual and creative and collective knowledge that exists in organizations.
So, when World Café showed up it was a very logical next step that gave us some infrastructure and a very simple system and process to encourage other people to do it. It doesn´t require training and I think it´s a really good way for me to move from the linguistic distinctions between training and learning. I know that HR folks are responsible for very important training programs, skills trainings that exist in organizations. I think that´s very important and an adjunct to it is creating learning in addition to training, where we start with: What are the questions that speak to what we don´t know that we have identified that we need and want to learn together in order to create new possibilities for our future, for all of our stakeholders?
KE: What makes conversations so important?
DI: Conversation from my point of view evokes trust; it can evoke trust under the right conditions using the principles that we have spoken to. When there is mutual trust and respect among people in an organization, in a business, in any setting, creativity can emerge. If there is fear and restriction, people do "C" quality work. So, how do we create environments in which people can do great work? We create environments in which people can have conversation. Conversation literally means to turn to one another to converse. Meg Wheatley has spoken about that in her books. To turn to one another with the assumption that we as individuals have one set of capabilities, but we as a collective have a synergistic or integrative capability.
So, conversation around important questions creates, in our experience, a synergistic or integrative value that is much larger than the sum of its parts. So, why not talk to each other? Although we all remember going to school and hearing, "Stop talking and get to work." We have a client up in Canada that has signs all over their business that say, "Start talking and get to work." Start talking about what you care about, start identifying what it is that we need to learn together and start talking about it, design the conversation to create value.
KE: Many organizations still operate with the traditional view that talking by the leader leads directly to action. The leader gets up and communicates the way it´s going to be and requests action and that´s the end of it. He or she may open it up for questions as a formality, but most people don´t feel comfortable asking them in that forum. So, then it's back to work and time to put the strategy into place. The emerging view that you are talking about here recognizes that conversations are happening behind the scenes in the social network anyway; why not invite them to happen in the open, where all can benefit from the learning that takes place?
DI: Yes and one of the biggest challenges of this work is that it´s very difficult, if not impossible to sell. It can only be offered and in the spirit of offering and invitation because people immediately say, "Well, we talk all the time, what's different here?" And if we don´t have specific actions or specific outcomes at the end of the café meeting, we really can´t have one. What´s the action of the café? So there is a predisposition to specific outcomes or action and that´s been a relatively hard question to answer. The best way that it has come to us in attempting to answer that question is that we believe that learning together around important questions having to do with the future of the community or the organization or the business is action.
Learning together about what we don´t know by asking questions that matter will create our future and being in a reflective conversation does lead over time to action that in many cases is better than the addictive need to create specific actions and specific outcomes from our conversations today. So, if we can or are willing to be in a reflective conversation, or divergent open conversation around important questions together with the assumption that the knowledge is already present, our actions over time will create much more value than if we need and I use that word advisably, "need" to take that action today.
KE: Besides the World Café process, are there other ways to faciliate conversational leadership?
DI: Certainly, there are wonderful organizational processes that work really well separately or with World Café conversations. There are Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, Counsel work, Future Search work, and many others. Interestingly enough, almost all of them involve a circle. And they all work relativity well together, but it´s a design consideration. We have had the pleasure of working with Open Space people and Future Search people. As a matter of fact, Future Search Network had a World Café on the future of Future Search. And we have worked with the Open Space people and we really believe that the World Café itself is an appreciative inquiry. It identifies what already is present, what already has value in our organization that we want to identify as having value and then reinvesting it; appreciating its value and building upon that.
KE: I have talked in previous webcasts with guests about the importance of leaders developing skills as good facilitators of conversation, not a competency that is usually listed on leader competency models. In the work you do, you don´t use the term "facilitator," you seem to prefer "host" or "convener" and I am wondering if you could talk about the difference.
DI: Well all three words mean different things to me. The word facilitation is a very good word but it tends to imply the facilitator is running the gathering. Yes, we have a person who is guiding the World Café - I like that word ´guiding´ better than running - who is the host of the conversation, or the café host. It's his or her job to evoke the capabilities that are there. There is less of a control orientation in the term ´host´ than ´facilitator.´ My partner, Juanita, likes to say that what we want to do is "design for coherence without control". Sometimes people actually want to put a facilitator at café tables in addition to the overall café host. The facilitator at the table will tend to manage or control the conversation. We find that by using the language of hosting, we have more of an opportunity for self-organizing in which no one is literally running the café tables and the café host moves into the background.
The word ´convener´ is more like a sponsor. So, if I am working with a corporation I want to have a partner who has skin in the game, usually at the vice presidential level, where there is some responsibility to take action as a convener of the conversation. So, he or she would create the context and say, "Why we are having this meeting? Why are we having this café?" The convener would introduce the café host and then the conversation would continue.
KE: You talk in your book about the importance of conversing about questions that matter. From the leader´s point of view, how might those questions be determined?
DI: Here is probably my best answer to your question. What question or questions do we have in our organization, or our community, or our business that, if we were able to explore successfully over time, would create the most value for all of our stakeholders? So, we are really asking, "What it is it that we don´t know together that if we were able to learn into over time, we could create the most value?" We find that in the World Café conversations the questions that evoke possibilities, divergent questions that open up infinite pathways towards creating value, or the ones that put light and energy into the inquiry are the most powerful ones to ask.
The World Café can be used for convergent conversations as well. It´s essential though to be first in the field of a possible creation before you convert that into convergent, action oriented problem-solving questions. So, open-ended questions that we don´t know the answer to are best. Reflecting on these is part of the design process.
KE: I am still trying to get my arms around how big a question or how narrow a question to ask. For instance, a very large question might be, "What might our organization look like in the future?" Is that too big for this type of process?
DI: That would be a top-level conversation that could happen over time. On the other hand, we may look at our most important questions that will guide our strategies, our budgets and our resourcing for next year. They would be of a much more confined scale. So, again what is it we want to design here? What's the purpose of our conversation? And then what are the questions that will convert into achieving our purpose? It´s so simple, but we don´t take the time to do it.
KE: What if a leader selected a question, which seemed like it might work, and began the conversation, only to find there was just no energy behind it?
DI: Well first of all, the question would not be thought about right at the date of the meeting. It would be thought about weeks and maybe even months before, with the leadership team, and possibly with external HR or internal HR people, to refine what the question is. But, in the event that it´s offered and it does not work, and that´s happened to me, what I would say is, "It sounds to me like this question is not working for us, what question do you think will?" And when you talk about it for a while at your table people will come up with a better question. Even if you do have a good question, we encourage people that if they come up with a better question, to let go of the initial question, because of what they have discovered as a deeper inquiry or more important inquiry. So again, it´s coherence without control.
KE: Let´s take a few minutes to walk through the steps of hosting a World Café dialogue. We determine the question of significance and then what's next?
DI: Well, if you remember the design principles, first of all we have clarified the context, answering why we are having the conversation. We have created a hospitable environment. Then, we have offered the question that matters. We will allow people at each table to have at least 20-25 minutes for that round of conversation before one person stays as a host and three people move to three other tables. What almost always happens, almost immediately, is people start to lean in. There is paper and some pens on the table. There is usually a flower and a variation of the "talking stick" that can be used. People gravitate very quickly to really listening deeply.
After 20 to 25 minutes, the café host raises his or her hand and asks for quiet and that happens very quickly, although people very often don´t want to move because they have been in a deep conversation and we always say, "It´s important to go deep again but also to go wide to bring together the diversity of knowledge and experience and insight that is here. So can we please move?" And three people go to three different tables where a new host welcomes them. The host asks them what happened at the first round of conversation. They briefly share what happened at their original tables and then go deeper into the original question. Or, in the second round, a secondary question can be asked. So there are infinite varieties to these café conversations.
In the third round there can be a third question or we will remain with the first question, deepening the first question. So it´s all about listening for the collective creativity that is in the participants´ midst. Then, at the end of three rounds, what we do is we go into an Oprah or Phil Donohue-type session. The café host walks around with a microphone and asks people what were their insights, what were their deeper questions? What did they learn? And things get put up on a graphic and that´s about ´gathering the knowledge.´ There are a lot of different variations. What we have discovered, however, is that there is no limit in terms of scale at the World Café.
We run cafés as large as 1,200 and last year we were informed that the girl scouts, at their meeting, ran a café of over 2,000 people. You need more technology obviously with a large café, but it still remains a small group conversation multiplied by the number of tables that exist in the room.
KE: And just to clarify, every table in a particular round is talking about the same question.
DI: Yes, unless there is an agreement at the table that they come up with a better question. And then we encourage them to dive into that and then take what they are learning to the next table and very often what gets shared at the end of the three rounds, is different than what you might expect from the initial question, but the creativity will be there.
KE: What sort of responses do you get from folks that experience their first World Café? What sort of feedback?
DI: After a short while, we recognized that people were really listening to each other and that just amazing ideas came up. We were immediately able to have conversations with some people that we did not know very well and we developed relationships of mutual trust and respect. When there were differences of view, we were able to really listen to those differences and look for common ground between them. That is a comment that we hear very often, differences were respected; differences of ideas of all kinds, of questions, of capability. Conflict rarely shows up, although you know in any conversation conflict can show up. And what happens when a conflict shows up? I think the best thing that can happen is to explore, "What's deeper than our conflict? What do we care about that´s deeper than our differences of opinion?" Then the café host helps people come back to the importance of the question that was offered, which was designed by their design team.
KE: I am thinking about individuals with whom I have worked who didn´t feel comfortable asking questions or sharing their ideas in a larger group. Something about this café process - and I have never experienced it first hand, but just imagining it - feels much more intimate and connected and human than a typical meeting.
DI: What's wonderful about the small group conversation of four is that the introverts will speak, and sometimes the most creative people in the organization are the introverts. So if you can create an environment of four people where people lean in, everyone has an opportunity to speak. However, there is never a demand that anyone speak, listening, just listening or just drawing on the tablecloth and saying nothing is respected. But, yes the introvert and the person who will not stand up in the larger group will speak in the small group and his or her ideas will be spoken by other people who are comfortable standing up.
KE: That´s the other piece that seems really powerful to me - that there is not as much personal ownership around the ideas as you might see in a typical meeting format, not feeling like I have to drive my personal agenda forward.
DI: What's interesting there Karen is that a lot of people believe they should not be giving away what they know. But the amazing thing that we find is when people do share, respect from others skyrockets and new possibilities show up. Other people comment, "I didn´t know that you knew that, that´s wonderful, how can we build on that?" So, instead of finding the common denominator in an organization I would like to talk about what the common numerator is. That which multiplies, instead of divides.
KE: We have talked about the process. What about the spirit in which the conversation occurs? Are there some ground rules?
DI: Not a lot. Very often we just welcome people into a room in which café tables are set up and let them have coffee and Danish before anything even happens. The conversation starts even before the convener can step into the room and the ice gets broken very quickly. If it´s still a little icy, what I have done and other people have done is just asked people to talk with each other at the table for a little while, to remember a time when they were involved in a good conversation in which innovation or learning took place, and to think a little bit about the qualities of those times. That really breaks the ice for people, if it´s not already broken.
Walking into a café with music and a small bud vase on the table with a flower in it and pens seems to evoke a spirit of enjoyment, of creativity. There is an art to having good conversations and a little bit of science in terms of having an infrastructure present.
KE: It is interesting that cafes have existed for a very long time; and you find them all over the world, as gathering places for community. Also, the tables don´t seem to get larger, no matter where you go in the world.
DI: That´s true. Some people try to do cafés with tables larger than five and what invariably happens is the conversation breaks down into two separate parts. So we really encourage people to limit the size of the table to about a 36-inch to 40-inch table for four. You can do dyads, two people talking to each other as learning partners, and it works really well, three is a little too small, five is okay, but it´s right on the edge. In some environments where the tables are not available, we just encourage people to sit in a circle of four and maybe put a large tablet on their knees in front of them that they can draw. You can host these conversations without tables, although tables help create the ambiance of a café.
KE: You mentioned earlier that businesses, in particular, are accustomed to action steps, due dates and agreed upon deliverables as output from each meeting. Beyond overcoming that obstacle, are there other challenges that organizations encounter when they begin to talk together in this new way?
DI: Well the biggest challenge is any fear that´s in the system. And if that doesn't get discussed in the design process, it can really restrict the capability of the conversation. What are the fears that are running us, or that are inhibiting our capability? When I have sometimes run into that in gatherings, I tend to want to take the risk of asking, "What's under the table here? Is there something that we are afraid of?" It is not intended for anybody to stand up publicly and answer, but to let them talk at the small tables and then drop in. Once you identify what we are concerned about or are fearful about, we can ask, "What possibilities do we see to break through that fear? What would we need? That´s a question that matters. If there is fear in the system or a lack of trust, what are the ways that we have already discovered to break though the fear? That´s the appreciative inquiry. Where, even when there is fear can we move through the fear or through our deep concerns? So fear paralyzes, and innovation and creativity allows for new knowledge to be developed. Being willing to talk about what's not working and why it´s not working is probably a better question. Not to identify the problem.
I think that´s important, the café works best in evoking new possibilities that can become probabilities for action in the future, as contrasted with problem solving. If the organization is insisting on doing problem solving, what I encourage is to shift the problem into a question. Then you can have a conversation, and it can be open ended.
KE: Given that World Cafés are happening all over the world, what are some examples of the different groups and situations that have benefited from this way of being in conversation?
DI: Well I gave you the example of Girl Scouts thinking about their future. At the end of that meeting they realized that now, people would insist on this kind of conversation in all of their meetings. But they were able to create a lot of value. There have been conversations in the military in Singapore around how the military can best serve the future and support all the people in Singapore. Young people in Bali are talking about how to bring innovation and creativity and the best of technology and education to their area; how to bring young people into the community and political process there.
In Denmark, there have been conversations in the ministry of education talking about the future of education in that country. There have been conferences all over the world that we have had the privilege of being involved in: The systems thinking conference, the Shambhala Institute conference, the Society of Organizational Learning has been a primary sponsor of World Café activities. There have been cafés in the desert under the aegis of Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia looking at how that company can support a positive creativity within Saudi Aramco, but also in service of its stakeholders. There have been cafes in the Knesset, the Parliament in Israel.
In South America, there is a large contingent of people in Brazil talking about important questions having to do with that country´s future. I have had the privilege of bringing World Café into Hewlett-Packard, into Sanofi Aventis, to talk about strategic planning processes in those organizations. Intel has used the World Café at high levels in that organization as they think about positive futures. So it´s spreading. In Mexico there have been conversations in a bank consolidation process, and in the Mexican congress to talk about the future. Nothing is perfect, all these café conversations, we believe, do create value, and at the same time, there is no promise of any conversation being totally successful. But, the fact that people are talking with each other about important questions across barriers, from my point of view, is really important.
KE: Is there any thinking that goes into who sits where in a World Café process?
DI: Generally, no. Random works best, although if people are particularly uncomfortable at the beginning, we encourage them to sit with whomever they want, since we are going to move them anyhow. So traditionally, you want people to meet new people and develop new relationships instead of just staying with their small group.
KE: I´m guessing that the rotations of the World Café could really assist with breaking down ´silos´ in an organization.
DI: In terms of collective intelligence, we assume that the collective knowledge is already present, although we cannot prove that, but we see it show up. It evolves in successive rounds of conversation to link and cross pollinate ideas and questions around the multiple perspectives and the result being new possibilities that can lead to action. So that´s what can happen.
KE: Now, let´s assume that some folks like this idea. As you mentioned earlier, using this process does not require any formal training. How might our audience get started using this process?
DI: Probably, the simplest way is to visit the World Café website www.theworldcafé.com. There is a specific area there called "Café To Go" and it gives all the information on how to design a café. There is our book that you mentioned, published by Berrett-Koehler; The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter and there is a small section in the book having to do with how to´s there, but also many stories about what people have done in different parts of the world.
I think the next thing that I would encourage people to do is start small. Gather people from the organization together and identify what it is that you might want to do with the café conversation. What small conversation could you have in your department? Identify a couple of questions that really matter. Sit down and design the conversation that you would like to have in your department or in your small group and then literally invite people and host the conversation around these questions to see what happens.
We also have a free ListServe where they can go online and ask questions about the World Café, or share stories. I can remember a couple of years ago a person (that we had no idea was doing this work from New Zealand) asked a question and within 15 minutes, a woman in Ghana answered it. She was doing World Cafés in government work and had learned about the World Café in a meeting somewhere in Africa where a man from Toronto had brought the café. So anyone can do this and there are friends who have experience doing it. If people are called to it, great, it´s an invitation and an offering. We never say you need to do a World Café. We never say that because they may not need to. It´s about inviting people to participate in a conversation. That´s what's in the foreground and the conversation methodology, be it a World Café or Open Space or whatever, we believe is best left in the background and that´s the container in which people learn.
KE: Many organizations are dispersed these days and individuals rarely come together to be in each other´s physical space. Are examples of this World Café being used in the virtual environment?
DI: Yes, the best example I know of is an organizational consultant in Sweden who is also a teacher at an institute in Santa Barbara called the Fielding Institute. In his class work he literally convenes a café online. They have done it both synchronously and asynchronously, in which people metaphorically move from table to table and build upon each other´s knowledge. So it´s harder to do it in virtual space, but possible. What we find is that once people have the experience of doing it face-to-face it becomes a lot easier to do virtually. Also, technology is improving all the time so that with video and audio and streaming video, it is becoming more and more possible in virtual space.
KE: From ongoing development of leaders to applying the learning from a training program, to building a culture of engagement, there are so many places that I could see this powerful way of conversing being effective. David, what final thoughts would you like to leave with our audience?
DI: Trust yourself. Trust that if you care, as I know you do, about creating environments in which people can innovate and shine and evoke their deepest capability and creativity, trust yourself. Bring together a small group of committed people who care about questions in your organization and practice. I think that what I just said really relates to Margaret Mead´s famous quote, "Never doubt the power of a small group of committed people to change the world, indeed it´s the only thing that ever has." I really believe that a small group of committed people, caring about the future of their community, their organization or their business, really can get together in small groups at the World Café or another conversation approach and evoke new knowledge that can have value to the future of the organization for all its stakeholders.
If you´d like to find out more about The World Café, please visit www.theworldcafe.com, or purchase the book co-authored by David Isaacs and Juanita Brown entitled, The World Café - Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter.
