My experience with TWC

From my point of view The World Cafe is very useful collaboration tool for people, which are looking for creative environment and also wish to share their own ideas and experiences. Discussion around the table was very inspiring and thanks to naturally flowing discussion creates many different views on same issue for each participant. It helps to individual creativity and support own intuition and positive thinking.
On the other hand these discussions brings objective solutions for the subject/question and helps to find common values and targets. This common thinking also enhance team working and helping to each individual find the right place in a group or team. People has chance to assure yourself about their opinions and gain some fine “tuning” of it.
I think that TWC is very useful and interesting not only for business purposes, but also for personal development and entertainment.

My World Cafe experience

World Cafe is a technique or process for having large group discussions which are emerging and not too controlled. It's based on the fact that if you create the right environment that useful discussion will be created. What is this environment like? It is like being in a nice cozy cafe, small round tables, candle light and people who are passionately about their subject. My experience with the World Café during our Communication Management class at UNVA was very similar. Although we did not have a coup of freshly brewed coffer and candles were not lit; discussion evolved from basic ideas to a highly complex thoughts.

We tried to apply the 7 principles of Wolrd Café: “set the context", "create hospitable space", "explore questions that matter", "encourage everyone’s contribution", "cross-pollinate and connect diverse perspectives", "listen together for patterns, insights and deeper questions", "harvest and share collective discoveries". Using these principles we came up with some pretty interesting thoughts on the subject of “What might a great MBA experience look like”.

I like World Cafe and the ideas behind it. Personally, I think the World Café is a great tool can be used to solve problems and sparkle new ideas in many fields of interest. It seems to be a good tool to be used for brainstorming sessions in business environment but it’s more than that.

My experience of World Cafe

The World Café organized in our Management Communication class was a completely new experience for me. After carefully reading the guidelines for crating a World Café I developed certain idea of what to expect, however I had my doubts about the outcome. At first I thought that my assumptions were proven, this was caused by participants getting sidetracked from answering selected questions, however as I understood later this was caused purely by lack of experience and unclear idea of what is the purpose of such session.

The whole situation was a learning process for me and I believe it had the same impact on my classmates. After experiencing the World Café atmosphere I can now conclude that such technique is very useful. It is a tool that enables participants to collectively brainstorm and shape their ideas through discussions while having an advantage of pleasant and intimate atmosphere of a small group. Everybody is welcomed and encouraged to provide their point of view on questions raised. However the whole experience is deeper than that. Not only people participate by providing their point of view but they also learn the point of views expressed by other participants – with their opinions shaped they then move to next table and provide perhaps more valuable opinion. Also the use of drawings provides the possibility for interpretation of such pictures by those who join another table and this also helps to shape their ideas. Until this point the whole technique is good for formulation of opinions however the next steps in which the discussions end and the ideas are collected and visualized – the outcome of the general opinion is clearly presented

How do you SEE The World Cafe methodology ?

The World Cafe live

Many years of the consulting experience did not help me to know about The World Cafe method of group discussion. I myself wondered, that so simply instrument stayed hidden in the large world of communication knowledge.

First time I saw web pages with name I had on mind famous desk game Cafe International. Later on I were in deep brainstorming what "the World Cafe" really means. I understand it as kind of the brainstorming with unclear foggy results. As target oriented person I was surprised, how fuzzy logic of collective wisdom might be usefull in corporate life. So I avaited class example. Next day we had to use WC (really not here in meaning toilet :-)

After few minutes of explanation we started. Experience from tens of companies workshops was usefull. Basic principles of generating ideas, free discussions about topics, noticing every thought, were not new for me. I was party amazed by deep conservatism of some students. They did not folow the topic. They did not expressed their feelings in drawings, words, notices. They did not continued with existing stripes of mind left on big paper.

Althought all schemes I compared with previous experiences, I found this technique pretty sucessfull in producing workaround to selected topics. But! There is one big "but" for me as leader, manager and businessman: this is not result. Only one step on the dusty way to solve some problem or managerial task. Of course it might be enough for intelectual debates, or to see widespread of chosen topic(s).


So keep my brain in reality, I found in "The World Cafe" usefull method to generate ideas, which might be compared to other alternatives I used previously. That is biggest benefit of TWC. Secondary it might help to better communicate in corporate team. It shows good communicators, moderators, speakers, leaders or "grey mouses".

If you want to see our result of TWC, please folow this link.

Collective wissdom and World Caffe process visualization from most reliable source - www.theworldcafe.com

intro

This is first brief text to start the blog about our group experience with The World Cafe methodology in MBA class Communication Management.

How we will structure content of our blog topic? I offer fisrt version:
- have we ever heard about World Cafe and how we imagined what does it mean;
- how did we understand to TWC process after visit web site
- describe in-class experience
- describe benefits for our current career (position, tasks etc)
- summary