Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

The World Café
A process for building knowledge about a focused need or opportunity.
Supports: collaboration, idea generation, problem solving
LEVEL OF EFFORT
SIZE OF UTILITY
MED
MED-LARGE
SCOPE OF WORK C 2
C 2 = CONTEXT/CONTENT DEPENDENT
While the World Café as a named and framed process formed in the mid 1990’s, it is a
process that has intuitively been used (both formally and informally) in organizations and groups
of all sizes for many years. Focused on the social aspect of building new ideas and the valueadded
each individual can contribute to that idea, there are evolving rounds of dialogue. For
example, let’s say there are 30-40 people engaged in finding a solution (or solutions) to a
burning issue. These people may all be within the same organization, part of a larger
connected stakeholder group, or interested/informed individuals invited to participate in the
World Café experience. Concurrently, they may be individuals with knowledge focused around
a specific domain-although working from different frames of reference—or they may represent a
variety of functional areas with a common interest in the issue or opportunity being addressed.
Good questions (those for which we do not have answers) are developed around the issue at
hand. The larger group breaks into smaller groups—of 4, 5 or 6—with each group gathered
around a paper tablecloth-covered table or around a flip chart with markers for everyone. All the
groups may be addressing a single Café Question, or there may be several closely-related and
overlapping questions scattered among the groups. For a set period of time each group
engages in conversations (using all the rules of Dialogue) around the question they are
addressing. As the conversations progress, core ides re captured through drawings, symbols or
words.
After a period of time—in our example a half hour has passed—individuals rotate to another
group of their choice. One person in each small group stays behind to host the incoming group.
As the second round begins, the ―host‖ of each group has the opportunity to introduce the
―seed‖ ideas from round one, and the second dialogue period begins. This rotation is repeated
five or six times, providing the opportunity for both cross-fertilization and social development of
new ideas. The results from this process then become the basis for action planning, with the
host who has stayed with a specific set of ideas becoming the expert resource for those ideas.
Expected Outcomes:
Creative ideas and processes to solve a specific problem.
New relationships and connections made among participants.
See:
Case Example #3 (Hill and Knowlton)
Case Example #9 (The Socio Economic Unit Foundation, India)
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