World Café

The Mechanism to Obtain Wisdom from the Crowd

Recently, I have the opportunity to organise another World Café for a group of trainers, and I like to share this process with you.

Setting the Context

A meeting was conducted a few weeks before the World Café event. In the discussion, my clients and I addressed the following matters:

• What wisdom do we want to obtain from the crowd?
  
• Who might have to the wisdom?
  
• How much of time do we want to assign to the session?

Create a Hospitable Space

To create comfort for and relatedness between the members in the crowd, a few activities were introduced prior to the World Café segment. These were:

• Participants were invited to turn up early
  
• Food and drinks were provided to energise participants
  
• Organisers mingled and introduced participants to each other
  
• Organisers also explained the purpose of the session
  
• Participant were invited to gather in a circle in the centre of the event hall
  
• Opening circle was conducted to secure the presence of mind amongst participants

Explore Questions that Matters

Knowledge will emerge and be created when the right questions are presented to the crowd.

The crowd has the capacity to find questions that are relevant to their real-life concerns and a facilitator needs to enable this capacity. In this World Café session, I had asked the crowd to write down the things that concerned them as trainers and to construct these concerns into session questions.

The stem for such questions will begin with ‘In what ways might I ……….?’ and here is an example of a complete question presented at the World Café.

It is the crowd who will have the wisdom to determine the questions that are most useful to them. I helped them make this determination by asking them to present their questions to the floor and invited each participant to view and mark those questions which they were also keen to know the answers or which they think they had answers to contribute.

Here is a video clip showing this segment of the World Café.

Encouraging Everyone’s Contribution

People will engage in deep conversation with each other when they feel that they are contributing in enlarging the knowledge and wisdom in the crowd. I have organised many World Café events and I have yet to observe a session where there were no conversation at all.

Let the members of the crowd break into their individual special interest groups and let nature take its course.

Connect Diverse Perspectives

It is important to record the knowledge and wisdom emerging ‘in the middle of the group’. A ‘shared visual space’ is created as the recording tablet for the group. Members from one group are free to ‘float’ to another group to cross-pollinate the ideas. This way, they will bring to the new table threads from the last round and interweave them with those they just joined. People who arrived with fixed positions often find that they are more open to new and different ideas when new members joined them.

Listen Together and Notice Patterns

Listeners are as important as speakers. They should listen for where the speaker is coming from, and to appreciate that their perspective, regardless for their divergence, is equally valid and they represent a part of the wisdom in the crowd.

Here are some tips about listening:

• The need to think of how to response to what was being said actually prevents one’s capacity to listen authentically
  
• Respect and treat each participant as truly wise
  
• Listen with an openness to be influenced by the speaker
  
• Listen for supporting questions, patterns, insights and emerging perspectives
  
• Listen to build on the ideas of others
  
• Listen for what is not being spoken

Share Collective Discoveries

Ask the groups to spend a few minutes to consider what has emerged in their conversation and which is most meaningful to them. Focus their attention at distilling these insights, patterns, themes and deeper questions, and provide a way to get them out to the whole room so that all members are given the opportunity to learn from this wisdom collectively.

After all insights have been shared in the room, the whole group is encouraged to take a few minutes of silent reflection to consider:

• What new things have emerged from the conversations?
  
• Do they notice patterns arising from these conversations? What are these and what do they suggest?
  
• If there was a single theme emerging from these conversations, how do we describe this theme?
  
• What do we now learnt and see as a result of these conversations?
  
• What new questions are arising as a result of these conversations?

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 25 Nov 2008.

Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.