Lesson 8:Using World Cafe/ Pros and Cons

by Therese Ong

The World Cafe is used in many different settings. It is good at generating ideas, sharing knowledge, stimulate innovative thinking, and exploring action in real life situations. The informal an deep conversations that the World Cafe encourages can lead to improved relationships between participants and between wider groups.

You should use a World Cafe when:

• you need to engage large groups in an authentic dialogue process
• you want to generate input, share knowledge, and stimulate innovative thinking
• you want to explore action possibilities around real life issues and questions
• you want to conduct in-depth exploration of key strategic challenges or opportunities

The World Cafe process can deliver new thinking, meaningful conversations, an inclusive and relaxed atmosphere and deeper relationships and mutual ownership of outcomes in an existing group.

The process can give a group a sense of their own intelligence and insight that is larger than the sum of the parts.

In every process change, there are pros and cons, and in the case of a World Cafe, i think that the strengths that the world cafe have is that it is a creative process for developing new ideas, it's also informal and inclusive, and it has the potential to be cheap and easy to organize. However, it requires a clear and relevant question, and it cannot be used to make direct decisions.