David Isaacs is President of Clearing Communications and designs strategic dialogue forums with senior leaders in the U.S. and abroad. David is also a co-originator of the World Cafe and serves as adjunct faculty with the University of Texas Business School's Executive MBA Program.
Juanita Brown, Ph.D. is co-originator of the World Cafe and has served as a Senior Affiliate at the MIT Sloan School's Organizational Learning Center (now Society for Organizational Learning), as a Research Affiliate with the Institute for the Future and as a Fellow of the World Business Academy.
The World Cafe is a flexible, easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue, sharing mutual knowledge, and discovering new opportunities for action. Based on living systems thinking, this innovative approach creates dynamic networks of conversation that can catalyze an organization or community's own collective intelligence around its most important questions.
Filled with stories of actual Cafe dialogues in business, education, government, and community organizations across the globe, this uniquely crafted book demonstrates how the World Cafe can be adapted to any setting or culture. Examples from such varied organizations as Hewlett-Packard, American Society for Quality, the nation of Singapore, the University of Texas, and many others, demonstrate the process in action.
Along with its seven core design principles, The World Cafe offers practical tips for hosting "conversations that matter" in groups of any size- strengthening both personal relationships and people's capacity to shape the future together.
For more information, visit www.TheWorldCafe.com.
Listen in as Susan Stamm interviews David on Bookends
Recorded on Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Watch an interview with the co-author, Juanita Brown, as she speaks about the 'World Cafe.'