World Cafe
World Cafe rotates small groups through several rounds of the same few questions, so the whole room's thinking gets cross-pollinated instead of staying stuck at whichever table people happened to sit at.
Small tables rotate through several rounds before converging on a single wall of shared notes.
Reach for this when…
- A large group needs to think together, not just listen to one voice at the front.
- The same five people always dominate whole-group discussion.
- You need real input before a decision, not just a rubber stamp on one already made.
How to run it
- Set café-style tables of four or five people.
- Pick one to three questions that actually matter to the group.
- Round one: each table explores the first question, writing and sketching on the tablecloth.
- One host stays per table; everyone else moves, carrying ideas from their last conversation.
- Repeat for two or three rounds.
- Harvest the whole-group themes, then close with a commitment round.
A worked example
Situation. Rachel Bennett needed forty people at her design agency Lonestar Studio in Austin, United States, to actually shape the new studio's values, not just nod at a slide she'd written herself.
Applied. She ran a World Cafe with one question, 'what should this studio never do, even under deadline pressure', across three rotations, with people carrying ideas from table to table.
Result. The harvest surfaced a near-universal theme, quietly discounting junior designers' names on client work, that had never once come up in a leadership meeting. It became the first line of the new studio charter.
The catch
The cross-pollination only works if people actually move between rounds; a room that doesn't mix just runs the same conversation three times in different seats. It also produces a lot of raw material, tablecloths, notes, themes, that someone has to synthesise afterward or it evaporates by Monday. And it needs a genuinely open question; a question with a predetermined answer turns the whole exercise into theatre.
If leadership has already decided the answer, running a World Cafe to 'get input' will be spotted for what it is by round two.
Origin: Juanita Brown & David Isaacs