A conversation method that moves a whole room through the same set of questions in rounds. Today it produces one thing: a stack of explanations for each of the four decline claims, written by everyone in the room.
You have spent two weeks describing the phenomenon. Explaining it means proposing mechanisms that would produce what you described.
A World Café suits this moment because explanation benefits from many minds on the same claim. One group generates three or four mechanisms. A room of thirty generates thirty, and the weak ones show themselves quickly.
Two things stay out of the room today. Nobody ranks the explanations, which is week 6 work. Nobody proposes what the club in Bodø should build, which is week 9 work.
"The innovative design of the World Café enables groups, often numbering in the hundreds of people, to participate together in evolving rounds of dialogue while at the same time remaining part of a single, larger, connected conversation."
Three features carry the method. Conversation runs in short timed rounds on a fixed question. People move between rounds while one host stays at each table. A report-out at the end gathers the whole room's answers in one place.
Hosting a Café differs from running breakout groups, and the movement is what does the work. By the third round an idea raised at one table has travelled to three others and been rebuilt by people who did not think of it.
Four tables · One conversation
"Decline" is four separable claims. Each table takes one of them. Select a table to see its question.
Select a table above to read its question.
Every table keeps one host for the whole session. Everyone else travels.
Choose the four hosts before round one. The role asks for someone willing to listen for three rounds and summarise what they heard, which is harder than arguing for a favourite mechanism.
Four hosts seated, the rest of the room in motion.
A card earns its place on the stack when it does these things. The first three are compulsory.
Correct. B names a mechanism and a direction of causation, so it can be wrong, which is what makes it an explanation. A restates the claim. C sharpens the description by adding a subgroup, which helps when describing and stays silent on why. D places two descriptions side by side with "and" holding them together, where an explanation needs a link.
Not yet. Ask of each card: does it say what produces what? A description can be true at any level of detail and still explain nothing. Try again.
Select everything that belongs on an index card today.
Cards 1, 2, 3 and 5. Card 4 asks for a judgement between rival mechanisms, which the adjudication criteria in week 6 exist to make. Card 6 jumps to intervention, five weeks early, and the usual cost of that jump is an intervention aimed at a mechanism nobody checked. Keep the stack full of rivals and leave them unranked.
Three from the World Café guide. Three for this room.
Ninety minutes, with two minutes of resettling folded into each move.
The guide recommends twenty to twenty-five minutes a round. Sixteen is a compression that buys a full report-out inside a ninety-minute session, so the brief has to be short and the bell has to be firm.
The three minutes of silence before the report-out are part of the method. Hosts use them to pick what to say; travellers use them to work out which mechanism they will take into week 5.