World Caf%C3%A9
| Type | Team Size | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Me, Myself and I | Group Collaboration | The Academic System | Software | 1 | 2-10 | 11-30 | 30+ |
What, Why & When[edit]
The World Café is a method for facilitating discussions in large groups. With many participants, discussion rounds tend to be sprawling, slow, and dominated by strong speakers, creating imbalances. The World Café method divides participants into moderated subgroups, who then wander together through a parcours of stations with different questions, facilitating a discussion that is more effective, energetic, and inclusive. Typically, the World Café method consists of at least three stations, each lasting ~20 min, with an internal or external moderator for each station. The hosting and discussion dynamics create a relaxed, casual atmosphere, akin to a Café.
Main Benefits and Effects[edit]
The World Café method is particularly used to assess areas of agreement or to reinforce collective intelligence, leading facilitators and researchers to achieve a more nuanced and diverse outcome. By collecting comments and feedback from smaller groups, engagement rates can be improved and a diversity of opinions can be heard (Löhr et al. 2020). Compared to interviews or individual focus groups for collecting qualitative data, the World Café method can reduce the researcher’s time investment. Splitting big groups into subgroups fosters inclusive, energetic, effective, and in-depth discussions:
- Comfortable Methodology: This approach helps reserved speakers to feel more comfortable when speaking in a smaller group setting. During the movement breaks, there are also opportunities to think or share in side conversations.
- Democratic Setting: By reducing power imbalances, all participants have a fair chance of sharing their perspectives and are fully heard.
- Higher engagement: The parcours format encourages people to physically move through the room between discussions, helping them stay alert and engaged throughout the event. Since the questions or themes per round change, there is less discussion fatigue.
- Flexibility: The moderator can steer the discussion toward unexplored issues with each new subgroup, progressively addressing more complex arguments.
- Outcome Ownership: Because every participant contributed to the collective argumentation, this process leads to a stronger feeling of shared ownership over the results.
Getting started[edit]
The setup for a World Café is straightforward: Depending on group size, room capacities, and questions you want to discuss, different stations are set up (can be tables, boards, flipcharts, or even separate rooms, etc.) with a moderator for each station who will introduce the question and lead the discussion. The participants will then be divided into as many subgroups as there are stations and will visit each station in turn. The session moderator or facilitator keeps the time. Whenever a new subgroup approaches a station, the stationary moderator welcomes them and introduces the question. Within a given time slot, the subgroups discuss the question and write down their ideas and insights before moving to the next station. After the first round, to deepen the group’s knowledge and carry forward the discussion, the moderators present not only the questions but also a broad overview of the insights and comments from previous groups. After all subgroups have completed the parcours, the moderators present the collective discussion results for each question to the full group.
Practical Challenges[edit]
According to Clements et al. (2023), several factors should be considered when deciding whether to use this facilitation technique over others.
- Compared to other methods, the World Café requires a high number of moderators for as many subgroups as needed. A thorough briefing at the beginning and clear instructions at each station could support self-led participation; however, we recommend having at least a second moderator to support the process, being available for questions, and keeping the discussion focused on the topic.
- The central moderator should keep the time, decide, and lead the parcours direction. Participants always need enough time to move on and settle at the new station, especially when there is a rather narrow space or many subgroups moving at the same time. Particularly large groups need meticulous time planning. All individual moderators should also keep time to avoid abruptly ending the discussion without a conclusion. Since the room might be noisy, agree on a gesture to indicate the end of a conversation round between all moderators and participants.
- For large groups, rather than having big subgroups, create “parallel Cafés,” meaning several stations on the same topic/question and with multiple moderators. This might also be beneficial for groups with a high potential for controversy or conflict, helping keep the discussion focused and constructive.
- Facilitators shall use neutral language. Especially when the method is used in qualitative research for data collection, moderators’ questions should avoid leading the discussion in any direction or recalling only what they personally thought was more relevant (Löhr et al. 2020). Clarifying questions can help ensure a minimum common ground on terminology and wording.
Normativity considerations[edit]
The World Café method is particularly useful for uncovering agreement patterns among participants, as individuals are more likely to share opinions and behaviours considered socially acceptable. For this reason, exploring sensitive topics may be difficult, as participants may feel uneasy about disclosing sensitive experiences, and moderators cannot prevent the next group from elaborating on information after the co-creation moment. Indeed, merely improving overall engagement does not imply that all individuals will feel more at ease expressing their views. Given the group dynamics, there may be former barriers and tensions among participants (Lorenzetti et al., 2016). In corporate settings, separating employees and managers can help ensure that power dynamics do not influence the productivity of a World Café event. In the sustainability field, academics might intentionally increase the diversity of the group to understand how the sustainability dialogue and its negotiations unfold in practice (Löhr et al. 2020). In specific scenarios, such as an institutional feedback event, a parallel World Café for researchers and administration is also viable. The subgroups might then decide to separate what is communicated to the scientific body or to management by writing or drawing in separate papers; as a result, the collective information can be presented more tailored to the relevant stakeholders.
Another question is how the written content is interpreted for research, and the role facilitators and moderators play in the knowledge production process. Observer bias, or the Hawthorne effect, in which either the moderators report what they think the outcome should be or the participants limit their comments because they are aware of being observed (Löhr et al. 2020; Takahashi et al. 2014), may influence the results. Furthermore, as the questions are not posed to participants equally, but instead presented with comments from previous subgroups, discussions evolve collaboratively through cross-pollination. Research-wise, this means it is not possible to connect comments or written content to a single participant (Clements et al. 2023). This also means that participants can hardly remove their contributions from a research project database, given the collaborative nature of a World Café output. Participants must be made aware of these conditions before partaking.
Literature[edit]
Clements, A. J., Sharples, A., & Bishop, J. (2023). The World Café method for engaging groups in conversation: Practical considerations and an agenda for critical evaluation. Occupational Psychology Outlook, 3(1), Article 6
Löhr, K., Weinhardt, M., & Sieber, S. (2020). The“World Café” as a participatory method for collecting qualitative data. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 19, 1–15.
Lorenzetti, L. A., Azulai, A., & Walsh, C. A. (2016). Addressing power in conversation: Enhancing the transformative learning capacities of the World Cafe. Journal of Transformative Education, 14(3), 200–219. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541344616634889
Takahashi, M., Nemoto, K., Hayashi, N., & Horita, R. (2014). The Measurement of Dialogue: From a Case Study of the Workshop Using World Café as a Collective Dialogue Method. Journal of Information Processing, 22(1), 88–95. https://doi.org/10.2197/ipsjjip.22.88
Links & Further reading[edit]
https://artofhosting.org/what-is-aoh/methods/world-Café/
Biggs, R., De Vos, A., Preiser, R., Clements, H., Maciejewski, K., & Schlüter, M. (2021). The Routledge handbook of research methods for social-ecological systems (p. 526). Taylor & Francis.
The author of this entry is Dagmar Mölleken. Edited by Polyana Visotto.