Taking accountability through World Cafe - first timer!

hi all

I've finally done it - I've hosted my first world cafe. It was a rough ride persuading my business leadership team to let me do this as a session within a conference. They very much traditionalists and luckily though one believed in me.

The context - it was the last afternoon of a three-day leadership event with 110 participants from all over the world. The subject was how we ensure that we're all safe to go (as in health and operationally) while driving performance. The idea was that I wanted leaders to take ownership - to understand it was about them - visible acts of leadership and considering consequence of their actions on others and themselves.

I wanted to move people every 10 mins but the HR director didn't! So to keep the peace I moved them every 20 mins - I had 13 tables and to be honest I was never going to be able to circulate them all. The time allocated for the whole session was 2 hours.

Prior to the event I handpicked 13 storytellers - selecting folks that I could imagine telling a story to their children (and also a few who are very opinonated and tend to like to just be heard). I designed a briefing for them - everything was done by email before the event. The global nature of our business didn't enable me to do it any other way.

The effort put into the storytellers was critical! Some were more effective than others as you'd expect but they all were positive about the experience and want to explore techniques more.

Anyway back to the event - the first round it was slow to get started, but it was after lunch so perhaps that had something to do with it. So I moved them after about 10 minutes - and all of a sudden there was an unleashing of energy and off it went. We kept going for a few more rounds and then in a break from what I was going to do - I got the leadership team member who was fronting the event (and who set the context at the start) to ask the story tellers for some feedback on the process and the personal learnings .

Wow - the reaction was amazing - people really felt like that we'd invested more time in them (in the end I think it was only 90 minutes) and they appreciated the chance to explore. Some found it difficult because there was no tangible output from this session - but to be honest we could have been clearer about what the output was in this instance. It's a legacy thing where they're used to having a task list at the end of something - but that's not necessarily a reflection on this session. It's definitely a wider challenge I have with this audience.

Overall the experience was good - I was exhausted at the end of it though. Feedback following the event has remained positive and a high percentage have mentioned it as a memorable moment of the conference.

Lessons learned for me: I'd be more explicit about the what in terms of output before I started. I'd have ideally spent some face to face time with the story tellers but to be honest they were good and they're senior leaders so it wasn't totally out of the capability. In addition I had some artists wandering around who painted pictures of what they heard - I was expecting a few line drawings/cartoons - what I got was works of art which blew me away. And actually if that's what the artists heard then the quality of the dialogue was pretty impressive...