World Cafe in Japan with 550 members

Hi everyone! My name is Cathy Takiguchi, and I've just had my first experience with a World Cafe last week with 550 participants in Japan.

To be honest, I have only hosted just 1or 2 world cafes with less than 10 so I was worried on the on how to plan and facilitate a world cafe with 550 participants.

My challenges were:

-how to shuffle since we were limited on time; participants are passive so I needed a way to create a system for the shuffle and predetermine the table hostess

-due the the venue size we had to divide the 550 participants into four groups and each group were given a different question for each room on the common theme. Each room did there own harvesting but since each room has a different questions we need to have all the particpants gather to share to link all together

-along with the participants I also had branch managers in the room to assist with facilitation and was worried that they would join in the conversations which I did not want them to do

-Facilitators in each room experience with World Cafe was close to zero

-Two hour limit so I did not know how many rounds but I went with three with the third going back to their home table

World cafe started from lunch

We started lunch and then moved into world cafe so all participants started off with a group that they did not know. This really helped to save on time since we did not have to do the self introduction and the participants voiced that this really helped.

Comments from the participants:

-Two hours went fast

-Learned many tips from other members

-Shuffle helped them to meet other people

-Enjoyed writing and talking

-Members learned that they have common thoughts and feelings

-New style of learning was stimulating

-Branch managers helped to collect ideas from the group and it helped their learning