World Cafe - Fielding Research Group

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Comment by Tonnie van der Zouwen on November 26, 2012 at 4:53am

As a practioner-research I did a six-year PhD study at Tilburg University. I was looking for answers to 'When and how are Large Scale Interventions effective for sustainable change' and 'how does this look like in practice'. I developed a practical guide for Large Scale Interventions (LSI). I see LSI as a participative approach for organisational change or community development, involving stakeholders of the central issue or task in every stage of the change process. On one or more occasions (a representation of) the whole system meets in one room, to build shared understanding and find common ground for next steps. To enable working with the whole system in the room, large group intervention methods are used, such as World Café, Open Space Technology, Future Search, Search Conferences, and Real Time Strategic Change (Whole-Scale Change TM).

The guide includes an evaluation instrument with success factors and effects, gathered in a field study based on multiple methods and sources, making a syntheses of existing knowledge and experiences.

The success factors and effects, with their indicators and methods to find evidence are categorized following an interesting model, Research model interventions.jpg . From there I have build an Evaluation instrument.

Depending on the aims of the evaluation you can use this instrument on different levels of detail, to assess pre-conditions before, assess performance during, and evaluate effectiveness after the intervention. The instrument is tested by reconstructing three cases after two years. What are sustainable effects? How effective was the LSI?

The Guide is tested in two interactive ReSearch Conferences, with up to 60 participants (researchers, practitioners, clients).

The Practical Guide is part of the book 'Building an evidence based practical guide to Large Scale Intervent...

If you want more details or if you are interested in scoretables, please contact me at [email protected].

Comment by juanita brown on November 25, 2012 at 6:24am

Hi all,

I did my doctoral dissertation research on the World Cafe and our book The World Cafe: Shaping our Futures Through Conversations that Matter was based on that research. There are a lot of stories in there, as well as on the Storynet here under "Conversations and Stories" on this website.

Fred Steier, a senior research guy who was my doctoral dissertation advisor might be a good resource as would Jerry Nagel who is doing his doctoral dissertation not on the World Cafe specifically, but on these types of processes.

There is also another guy, Flavio Mesquita, in Brazil who is doing his doctoral research in collaboration with the UN related to a major large scale change project in education using the World Cafe as the core process.

If you want their contact info, write me at [email protected]

Warmly,

Juanita Brown-Co-Founder, The World Cafe

Comment by Lisa Wocken on November 25, 2012 at 12:13am

Thanks Ria. Very helpful! :D

Comment by Ria Baeck on November 24, 2012 at 12:09pm

Lisa, the only person that I know that does research (at a university) related with these kind of processes is Isabelle Mahy. She might be a member here on this site, otherwise you will find her when you google.

Comment by Lisa Wocken on November 15, 2012 at 9:34am

Hey everyone. I host a weekly video blog on the subject of Happiness, Leadership, and Conversation, and thought this would be the perfect place to garner suggestions for future episodes dedicated to research done on the topic of conversation. Here's the link to get a feel for the episodes I've already conducted on the topic. I was thinking an episode explaining World Café methodology or success stories would be worthwhile, but I'm really hoping to ground each episode in research. Any thoughts from this group?

Comment by Lisa Wocken on June 5, 2011 at 6:18pm

Ria,

Thanks for the additional insights. This will definitely help me explore the topic even further. Much appreciated! :)

Comment by Ria Baeck on May 28, 2011 at 11:46am

Hello Lisa, I'm not a scholar, but I think you are right about David Bohm being quite central regarding dialogue.

As I see you make the distinctions between dialogue, debate and discussion - do you know the work of Otto Scharmer, and his four fields of listening and conversation. Might fit in nicely I guess.

Comment by Lisa Wocken on May 27, 2011 at 11:10am

Thanks for responding Juanita. :) Very helpful! I'm a proud owner of your book and have leveraged the works cited for my thesis...this will, in no doubt, be used as I compile a comprehensive list of sources for each form.

Comment by juanita brown on May 27, 2011 at 9:46am

Hi Lisa...

Do you know how to add things to Wikipedia? On our website www.theworldcafe.com is my whole bibliography on conversation from our book The World Cafe: Shaping our Futures through Conversations that Matter. Hope that can be helpful. If you can't find it for some reason, let me know and I can send you the biblio separately by e-mail.

Warmly,

Juanita

Comment by Lisa Wocken on May 27, 2011 at 9:12am

I recently conducted research at a Fortune 50 company on how the three primary forms of conversation (dialogue, discussion, and debate) occur in the workplace. After viewing the recent updates/improvements to "conversation" on wikipedia, which includes a section on "Literature on Conversation" I couldn't help but inquire on who would be cited as the most credible authorities/literature on each specific form of conversation? I thought it'd be worth throwing out to this group, so I could compile and share back out to not only this list, but to wikipedia as well.

For example, wikipedia currently lists David Bohm as a "see also" or related topic, but through my research I've found he is an extremely credible and noteworthy theorist for dialogue as a form of conversation, with almost all other dialogue resources citing his work.

In other words, who do you see as truly credible in effective dialogue, discussion, and debate?

Looking forward to building on the collective insights of this group and sharing back what we discover together! :)

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