Juanita Brown and I were recently asked to co-host a World Cafe as the final session of the Shift Network's week long online Enlightened Business Summit. The intent of this World Cafe was to help the participants bring together what they'd learned during the week and take their insights into action. Appropriately enough, we entitled our session ""Moving from Insight to Action: A World Café Strategic Dialogue".

We were working with a shorter time frame than is really optimal for a World Cafe, but we made our two rounds and a harvest really work for us, and the results were excellent.

The questions we used to guide the process really needed to be juicy and take us quickly and directly to the depth we needed to achieve, so we started the first round of table conversation with this question:

"Reflecting on the session or session you experienced, what are the 2-3 things that stood out as being most impact-full for your life and work, and why?"

The question for the second round was "Given what you shared and heard in the first round, what is one idea that you are taking - either from the sessions you were in or what you just heard - that you want to turn into action? And what are 1-2 concrete steps you might take to start that process - be specific."

But it was the harvest round that was the critical step in embedding these ideas in a way that "brought them home" to the participants in the Cafe. We started with a few minutes of silence, asking everyone to get a piece of paper and write down one seed they were taking with them from the two rounds of conversation. One seed that they wanted to plant and let grow and one question they were taking that they wanted to "live into". We really found this exercise to be effective, as evidenced by the subsequent sharing or "harvesting", which was deep and plentiful.

The magical Andrea Medina was there with us, bringing her skills as a graphic professional - she is getting really good at this "online" application of her craft - and we used her recordings as a gift to thank those who signed up for the World Cafe mailing list during this event.

Here they are (click on them to see them full size!):

After the harvest, we stayed an extra half hour or so (which turned out to be closer to an hour) for those who wanted to talk with us, especially about their experience with the virtual World Cafe. The harvest we captured from that session was very useful and reinforced our learning that the online World Cafes we're hosting now have the power and impact of the face to face World Cafes, and in many cases have significant additional benefits as well.

Here is Andrea's graphic recording of the extra session:

We also have an audio tape of the large group parts of the World Cafe - the small group table conversation were private - if you are interested, and you are welcome to contact me directly (Amy Lenzo) if you would like more information about online World Cafes.