World Café
The World Café is a collective intelligence technique that fosters the collaborative creation of ideas and concrete projects. Through successive rotations, groups enrich different themes, allowing each participant to contribute to the overall reflections within a structured yet flexible framework.
World Café?
You’ve probably heard of, if not participated in or organized yourself, a World Café. It’s a proven collective intelligence technique, but one that can be adapted to suit individual needs. My version, which has proven effective in numerous professional situations, is a personal adaptation of this method.
The World Café is useful when there’s a need to collectively generate ideas, work paths, or projects. It’s an exercise that can lead to concrete actions, which has happened several times in the World Cafés I’ve organized.
Concrete Example
Let’s take an example: a number of cultural leaders from several French institutes in a specific geographic area participated in a World Café I organized. The goal was to jointly define film distribution projects that could both better reach target audiences and create synergy between the different institutes.
Step 1: Collective Brainstorming
For me, the first step in a World Café is to conduct a collective brainstorming session. I do this using mind mapping. This allows the group to define concrete work paths or specific themes that will later be explored in detail by the working groups. Of course, themes can also be imposed for a World Café, but in the example I’m using, there were no imposed themes. The general brainstorming session allowed ideas to emerge, such as:
- Organizing a joint event during the Cannes Film Festival to leverage its international communication in regional branches abroad.
- Better organizing the circulation of films and their directors across territories, etc.
Thus, it was necessary to start with this brainstorming.
Step 2: Organizing the Tables
After the brainstorming, tables are set up. Each table corresponds to one of the work themes. The participants are divided into as many groups as there are tables. Each table has a host who will facilitate the discussion and take notes. The initial idea is that each group contributes to each of the themes.
Imagine there are four themes (four tables) and around thirty participants. This makes roughly four groups of eight people. For twenty minutes, they sit at a table and work together to develop their reflections, proposals, or concrete ideas to address the question or theme at hand. They have large sheets of paper, markers, and the table host takes notes on all their contributions.
Step 3: Group Rotation
After 20 minutes, the groups rotate and move to another table. When they arrive at the new table, the host gives them a quick summary of what was discussed during the first round. Additionally, the written notes are preserved, allowing the newcomers to avoid repeating what has already been said and to enrich the reflections started by the previous group. Then, a third round, followed by a fourth round: in this way, everyone contributes to each table.
Step 4: Break and Preparation for the Presentation
Finally, there’s a break of at least fifteen minutes. During this break, the table hosts prepare their public presentation using a graphic representation of the project.
Step 5: Collective Presentation
Each table host presents what was developed in five to ten minutes, followed by a ten-minute debate on the topic to further enrich it. In the example I gave, very concrete projects emerged from this World Café and were implemented within the French institutes.
Tips for Facilitation
If this exercise is conducted with attentiveness, particularly in terms of pacing (for example, if you notice that participants need 25 or 30 minutes instead of 20), it’s important to remain flexible and adaptable. You really need to guide the participants, and in this case, it can lead to very rich outcomes. Rigidity in organization should be avoided.
In the context of businesses, as well as in associative, social, artistic, cultural mediation, cultural action, initial or professional training, and social action settings, mobilizing the collective intelligence of participants is a very powerful lever. It enables mutual enrichment, improved relationships, stronger cohesion, the emergence of ideas, the invention of projects, greater engagement, and more.
Collective intelligence tools are also powerful democratic tools. They have been largely developed within the field of popular education, where the contribution of each individual is valued far more than in the national education system, which, in France, unfortunately often remains too traditional in its approaches.
I have frequently participated in collective intelligence workshops, and I have facilitated, applied, refined, adapted, and even invented a number of them. Here, you will find a collection of tools that I have personally used, which are integrated into the methods I propose, supported by real-life use cases. I believe these tools are highly worth sharing, as I have seen so many beneficial effects from them! I often find myself thinking, during collective moments such as conferences, for example: it’s a shame to limit ourselves to passive listening—all these minds gathered together could, if mobilized more effectively, produce something greater collectively.
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The Shared Secret
When the intimate becomes collective: a method of collective intelligence through whispering, listening and creation.
Creating a space where the intimacy of a whisper becomes a collective work. Engaging empathic listening, emotional regulation and creative (…) -
The Implementation of Methods
When Words Are No Longer Enough: Toward an Embodied Transformation of Professional Practices
Methods often fail because they remain discursive. Advocating for cooperation while dominating, speaking of ecology while imposing: the (…) -
Cooperative Narratives
Creating polyphonic narrative devices to transform academic knowledge into living and operative knowledge.
How can we overcome the limits of academic narrative to create truly shared knowledge? A concrete experience of collective writing devices that (…) -
For an ecology of dispensability
Rethinking authority and transmission.
Faced with the vertical management that dominates and alienates, another path exists: that of an authority that aims for its own dispensability, (…) -
The Group Flag
Between cohesion and freedom: the fertile paradox of shared culture.
How can a common symbol liberate singularities? I propose here a reflection on the paradoxical role of the “group flag” function as guarantor of (…) -
The State of Openness
For democratic and transformative facilitation.
How can we cultivate a welcoming posture that allows everyone to contribute fully? Openness is not a method but an inner state that transforms our (…) -
Formalizing the informal
Informality, essential to learning, resists structure while calling for it. How to tame it.
The absence of informal aspects in distance learning forces us to rethink its fundamental nature. This constraint becomes a laboratory for (…) -
Framework, purpose and transgression
So as not to get lost along the way.
When the framework of a project becomes inadequate, transgressing it often allows for better achievement of the objectives by prioritizing lived (…) -
Speech takes on PowerPoint
For more useful collective exchanges.
PowerPoint presentations hinder collective intelligence by rigidifying exchanges—this is well-known and documented—yet they remain almost (…) -
Collective surveying of texts
Enrich a text with the intelligence of other readers.
Collective text surveying is a method where a group divides a document into sections, with each subgroup working on one part before sharing their (…) -
Potential development space
Collective innovation method.
The potential development space is a method of collective innovation based on intuitive encounters, without predefined objectives, where mutual (…) -
Mapping the Collective Territory
Geographical Identification of Connections within a Group.
This activity allows visualizing connections and origins within a group by creating a human world map. By positioning themselves according to (…) -
Web platform for professional training
An astonishingly powerful device.
Following the democratization of remote work, it has been necessary to rethink approaches to professional training. This proven method offers a (…) -
Digital traces as a link
The power of digital to bring people together.
The immediate sharing of activity traces (recordings, photos, mind maps) via an accessible digital space strengthens the connection between (…) -
Listener contributions via digital tool
Unleash the power of the brains involved.
In a conference where one or more people address a large audience, it is common, after the presentation, to have a moment of discussion or Q&A (…) -
The sustainable links workshop
Create meaningful connections in collaborative workshops.
This “Workshop of Sustainable Connections” encourages the creation of lasting bonds between participants in collective events. Each person (…) -
Collaborative mind-mapping
An instituting, evolving form of writing.
Collaborative mind mapping is a visual and tree-like note-taking method, projected in real-time during meetings or training sessions. This (…) -
World Café
A tried-and-tested technique that’s always being reinvented.
The World Café is a collective intelligence technique that fosters the collaborative creation of ideas and concrete projects. Through successive (…) -
Thematic groups
Elaborate together.
This method is a simplified and faster variation of the World Café method, which I have successfully implemented and tested. The goal is for each (…) -
A web platform for collective intelligence
Support collective action with a specific digital tool.
Discovering the Power of a Web Platform Specifically Designed for Collective Intelligence Contribution, Through a Concrete Example. A Digital (…) -
Exchanges in pairs
To give everyone a voice.
A collective intelligence exercise that stimulates thinking and listening. Working in pairs, each participant builds his or her own argument on a (…) -
Book synthesis
Boosting professional training in collective intelligence.
How to use collective intelligence in professional training in a way that is not anecdotal but enriches the subject in depth? Bringing a moment of (…) -
The importance of expression
Identifying an essential path to emancipation.
Expression, often overlooked, is a key element for individual and collective emancipation. By providing a legitimate framework, appropriate tools, (…) -
Reception
Interaction practice exercise.
An activity to explore welcoming and interaction: each person alternates between welcoming and being welcomed, experiences strong emotions, and (…) -
Secret tips
In-depth mutual enrichment.
A powerful exercise to nurture creativity and collaboration: each participant presents a project or idea in 3 minutes, then receives intimate, (…) -
Collective bibliography
An encounter with oneself through books.
This activity is very useful at the beginning of meetings, gatherings, or workdays. The idea is to bring a number of books that address the topic (…) -
Sit Stand
Playfully identifying the links between participants.
Sit Stand, a playful and profound exercise to identify the concept of community. The “Sit Stand” exercise is often presented as an icebreaker, (…)
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Institut Français: Innovating in cultural policies for cinema and the relationship with the public, in the light of digital practices
Training for the Institut Français Region East Europe
To take into account the evolution of the use of moving images, in order to conceive adapted cultural proposals, motivating for the public, and in (…) -
Systematize mutual discoveries between cultural players Removing obstacles to cooperation.
Common-sense proposal for better mutual understanding among cultural actors in the same territory. Why don’t we know each other well enough?In (…) -
Cultural venues and social networks How to turn audiences into ambassadors rather than chasing followers.
Cultural venues are on social media out of obligation, without a clear strategy or convincing results. We need to rethink their presence: no (…) -
Formalizing the informal Informality, essential to learning, resists structure while calling for it. How to tame it.
The absence of informal aspects in distance learning forces us to rethink its fundamental nature. This constraint becomes a laboratory for (…) -
The sustainable links workshop Create meaningful connections in collaborative workshops.
This “Workshop of Sustainable Connections” encourages the creation of lasting bonds between participants in collective events. Each person (…)
