World Cafe, how to have a conversation

Last night our local sustainability group hosted a World Cafe on the subject of global warming.

About seventy-five people came together to discuss the question: “How can we meet the needs of current and future generations in the face of global warming?” Our assembly included students from local K-12 schools, university students, educators, elected officials, community activists, health care professionals, entrepreneurs, business managers, and people who question the reality of global warming.

The positive aspects of the experience included an extremely diverse group, who seemed to want to continue the conversation (we didn't lose people to breaks), and some truly phenomenal ideas that were reported at the end of the event. Many people said they enjoyed the experience...I hope they weren't just trying to make us feel good.

The challenges: our conversation patterns are pretty ingrained...in many cases the quality of conversation didn't meet the ideals I imagined. The World Cafe process is supposed to help people build on each other's knowledge, and I got the sense that many people found this difficult or counter-intuitive. It is much easier to hang onto our own ideas than to actively examine, respond to, and develop the ideas of others.

What constitutes good conversation? I suspect that our hyper-technological, fast-paced, individualist world gives us few good opportunities to really learn what good conversation is like. Every once in a while I have a really great conversation with someone: I listen, I learn, and I feel heard, and I can think of few more satisfying experiences. But it's rare. I have the same bad habits as others do. Joe states his opinion, I state mine. We think we're having a conversation, but in reality we are two people speaking into our own bubbles.

The next book I want to read is Conversation, a History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller. I just listened to a radio conversation on his book, and learned some succinct critiques on the state of conversation in the United States: first, we have a fear of offending people, so we shy away from in-depth conversation on the topics that divide us. Second, we are suffering from an epidemic of opinionatedness--we are not really interested in listening to others but instead believe we must hang onto and express our opinions as a way of being authentic. In other words, we wear our opinions on our sleeves as if they were essential to our identity. Third, most of our conversations are functional in nature: we want something from someone. The best conversations are purposeless in terms of outcome or accomplishment.

America has a history of seeing conversation as a means for getting ahead. Books like Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking with the Stakes are High, express the purposefulness behind many of our conversations. I had a great deal of enthusiasm for this book and even received training in Crucial Conversations, but I can't say it made me a better conversationalist. The implied aim of conversation in Crucial Conversations is to work things out, to promote harmony, to help a company or organization advance its purpose. But these conversations may lack the beauty, humor, and good natured disagreement which Stephen Miller says is one of the hallmarks of a good conversation.

Our World Cafe was purposeful, because we were interested in learning what insights people might have on a complex topic. I did learn from some of the viewpoints expressed at our event, even as sound bite summaries. But I long for something more. As one caller to the radio show above said, "conversation is an end in itself--it is part of being a healthy human being. You've got to be willing to have your mind changed." I continue to want to have this kind of conversation, both for the pure joy of it, and also for the way it sustains the human community.