Worthington's "World Café"

Last Friday, I spoke at the Worthington (Ohio) Libraries' Board, Staff, and Community Retreat session. Worthington is a wonderfully progressive suburban library system Library Journal's 2007 Library of the Year, in fact), and the director, Meribah Mansfield, has put together a young, enthusiastic leadership team that seems to effervesce with new ideas. (Full disclosure: Meribah and I go way back as friends and colleagues. I live in her library district, and she serves on OCLC's Members Council.) I was delighted to speak in Worthington for another reason---I love any speaking engagement I can drive to.

The point of this post, though, is to talk about the structure the organizers of the meeting used to get the discussion moving. They called this session a "World Café," which has no relationship to the NPR radio show of the same name.

There were about seven tables of eight people each at this event. Lisa Fuller and Kristin Shelley, the organizers of the discussion, had four questions they wanted discussed. They gave us the first question, then asked us to spend about eight minutes discussing it. At the end of the eight minutes, Lisa and Kristin raised their hands to end the discussion, and then they told us all to change tables and sit with a different mix of people for the second question. We worked through this for all four questions, changing tables and getting to meet new people each time. There were no assigned recorders or discussion leaders.

When all the questions had been discussed, they asked us for key "Ah-Ha!" moments at each table. So in about 45 minutes, we had a terrific discussion, and the board had several flip chart pages full of good ideas to take into the second day of their deliberations.

If you are running a meeting seeking broad based input, this could be a good model.

Incidentally, for years, I've been saying in my talks that library web sites can be called many things, but they can rarely be called fun. Here is an exception.