01 / UNDERSTAND
What is World Café?
World Café is a facilitated dialogue format in which small groups explore meaningful questions and connect ideas across rounds. Participants move between conversations, and a shared harvest makes patterns visible. It supports collective exploration, not a representative vote.
The World Café Community Foundation describes a basic format of a welcoming setting, introduction, small group rounds, crafted questions and harvest. Its design principles guide how the format is adapted to context.
Why use World Café?
A large meeting can make conversation difficult and leave ideas isolated within the people who already know one another. Connected small conversations allow perspectives to travel and develop. For service design, this can reveal how different actors understand the same problem, provided the event preserves whose experience is being represented and what still needs evidence.
When to use it
USE IT WHEN
A shared question benefits from several groups’ perspectives.
The purpose is exploration and connection rather than an immediate binding decision.
Participants can contribute in a setting designed for their access needs.
When to choose another method
Use User Interviews when private experience needs depth or confidentiality.
Use Stakeholder Map to understand who should be involved.
Use RACI Matrix when the unresolved issue is decision responsibility.
What you’ll need
Clarify the purpose, invitation and limits of the event. Design questions people can meaningfully answer from their experience. Prepare accessible tables or an equivalent remote arrangement, visible capture and a harvest process. Decide how attribution and sensitive contributions will be handled, and how participants will hear what happens after the event.
What a connected dialogue needs
Keep the elements that help answer your question and support a decision.
The question and why collective dialogue is useful.
Relevant perspectives, access and participation conditions.
Groups sized to make contribution possible.
Movement of people and ideas without erasing context.
Visible notes that retain questions and disagreement.
Shared patterns and named next work.
02 / PUT IT INTO PRACTICE
How to design a World Café
Keep evidence and assumptions distinct. Revisit your work when new information changes your understanding.
01
Define the purpose
Name what the event can produce and what it cannot decide.
Explore what makes a repair visit dependable, without promising policy changes.
02
Invite perspectives
Use the service context to identify voices beyond the usual internal team.
Include residents, scheduling staff and contractors.
03
Craft the questions
Start with experience and move toward useful possibilities without supplying a preferred solution.
What needs to be true for a visit to feel confirmed?
04
Prepare participation
Set a welcoming, accessible arrangement and explain capture and movement.
Offer contribution routes for people who cannot rotate easily.
05
Connect rounds
Move ideas across small conversations while keeping enough context for newcomers.
A host can summarise the question and competing accounts.
06
Harvest carefully
Bring patterns into the whole group without presenting repetition as consensus.
Record reliable attendance and workable access as related but different concerns.
07
Close the loop
Name what will be investigated and when participants will hear back.
Scheduling staff and residents review the proposed confirmation rule.
Example: discussing dependable repair visits
Fictional scenario: residents, contractors and housing staff explore what makes a repair visit feel confirmed. One round collects experience; another considers what should be reliably known; a final round examines possible changes.
Conversations connect appointment status, physical access and uncertainty about arrival. The harvest keeps these threads separate while showing their relationship. A contractor’s need for access is not automatically treated as a resident’s willingness to wait all day.
The visual uses three connected conversation circles and a harvest panel. The next step is a smaller operational and research review. The dialogue supplies questions and perspectives, not proof that the whole population shares one priority.
03 / BELOW THE SURFACE
Below the surface: a repeated idea may be travelling, not independently confirmed
Connection is the strength of the format, but it complicates how repetition is interpreted.
ORIGIN
How did this thread travel across conversations?
Do not count echoes as independent support.
DIFFERENCE
Which disagreement remains important?
Preserve context in the harvest.
FOLLOW THROUGH
What will participants hear after this event?
Make the next step credible.
An idea introduced at the first table may reappear at several later tables because people carry it with them. Counting those mentions as independent support exaggerates the strength of the evidence. A compelling phrase can also crowd out quieter contradictions.
Preserve where a thread began, how it changed and where disagreement appeared. Frequency in a connected dialogue is not prevalence in a population. In the harvest, distinguish a widely discussed idea from one independently grounded in several experiences.
This editorial interpretation does not replace the World Café principles. It clarifies how the output should travel into design: use patterns to form questions, then investigate consequential claims through methods appropriate to them. Share that boundary with participants so being heard is not mistaken for a promise of implementation.
World Café companion worksheet
The original companion supports purpose, invitation, questions, rounds and harvest planning. Page two records a thread’s context, disagreement and follow through. It attributes the method to the World Café Community Foundation and does not replace its hosting resources.
Practical tips
Create questions that invite experience before proposals.
Keep disagreement visible in the harvest.
Tell participants what will happen next.
Common mistakes
Treating workshop participants as a representative sample.
Counting travelling ideas as independent votes.
Holding a dialogue with no credible route for follow through.
What you’ll get
Connected perspectives with a clear boundary on their interpretation. Choose a consequential question for deeper research or operational review, and communicate the next step to participants.