Conversation Café

Big News from CC Central

By Vicki Robin, Co-founder of Conversation Cafés

 

We need your help. If you are a host or just love the CCs, please read and respond to the many questions below. The core team met May 8-9 and are about to make some changes. Please be empowered. Blurt out your opinions and ideas.

Here are the headlines – then read below:

• Successful Conversation Week opens new possibilities for 2009
• New clarity about mission and strategy
• Susan Partnow, Leif Utne and Vicki Robin are now functioning as the interim leadership team, with Susan taking over from Vicki as chief poobah.
• Adjust the CC agreements? Heresy? Long overdue?

 

Conversation Week a Smashing Success

One hundred and fifty hosts and 2500 participants in 24 countries explored the 10+1 questions in Conversation Cafes during Conversation Week. Dozens of people also convened online through Global Mindshift and Second Life. Without you, none of this would have happened. We played the Conversation Week game together – fully.

Can you imagine doubling that for next year? Three hundred hosts, 5,000 people in 48 countries. What would it take to reach that goal? How would you go about making it happen? There's a simple answer – though not necessarily the best one: if each host trains one more host and helps them set up an additional CC, that would double the numbers. Think you could actually do that – or more? Or what do you hope we at CC central would do?

Here are some of our ideas:

1. Get going in September, rather than December.

2. Get whole high schools to do a Conversation Café in the cafeteria - just as Jackie did in 2007 at Todd Beamer High School in Seattle

3. Have aligned corporate sponsors, perhaps a coffee chain like Starbucks or Pete's or Tully's. If you have a connection to a corporation that would be honored to contribute to Conversation Week, let us know.

4. Engage media partners such as e-zines and magazines.

5. Engage dialogue partners – especially those whose imagination soars when thinking about people everywhere in one shared conversation that matters.

6. Partner with dialogue organizations that specialize in harvesting large scale dialogue events.

7. Do up to 10 city-wide campaigns as Ron Gross did in New York City and Michael Kerman did in Toronto and we did in Seattle for the launch in 2002. Are you ready to take on more than one Conversation Café? Would you like to use CW09 as an excuse to get more people in your city talking about what matters most? You could do a launch event, inviting hundreds to have a taste, and then go to cafes to experience the real deal. You could have the mayor proclaim that March 22-28 is the week where people sit down to talk. If you want to try this, we'll support you.

8. Hire a coordinator by Fall and a PR person by January.

With such ideas, and yours, we'll surely double our impact.

Sharper focus for CCs and CW

Vision
Because we believe, with physicist David Bohm, that dialogue is the generative life force of culture
Because we believe with indigenous peoples that every voice counts in the circle of life
Because we believe with Einstein that solutions come through asking the right questions
Because we believe with the Dalai Lama the 21st century must be the century of dialogue

We believe the Conversation Café method – a simple process, a set of agreements, powerful questions, a host and a conducive place for face to face – is a crucial tool for these times for building relationships, solving problems, changing paradigms.

Purpose
Our mission as organization is to spread the tool of the Conversation Cafe method to change agents (people who care and want to make a difference) so they can use it to transform systems from families to society.

Strategy
We do this through content rich, interactive website, a small staff to support a worldwide network of hosts and conversation week as an annual outreach campaign. Our task then is to make more people aware of the tool for depth conversation, assure they know how to use the tool, empower them to use and spread the tool, and support them in dreaming up new ways to use the tool.

New leadership
Vicki Robin has carried the organizational ball for over six years with great love and passion. The baton is now passing to Susan Partnow, cofounder of the Conversation Cafes. She runs her own social profit organization so has both a deep love for the CCs and organizational experience. In support of this shift, Susan, Leif Utne and Vicki will serve an interim leadership team until we can hire a Conversation Week coordinator who may also move into the position of Executive Director. What hasn't changed is Lorie Wood who is our stable point at central – and yours as hosts. Her warm, responsive and competent support will be there for you.

The six agreements – sacred or subject to improvement?

Here are the six we have now:
• Open-mindedness: listen to and respect all points of view
• Acceptance: suspend judgment as best you can
• Curiosity: seek to understand rather than persuade
• Discovery: question old assumptions, look for new insights
• Sincerity: speak for yourself about what has personal heart and meaning
• Brevity: go for honesty and depth but don't go on and on

From the surveys we learned that the powerful moments for the CW conversations came when someone told a personal story. That's when the conversation dropped from head to heart. That's when the magic happened. Personal stories are often about a time when a certain insight blossomed or a relationship healed or a mind opened and changed. They come from the depth, not from complaint about current problems.

So we're wondering if Sincerity might shift to something like:
Personal: a story is worth a thousand ideas – tell a time when… (or ‘stories touch the heart, inviting depth') (or ‘move from head to heart by telling your story) (share stories of your life, not just your ideas)

What do you think? How might you adjust the agreements to reflect the central importance of stories?

Also, are there other agreements you've always wanted to change? Or eliminate? We're about to print more wallet cards and it's the time to make changes.

• Now there's another issue where you can help. Nowhere in the agreements are the key ideas of:
• No committees with be formed (no need to agree or come up with an action plan)
• No marketing (for your pet ideas, events, candidate – or yourself)

These two key ideas assure real freedom of thought in a CC. We call that the “non instrumental” quality that is so refreshing, more like good jazz than a meeting. Should these be an agreement, like Freedom: No agenda, no committees, no promotion?

If you've read all the way through, you deserve some chocolate. Go eat some for us!