These are books and audio recordings I have found inspirational and helpful in the past several years. There are Amazon.com links for those items available through Amazon.com.  Please let me know of your favorites and new discoveries that are not listed. 

The World Cafe
by Juanita Brown with David Isaacs and the World Cafe Community

Editorial Reviews
Book Description
The World Café is a flexible, easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue, sharing collective knowledge, and discovering new opportunities for action. World Café originators Juanita Brown and David Isaacs outline seven core design principles and provide practical tips and tools for convening and hosting "conversations that matter," even with very large groups. Each chapter features actual stories of Café dialogues from business, education, government, and community organizations across the globe, demonstrating how the World Café approach can be adapted to many different settings and cultures. Based on living systems thinking, this is a proven approach for fostering authentic dialogue and creating dynamic networks of conversation around your organization or community’s real work and critical questions––improving both personal relationships and people’s capacity to shape the future together.

Janet McCallen

Juanita and colleagues interviewed some of us from FPA about our use of Knowledge Cafes and other conversational processes, and FPA's story is one of the ones in the book.  That's why I bought it.  I was amazed at how inspirational and practical it was, at the same time.  As my website demonstrates, I believe conversation is the critical skill and practice of our work today.  The World Cafe explains how and why to host conversations about questions that matter, both in your workplace and your community.  I'd already volunteered to host a "Lakeside Cafe" for my community association, and I'm very grateful this book arrived to provide a refresher.  To ignore this "technology" for group conversation would be tantamount to ignoring the internet.  Buy this book today!

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Last modified: 12/30/05