At a Café on Listening...
by Ken Homer

The following story is a composite of several voices that have actually spoken at various Cafés...

You've arrived late and hurry to take an open seat. There is a young woman speaking at the front of the room.

"The World Café is a set of principles and practices that support productive and meaningful conversations in groups larger than twelve. It has been used in corporate, non-profit, educational and community settings. In each setting people consistently report outcomes that include: satisfying relationships among participants, a high degree of trust established quickly among people who have had no previous contact, access to breakthrough thinking and the coalescing of a common sense of purpose. One of my favorite descriptions of the Café is that it is a way for us to notice and remember collectively what we are normally prone to miss and forget individually. It is also a way to access the collected intelligence in any group."

"Let's see if we can access some of the collected intelligence present among us now. I invite you to close your eyes and take a couple of deep breaths As you breathe, recall a conversation that you experienced as meaningful and powerful. A conversation where you felt a shift in perspective, where things opened up for you. When you have a sense of such a conversation, let go of what was talked about and focus on the conditions which supported the conversation. Who was there? Where was it? What made it powerful? Once you have some sense of that bring your attention back to the room and let's hear what people recall."

There is a pause and then a hand shoots up. "Trust" is the first word into the room and it is written down on a large mural-size paper taped to one of the walls. "Keep 'em coming", says the young woman, "just shout 'em out."

"Safety... Listening... Risk-taking... Mutual Respect... Encouraging dissent... Curiosity... Irreverence... Humor... Boundary-stretching... Messy... Playful... Silence... Cooperation... Honesty... Openness... Passion... Caring... Patience... Commitment... Connection to something larger... Cooperation..." The words are coming faster now, cascading into the room like a fountain.

The young woman stops scribing. "We could keep going but since our time is short, I am going to stop here and tell you that this exercise has been done with thousands of people on six continents. And each time we do it, we get about 95% concordance on the conditions present in meaningful conversations. As a result we have come to believe that the ability to have powerful conversations is part of our social DNA, but most of us have forgotten this trait. Are you willing to help each other remember how to have great conversations here today?"

Heads nod in assent around the room. "Okay. Let's get started with our first Café Round. You will notice that each table is covered with paper and supplied with a cup containing markers. Please use those markers to take notes right on the table so that you create a shared visual map of your conversations. As we move through the Café Rounds you will be traveling to other tables and the tablecloth notes will support you in cross-pollinating and linking diverse points of view. They will also help those of you who remain at your table as hosts to fill the travelers in on the essence of your last conversation. You'll have about a half hour to talk over this question at the end of which one of you will stay behind and the rest of you will go to new tables with different people to continue the exploration."

"The first question we'd like you to engage is: "What is listening?""

You glance around at the other three faces at your table. Each one sports a thoughtful look as the simplicity of the question gives way to how quickly it opens uncharted vistas in the mind. After a moment or two, an older man on your right speaks with a soft voice containing the slightest trace of an accent. "Well the first thing that comes to my mind is that listening starts with my ears, but my ears seem wired to my gut somehow. I can always tell the rightness or wrongness of a thing by the feeling in my gut." There is a familiar warmth in your own belly as the truth of his words descends from your ears to your abdomen.

The woman on your left joins in. "Yes, I can relate to that. And for me, listening has to do with my eyes. I listen by observing body language. I note how people hold themselves when speaking to me. Whether or not they make good eye contact is important to me in terms of my being able to listen well. I have trouble with people who don't sustain eye contact."

The other woman at the table chimes in. "That relates to my way of listening too, as I've had a little NLP training. I tend to look not just for eye contact, but to where someone's eyes go when they are thinking. I also tune into the tonal qualities of their voice."

You add, "I tend to focus on the language being used to understand the lens a person sees the world through. I find I get a lot of cues about how someone sees the world by the way they use words." You see the woman on your left jotting down "gut", "body language", "eye contact" and "words used" on the tablecloth.

The conversation among your tablemates deepens as you each reflect on what has been revealed so far and connections emerge that were unexpected at the beginning of the round. Before you know it, the half hour is up and the young woman at the front of the room has her hand raised. The room quickly quiets down as other people also put up their hands and stop talking.

"Please choose someone from your table to stay on as the host. The host's job is to act as the distilled memory of the conversation that has just occurred. The rest of you will travel to a new table where the host will welcome you and recap briefly what was touched on in the first round. The travelers will then link in the ideas and insights that seem most appropriate from their home tables and we will continue to explore what it means to listen. Any questions?"

"Yes, do the three of us go to the same table?"

"No, we'd like each of the travelers go to tables with all new people. We want you to have the chance to speak to as many different people as possible. We are creating new synapses in the social brain here today, so a high density of connections will help us to have more intelligence available to us. Any other questions?"

No hands are raised. "Great, please travel to a new table and continue your explorations and now please also consider the question: "How do you know when you are being heard?""

You have volunteered to be the host for your table and you warmly greet the three people who join you. After sharing the notes you took, along with a couple of things that arose as you were speaking, the newcomers begin to make connections to your conversation by sharing what was similar and different from the tables they sat at in the previous round. It is both fresh and strangely familiar to hear the differing perspectives and to observe how even points that you would never have thought of on your own seem to weave together into a pattern that stirs a deep recognition in your mind. This round goes by even faster than the first one and suddenly the young woman has raised her hand and people around the room bring their conversations to a close.

"Thank you. At this point we'd like to get a sense of what is going on in the room. To do that I would like one person to tell us something that they heard that was new or surprising to them."

After a brief pause a man raises his hand and offers, "At our table we all agreed that listening is a learned behavior, and one critical to success in life, but none of us had been formally taught how to listen. It raised the question for us of why we don't see courses in schools about listening, and what might be the impact if such courses were developed?"

"Wonderful question", she comments, writing it out on the oversized paper on the wall. "Does anyone have something that relates to that?"

A young woman speaks up, "We were struck by the fact that deep listening is a sort of radical act. Really deep listening changes how we speak. To deeply listen to another person we have to become aware of our internal commentary and create enough mental space to accept the parts of what the speaker is saying that we agree with, as well as make space for what we find challenging to our egos. So part of listening well to others is the ability to hit the mute button for the commentator we carry in our heads."

The young woman is busy scribing using both words and simple pictograms. "Someone else?"

"Yes, I can add to that." Says a man behind you. "At our table it was pointed out to me by the women present that my gender has a tendency to listen from a "fix-it" mode. Meaning that when women talk about something that is a challenge to them, most men respond with ideas about how to fix it. And when we do that women often don't feel heard. Now, I had heard this before, but in the course of the last hour I got it at a deeper level than ever before and I see how my listening is shaped by my desire to make things better, to always have a reply ready at hand and to be of service. It never occurred to me that my desire to serve might get in the way of my listening or that it could impede someone from feeling heard. This conversation shifted how I listen, I feel a little bit humbled and a lot more curious about listening now than I was before."

There is a murmur of assent throughout the room. Several other people contribute perspectives from their conversations and soon the mural paper has been turned into a colorful map that shows at a glance both the collected knowledge and the deeper questions that have arisen in the last hour and a half.

"I am afraid our time is up for now. You are invited to continue hosting the conversations engaged here today with family friends and coworkers so that they will unfold and deepen in your lives. As you leave please take one of these Café to Go guides which covers the principles, etiquette, and other necessary instructions to allow you to begin hosting your own World Café conversations. Thank you all for coming and I'll be here for a while to answer any questions you may have.

Ken Homer is a World Cafe host and designer.