About the Author

Juanita Brown, Ph.D.
Juanita, with her partner, David Isaacs, is a co-originator of the World Café. She collaborates as a thinking partner and design advisor with senior leaders across sectors, creating and hosting innovative forums for strategic dialogue on critical organizational and societal issues. Juanita's keynotes and seminars have attracted a broad range of leaders, including members of Fortune 100 companies, government, health, education and community based organizations in the U.S., Latin America, Europe and the Pacific Rim.
As a Senior Affiliate with the MIT Sloan School's Organizational Learning Center (now the Society for Organizational Learning), Juanita participated as a member of the core research team with the MIT Dialogue Project and as co-faculty for SOL's Executive Champions' Program. She has served as a Research Affiliate with the Institute for the Future and is a Fellow of the World Business Academy.

David Isaacs
David is President of Clearing Communications, an organizational and communications strategy company working with corporate leaders in the U.S. and abroad. David was a co-convener of the MIT Organizational Learning Center's Strategic Dialogue on Large Scale Systems Change in collaboration with an Intel executive, and has worked with a wide range of clients including Chevron, Cargill, Hewlett Packard, Scandinavian Airlines Systems (SAS), Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Lego (Denmark). David has served as guest faculty for innovative learning programs with the University of Texas Business School (Executive MBA), the California Institute of Integral Studies (Leadership Coaching), and the Kaos Pilots University (Denmark/USA).

About the Book
The World Café process has been used by tens of thousands of people around the world to tackle real-life issues. Based on seven key principles, it begins with small, intimate conversations at café-style tables; these gatherings then link and build on each other as people move between groups and cross-pollinate ideas. In this way, Café learning enables even very large groups to think together creatively in a single, connected conversation. This complete resource explains the Café concept and provides readers with the tools they need to get started. Each chapter opens with stories from business, education, government, and community organizations, each a dramatic example of how leaders are using this process in the real world. Such stories underline the Café's immediate, practical implications for meeting and conference design, strategy formation, knowledge creation, and large-scale systems change. The book includes a foreword by best-selling author Margaret J. Wheatley, an afterword by author Peter Senge, and real-world stories of the Café process in action at Hewlett-Packard, the nation of Singapore, and the University of Texas.