Common Patterns

Tom Hurley and Otto Scharmer described the evolution of the respective bodies of work of the World Cafe and U Process.  This stirred interest in the personal stories of the original impulse giving rise to the innovation and naming the respective approach as this took place during a similar time period in the mid 1990s.  Their descriptions also included stories of the unfolding of the work, to current forms and formation of networks taking shape worldwide.  The group listened intently, noticing commonalities and potential points of synergy and collaboration.  Such listening opened doors to imaginings and to sensing possibilities.

Open Sourcing:  A significant insight was in noticing how the shared value of open sourcing has contributed substantially to co-evolution of both of these social technologies.  Open sourcing (with a complementary mindset of “gifting” the work) has enabled very rapid and wide spread use of both approaches all over the world.  A large network of people are now using the World Cafe approach in all types of settings worldwide, this as a consequence of open sourcing that has enabled the principles and processes to moved easily and naturally from friend-to-friend.  Over a period of thirteen years, an extensive and diverse network of people using World Cafe has formed.  

Otto Scharmer made note of the shared intention and the enabling influence of open sourcing has had for the U Process work: “There is a lot of similarity [of World Cafe and U Process] in our early beginnings and around the intention of open source.  I always thought about the work I am doing as contributing towards and being part of a larger movement.  I always tried to make it a part of a larger, open source based community rather than just delivering it through a consulting company. As a consequence, a global community or movement around Presencing work is emerging, most importantly already there.  You don’t need to bring it to any place because people are already experiencing it through their own modest experience.”   

Stewarding a Community: Another significant insight from the conversation was in seeing even more clearly from the shared stories the enabling influence of stewardship and global community building. “Up until about three years ago [the global network of people using the World Cafe] was very loosely connected, a very tenuously connected network.  It was connected mostly through the bonds of friendship between individuals and was not really visible to itself or conscious of itself as a network.

In the last two years, we’ve been working to foster the emergence of what we are calling a World Cafe Stewardship Network. Through that process, a number of key stewards have stepped forward to steward different parts of the co-evolution of the World Cafe both as a process and a global community and as a doorway into the deeper work. The Network has coalesced around different stewardship groups, for example by city, by region and by particular aspects of the work such as developing learning tools, on-line communications, multigenerational leadership and research.” -- Tom Hurley

Otto Scharmer described community building in the use of U Process through action projects and collaborative learning:  “Where I try to focus is creating networks through specific activities. The ELIAS Project (Emergent Leaders Innovating for Sustainability) is one such project that has connected high potential leaders from business, government, and NGOs around practical innovation projects.  Other projects that I am currently working on are in Namibia transforming the health system and in Zambia on HIV AIDS.  These are partly business, partly community or partly society based.

It has become a main priority for me in my learning journey lately to come out of the trenches working with projects in the field, to spend more time and focus on [global community building], helping people to link with each other with a global community connection. In addition, part of our experimentation or prototyping around community building has been through our offering of the Global Presencing Classroom on-line.  This is a global network creation around people doing innovation and transformation work in their own context and yet linking with each other in the Global Presencing Classroom infrastructure to support each other and learn how to apply the social technology. How to weave it together and make it more sustainable for a larger whole is becoming more focused for going forward.”