Liquid Café
Richard Seel, June 2006
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Recently a client asked me if we could run a World Café for a meeting of about 80 people who were coming together to chew over some of the issues around the creation of a new university. I agreed and started to explore with her the question which would form the topic for the café inquiry.
“Ah,” she said, “actually there are about six questions we want people to consider.” In that case, World Café might not be appropriate. Of course, the choice of question is crucial for any good inquiry. If it is sufficiently engaging and generative people will cover all the areas necessary but there can be no guarantees that any specific area will be covered in any depth and this client wanted to be sure..
“In that case,” I said, thinking on my feet, “what you might want is a Liquid Café.” As I said this, some images flashed into my mind: from a some workshops I ran some years ago and from some contemporary worship which I led last year. It was the worship which led to the name.
Liquid worship is a name given to an approach to church services in which there is no simple linear order of service. The building (whether church or other space) is divided up into a number of ‘prayer stations’ or 'zones'. Each prayer station offers a different worship activity or experience. Worshippers move from station to station as they wish. Some may visit each station, perhaps more than once. Others may stay in the same place for the whole time. All of these activities take place simultaneously—in computer parlance, this is parallel rather than serial. (See, for instance, Lomax & Moynagh 2004 and Ward 2002.)
The workshops I ran some years ago were for a the board of a charity in the course of a strategic planning exercise. In these we looked at a number of topics, each one of which had its own table. People were invited to go to a table and discuss the topic named there and to write their thoughts on a piece of flip chart paper. From memory, there were three topics (and thus, three tables) and about fourteen people attended the workshop. I think I allowed about ten to fifteen minutes per ‘round’ and then instructed everybody to move to a new table. There was a small set of simple rules to follow:
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Move to a new table |
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There should be no more than six people at any table |
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There should be no fewer than four people at any table |
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As far as possible, work with people you haven’t worked with before. |
The process worked quite well and I used it a few more times in similar contexts. However, it now seems a bit too prescriptive to me and so when I thought about how Liquid Café might actually work I wanted to make it a little bit more self-organising.
The process I came up with was to keep the café elements from World Café—the small tables, the paper tablecloth, the informality (Brown & Isaacs 2001) and to combine that with elements from liquid worship and Open Space (Owen 1997).
With six topics and about eighty people I planned to have twelve tables, each with eight chairs. This would limit the number of people at any one table to eight since my experience suggests that between six and eight people per table is optimum for a café-style process. Of course, there was nothing to stop people drawing up chairs to make a greater number but it is still unlikely that there would be enough people round the table for unwelcome large group effects to manifest themselves (Seel 2001). Each of the six topics would be duplicated on two tables.
I prepared the topic questions, something which needs to be done with some care. In my experience this is an area where clients invariably need help; their tendency is to write closed questions which constrain conversation. The ideal inquiry question is open and generative, inviting dialogue and permitting dissent—indeed I often invite people to consider the premises upon which the question is based and to challenge those if they wish.
The Liquid Café was to last an hour and Owen’s “Law of Two Feet” (Owen 1997:98) was to underpin its operation. The law is simple and blunt: “If you are neither contributing nor learning, move!” (Owen’s original is a bit wordier and less blunt than this but the core is the same.) Owen points out that this may lead to two particular kinds of behaviour which he calls bumblebees and butterflies. Bumblebees move from conversation to conversation, never settling anywhere for long. They ‘cross-pollinate’ between tables: “Oh, that’s interesting. At the table I’ve just left they were saying…” Butterflies, on the other hand, don’t seem to do much at all. They hang around on the periphery, apparently not participating. But they can play a vital role. People come up to them and productive conversations can often ensue.
I must confess that I was nervous as the workshop approached. In theory I was confident that it would work but in practice—who knew? The participants were academics who usually have a fair amount of healthy scepticism which occasionally leans into unhealthy cynicism. What would they make of it? Would they engage?
The liquid café session was held in the afternoon of a day-long workshop. Fewer than expected people turned up (just over seventy) and the organiser decided to seat them at eleven tables. This meant that we had to put out another table at lunchtime. The afternoon started with a presentation from me on facilitating complex change, which ended with a brief introduction to forms of collaborative inquiry. Participants stayed at the tables they had occupied during the morning so the twelfth table remained empty.
After the explanation, with particular emphasis on the Law of Two Feet, we placed A4 laminated sheets on each table. One had the inquiry topic for that table in large letters. Another had some supplementary questions which indicated the areas which the topic was supposed to cover. And then it started. The empty table soon filled up as people moved around the room. I later discovered that one table agreed that they would all go to different places, leaving their own table empty—though, again, it didn’t stay empty for long.
The buzz in the room was intense and people remained engaged in the conversations throughout the hour allotted. All the table cloths were extensively annotated and there was much sharing of perspectives and emergence of new approaches.
At the end of the café I took a quick straw poll to see how people had behaved; I asked them how many tables they had visited. The results were interesting:
Stayed at same table 4
Visited two tables 18
Visited three tables 28
Visited four tables 12
Visited five tables 0
Visited six tables 1
Was it successful? I think so. At the end of the workshop one woman came up to me and said, “Butterflying and bumblebeeing have produced two unexpected and gratifying outcomes.” Another participant e-mailed afterwards:
“The formation of the new university and the whole process of amalgamation undoubtedly raises uncertainty for many of us. You did us all a great service, not least through the Liquid Café communication exercise, in helping us work through many of the issues in a very short timeframe. Thank you.”
I hope others might find this a useful addition to the collaborative inquiry canon. I’m pretty sure I shall use it again when the opportunity arises.
References
Brown, Juanita & Isaacs, David 2001, “The World Café: Living Knowledge Through Conversations that Matter”, The Systems Thinker, vol 12, no 5. Also at http://theworldcafe.com/STCoverStory.pdf
Lomax, Tim & Moynagh, Michael 2004, Liquid Worship, Cambridge: Grove Books.
Owen, Harrison 1997, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Seel, Richard 2001, “Anxiety and Incompetence in the Large Group: A Psychodynamic Perspective”, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 493-504.
Ward, Pete 2002, Liquid Church, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson & Carlisle: Paternoster Press.