Green Cafe

Last week, our team at SOPOLEC hosted a World Cafe based on the question: “What can be done to encourage sustainable building practices in Romania?”. We called it the “Green Cafe”.

This was my first experiment with hosting a World Cafe, and it was very exciting to see groups quickly become engaged in conversation, leading to very clear common themes across the different groups by the time participants re-united.

Hosting this event at our office required a little creativity. We created six spaces for discussion, including a number of offices, a conference room, and our terrace. I was worried that, while spaces such as the terrace would create welcoming environments for discussion, drier spaces such as the conference room would be rather forbidding. However, people were so quickly engaged in conversation that the environment was quickly out of mind. In some spaces, people felt more comfortable sitting on the floor.

When using multiple rooms to host Cafe conversations, it becomes a challenge to end each round of conversation: by the time you move between the rooms, people are confused as to who is staying and who is leaving. We always seemed to end up with 1-2 tables where the table host was left alone… and then had to round up the stray people left on the hallways continuing previous conversations.

After three rounds, of conversation, everyone convened in the main space for coffee. We taped the visual products of each table to the walls, people moved from one to the next, trying to quickly grasp the content. After a 10-minute discussion in which we summarized the 3-4 common themes that had been discussed at all of the tables, the Cafe participants enjoyed ice cream on the terrace while continuing their conversations.

(My colleague Anca wrote about it on BusinessIDEAS.ro)