Cafe Experts.Net

How to Ramp Up the Impact of Your Meetings

You’ve invested heavily in speakers and resources to make your meeting as powerful as it can be. Now how do you make sure they take what they learn home and make it work?

Meeting work and they create impact for attendees, even though people retain only a small amount of what they heard – 10% or less.

That’s because, on top of all the other learnings and sessions at your meetings, people go back to an avalanche of e-mails and other work in the office. They never have time to digest what they’ve heard and think about how they could use it to make a difference when they get back to work.

How powerful could your meetings be if you could double what people retain – or triple it? How much more powerful could it be if all the attendees had time to think about and apply what they’ve learned to their own challenges before they even leave your meetings? How much of an impact would that have for your organization/clients?

That’s exactly what the World Cafe delivers.

Once your delegates receive the information and expertise of your speakers, they need to think about how to apply it and make it work for their challenges. And there’s nobody better to understand the challenges of doing this than their peers at your meeting.

The World Cafe engages all the participants to tap their collective wisdom to apply what they’ve learned and find ways to make it work.

Your delegates will all be involved in active conversation about what they’re most concerned about – their own challenges and goals.

Everyone is involved because the World Cafe takes place at cafe tables with only four people to a table, not at the big banquet rounds where one or two people talk and the rest fade into the background. Every single person is involved. And that ramps up the energy.

But it’s not just the few people at your table that you talk with. There are different ‘rounds’ in a cafe, each with a powerful question to guide the conversation. After each round, one person stays at each table, and the other people all get up and move to different tables.

In this way, ideas travel quickly, and group consensus can build just as fast, even in large groups. People take thoughts from one conversation to another, cross-pollinating ideas and connecting with more and more people, taking the energy even higher.

While a good facilitator can guide a simple sharing exercise with up to 50, even 100 people, a good Cafe host can host a Cafes with hundreds or thousands of people. Cafes have been successfully held with as many as 5,000 people at a conference.

Imagine the energy and excitement of all your delegates as they come up with ideas to apply all they’ve learned – taking the impact of your meeting to the next level. What a way to come to the end of a meeting!

How a World Cafe might look

Your delegates enter a room filled with cafe tables, each with four chairs around it. Each table has a gingham tablecloth on it, with a sheet of flip chart paper on top and some markers.

Your Cafe Hosts invite the participants in, welcome to the Cafe, and introduce them to ‘Cafe Etiquette’. Click on the video to see this explained.

The Hosts present your attendees with a question to guide their discussion for the first round – this might be ‘what was your greatest insight or learning at this conference? The questions are critical, and the art of shaping powerful questions is a big part of the skill your hosts bring to you.

After 20-30 minutes, each table is asked to pick one person to stay at that table, and then the other participants all separate and go to different tables. Once there, they’re given another question to build on the first and continue their conversations. A second question might be as simple as, ‘How are you going to apply your insights/learning?’

Another 20-30 minutes of animated conversation happens and then they once again leave their hosts and get up and move again to different tables where they are given another question, might be something like ‘how are you going to measure your success?’

At the end of 3 or 4 rounds (whichever bests suits your objectives), the insights from the group are harvested to help the group as a whole discover the common thoughts, insights and plans of action that are being taken.

If all the participants are from one organization, this is a powerful way to build consensus and commitment around a new strategy or initiative.

This is just one simplified example of how a World Cafe can help you ramp up the engagement of your delegates and the ROI of your meetings.

Ravi Tangri is an expert at hosting World Cafes, and he is a professional member of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers and a steward of the international community of the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations. Contact us now to find out how we can work with you to shape a Cafe that helps you hit – and exceed – your objectives.