Welcome, you are interested in running a World Cafe at your company or an event? Then find following the Word Cafe rules. If you are looking for a professional Word Cafe facilitator, feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.

World Cafe rules and guidelines

  • The ideal activity for the facilitation of large groups (>20 participants)
  • Split participants into groups of 6-10 members
  • Each group gets a table and a „table captain“
  • Set a time limit to discuss a specific question on each table (5-15 minutes)
  • Table captain summarizes discussion on table best in the form of a mind map on a flipchart sheet
  • When the time limit is up, group members switch to a different table. Table captains remain at their tables, and welcome the new group with an introduction of what has already been discussed by the previous group.
  • The new group tries to build on the ideas of the previous group.
  • Repeat process 3-x times (depending on topics/tables)
  • At the end, all flipchart sheets with the mind maps are presented in the form of a gallery.
  • Every participant can now look at each content in detail and highlight with a dot what he/she likes.

If you are interested in learning more facilitation techniques, then check out our popular live facilitation training.