Volume 1 • Number 3 • Summer 2005
Articles: From the
Editor | Burke | Nickols | Varney | Moore
Book Review: Bushnell
Book Reviews:
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the
Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Friedman
and
The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter by Juanita Brown with David Isaacs and Associates
By Don Bushnell
Two books related to our collective futures came across my desk almost simultaneously. As I read the first, I felt a sense of despair for both the short term and long term future: the second brightened my outlook considerably
The World Café, by Juanita Brown and Associates, offers a common-sense and uplifting alternative to Thomas Friedman’s best seller, The World is Flat. In it, Friedman advances the notion that inevitable forces are shaping the future toward a high tech driven world economy– one characterized, in my view, as a debt-driven, bottom-line obsessed, consumerist economy. Brown and her associates provide us with a creative alternative by exploring a different future of our own making and suggesting processes for taking action to shape it. Her underlying message is that through catalytic conversations that access our collective intelligence, we, the shapers of our future, can co-create a world in which we want to live.
First, I offer a short review of The World is Flat. Friedman has a lighthearted style that is easy reading and would be amusing if it were not for the fact he is dealing with the future of our global economy. According to him, downsizing, outsourcing, insourcing, and work force mobility, are inevitably part of the corporate future as the world flattens, that is, becomes more interconnected. His book breathlessly contends that corporate capitalism will spread consumerism worldwide and lift the economies of developing nations. Significantly, he evades such problems as its cost to the environment, its inevitable conflicts with local cultures, and its resultant debt-driven economies that accelerate the growing gap between rich and poor.
After a lengthy discussion of ten technological flatteners that have already changed the corporate world, he argues, in the second half of his book, that it is the convergence of this technology with other innovations - outsourcing, supply-chaining, and web facilitated networking, for example - that has created a flat global playing field. This convergence allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance. And, according to the author, convergence has "flipped the playing field from largely top down to more side to side" business practices. And it behooves the business managers (and their OD consultants) to get comfortable with this kind of horizontal collaboration between corporate teams spread all across the globe. And management, in his views, has shifted from a vertical leadership style to one that can facilitate, horizontally, cross cultural, and cross interdisciplinary team collaboration.
Friedman is not entirely unsympathetic to the growing pains of globalization. He writes, "The individual worker is going to become more and more responsible for managing his or her own career, risks, and economic security, and the job of government and business is to help workers build the necessary muscles to do that." Friedman suggests this could become the work of local NGO’s and unions looking after social contracts to help businesses and their employees. (This should fall within the purview of the global OD consultant as well.)
The World Café offers a common-sense alternative to the seemingly inevitable forces that are shaping the future according to Friedman and his minions. The World Café accommodates groups of people who engage in dialogue on questions that matter. The book is designed to give the reader a vast sampling of the quality of conversations that result from these conclaves and lead to a collective wisdom for exploring real issues that will foster social and organizational change
The many stories told throughout this book by World Café pioneers highlight important questions whose answers can be put into action. For example, Carlos Mota Margain, a long-time OD consultant in Mexico, tells a story in Chapter Three about planning a national congress around the emerging social economy in Mexico and, instead of opting for a highly structured official conclave where panels of experts give one-way speeches, he designed an interactive forum where three hundred participants had a dialogue together about the kind of innovations that would create a new economy and support diverse social and economic interests. By not just inviting experts to lecture each other, Margain facilitated conversations between rural farmers, key businessmen, and top officials in the Mexican government by using the Café format. In terms of practical outcomes, the insights gained from these conversations helped create the agenda and focus for the coming year of the National Fund for Social Enterprise. As he reports, "My key discovery from this World Café experience: It’s amazing what can happen when you shift the context to provide simple interactive formats for diverse stakeholders to really talk together as equals across traditional boundaries . . . Seeing people from such different social and economic backgrounds creating ideas together for Mexico’s’ future was deeply rewarding."
Stories hosted by all levels of community, state, and national leadership reflect the Cafe process as well as the design principles and innovative structure that make for a productive World Café experience. Each chapter has a story told by a Café practitioner. Brown, the principal author, gives the reader perspectives and observations on the particular design elements that illustrate the successful staging of a World Café.. The book ends with a epilogue by Peter Senge offering an "afterword" based on his experiences in jointly hosting, with Juanita Brown, World Café gatherings around the globe.
This reviewer shares Margaret Wheatley’s sentiment in her introduction to The World Café,: "I hope you will enjoy this book for all that it offers. . . If enough of us do so (host Café conversations) we can reintroduce many people to a world where people enjoy working together, where collaborative conversation yields true insight and new possibilities for action, where work and life are revived with meaning and possibility."
These are goals worthy of every OD practitioner and are very much in character with the underlying traditional humanistic values of our field of practice.
About the Reviewer
Don Bushnell, PhD will
be offering a current book review for each issue of SEASONINGS. Don
is the founding Chair of the School of Human and Organization Development
at the Fielding Graduate Institute and founder of the Center for Innovation
in the Nonprofit Sector at Fielding. He earned his doctorate in Sociology
from the University of California. Don can be reached at:
.