Building Your Lifeboat Using Lifeboat Café conversation

The way it works: We have had between 15 and 25 selected participants who gather for an overview of our intention and the question for the evening. The question is designed to elicit conversations that matter, not to difficult in these times. We chose the question: How might we best launch the first Ashland Lifeboat?

The group then proceeds to the café tables, complete with a flower and candle on a paper table cloth which serves as the note taking place. Groups discuss the question for 20 to 30 minutes then take a little break (with snacks) and mix into new groups at the tables. All except the Table Host who stays with the table and gives a brief overview of what has already been talked about at that table. The conversation then starts at each table where it had left off. You can imagine how the conversation depth evolves. Then there is another break and yet another shuffle to new tables.

After three rounds the entire group reconvenes in the bigger room and people present what their table came up with and what idea or new questions may also have been generated.

Often the question for the next meeting shows up in this review period at the end of the meeting. The whole meeting runs about three hours. We meet from 7:00 to 10:00 pm.

Some definitions we developed for our Lifeboat Café conversation:
LIFEBOAT: A contiguous group of 150 people who are educated, bonded and prepared to support each other through the coming changes.
CONTIGUOUS: Live close to each other.
EDUCATED: Understand the world energy, economic, environmental, and political situation sufficiently to feel an urgency to prepare.
BONDED: Have come to know and trust each other enough to feel a high level of trust, comfort and security.
PREPARED: To have taken those steps necessary to provide for the survival and perhaps thrival needs of the group.

We borrowed the Café process from the new book The World Café by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs. Over a decade they developed this flexible, easy to use process for fostering collaborative dialogue and "conversation that matters." "Based on living systems thinking, this innovative approach creates dynamic networks of conversation that can catalyze a community's own collective intelligence around its most important questions."

There is much practical and useful stuff to learn from her web site, including exact instructions on running your own Café.

Juanita and David are part of what is known as the Dialogue movement which bring to people more effective, useful and heart centered way of communicating with each other. These are the new skills that make the new culture work.

I so appreciate Tom Atlee of The Co-Intelligence Institute because he envisions models of working democracy. As a young man he grew up with activist parents who were, in his eyes, always "putting out brush fires" and nothing systemic seemed to change. So he devoted himself to the study of a perpetuation of higher, more effective forms of democracy. And, as we might expect, many of them involve the innovations of dialogue. Enjoy Tom Atlee!

Dialogue is shared exploration towards greater understanding, connection, or possibility.

And I want you to know about this coalition of people bringing dialogue into every part of life and doing so all around the world. I find this very hopeful:

National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation - fostering a world of conversation, participation and action.

Dialogue and deliberation are dynamic processes which can be empathy-enhancing, relationship-changing, problem-solving, action-planning, organization-developing, community-building, conflict-resolving, skill developing, prejudice reducing, consciousness-raising, and more!

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