The Conversation Cafe Carousel

A community-driven initiative to explore a wide variety of topics and to share thoughts, challenges, and ideas for action

Barry Overeem
The Liberators
Published in
8 min readAug 23, 2023

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Liberating Structures are a collection of interaction patterns that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group — from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers. In this series of posts, you can find inspiration on how to use them within your team, organization, or community.

Conversation Cafe is one of my favorite Liberating Structures. It encourages people to listen and understand each other’s perspectives on a profound, shared topic or challenge instead of trying to convince or persuade others to see it your way. Sitting in a circle with a simple set of agreements and a talking object, small groups engage in consecutive rounds of dialogue. Conversation Cafe invites people to listen to one another’s thoughts and reflect together on a shared challenge.

In this article, I’ll share an idea I’ve been playing with for a while: a community-driven Conversation Cafe — with rotating facilitators — to explore a wide variety of topics and to share thoughts, challenges, and ideas for action.

“A community-driven Conversation Cafe — with rotating facilitators — to explore a wide variety of topics and to share thoughts, challenges, and ideas for action.”

A community-driven Conversation Cafe

My hope is that we can kickstart a rhythm of Conversation Cafe’s facilitated by members of our community. Each session is focused on a specific topic, with no dependencies on Christiaan and myself. If we like, we can simply join as participants or host a session when we feel like doing so.

With this initiative, we want to show that you don’t need to be an expert facilitator to run your own Conversation Cafe. Once you’re familiar with the ground rules, and you’ve experienced a couple of sessions yourself, you can host your own sessions! Most importantly, we offer a safe space for a constructive exploration of a wide variety of topics. A space where everyone feels heard, seen, and respected.

“We offer a safe space for a constructive exploration of a wide variety of topics. A space where everyone feels heard, seen, and respected.”

Conversation Cafe in progress!

Rules of play

Everyone can become a facilitator of a Conversation Cafe. There are some ground rules to increase the likelihood that it becomes a valuable experience for everyone. Hosting a Conversation Cafe isn’t complex, but there are some tips & tricks that make your life easier.

  1. Join a Conversation Cafe. You can find an overview of the upcoming meetups in The Liberators Network. Join as a regular participant, and experience the flow, structure, and design of the session.
  2. Join our Patreon community. In order to join our meetups, you don’t have to be a patron. It is a requirement to facilitate meetups though. Mostly because you’ll get access to most of our (paid) digital materials for free and you receive various other benefits.
  3. Add your name to this Google spreadsheet. Include details like the title of your session, a short description, a potential date, preferred time, and your contact information.
  4. Select a topic. Anything related to Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or Liberating Structures in general could potentially be a topic for a Conversation Cafe. Great potential topics are the scientific in-depth posts by Christiaan. They’re ideally suited to explore together and offer extra reading material before and/or after the meetup.
  5. Send the Leadership Team a message. Once you’ve completed these steps, send us a message (community@theliberators.com), and together with the other members of the user group’s leadership team we help you move forward.
  6. Find a co-facilitator. A co-facilitator makes your life way easier. Especially if you’ve never facilitated a Conversation Cafe yourself. It’s also lots of fun! Anyone can be your co-facilitator.
  7. Create a Google presentation. Use the template Google presentation (this will be made available soon) for Conversation Cafe and include information about your topic.
  8. Ask us to publish the meetup. Once you’ve completed all the previous steps, send us a message, and we’ll publish the meetup in The Liberators Network.
  9. Promote the meetup. It’s nice to create some awareness for your meetup. Feel free to announce it on LinkedIn, if you tag us, we’ll give it some promotion as well. Although with a user group of almost 4000 members, getting sufficient participants probably won’t be an issue.
  10. Facilitate & debrief the meetup. The most essential step: running the meetup! After the meetup, take some time with your co-facilitator to debrief the session and to decide what to improve.

If at any point, you need some support, always feel free to contact us at “community@theliberators.com”. We’re happy to help you out, give feedback, find a co-facilitator, or maybe even facilitate the meetup together!

You can download a high-resolution version of the poster here.

The steps of Conversation Cafe

The template Google Presentation (link will be included soon, stay tuned) contains all the steps of Conversation Cafe, including the timeboxes. The steps below are mostly intended to give you a session of the flow, the timeboxes & steps aren’t set in stone.

  • Form groups of mostly 5 people. That’s the ideal group size of a Conversation Cafe.
  • (1 min) Provide a rough overview of the rounds. There will be four rounds of conversation, two first rounds using a talking object, the third one as an open conversation, and a final round with the talking object. Give the duration of each round;
  • (1 min) Ask the groups to decide who becomes the “Host”. The host is a regular participant who gently intervenes when a participant fails to live up to the rules of Conversation Cafe or when timeboxes aren’t respected.
  • (2 min) As a host, read the six Conversation Café agreements.
  • (1 min) Invite participants to reflect on the invitation. This is done individually and in silence.
  • (5 min) First round with the talking object. Everyone takes 1 minute to share their reflections and thoughts on the topic. Only the person with the talking object speaks, and this person decides who gets it next. People may skip a turn.
  • (5 min) Second round with the talking object. After listening to everyone in the first round, new ideas, insights, or questions might have emerged. All of this can be shared in the second round. There’s no discussion though. If you have a question for someone else, just share it, but don’t discuss it yet. Everyone takes 1 minute, it’s ok to skip a turn.
  • (20 min) Third round. As a group, engage in an open, lively conversation. Using the talking object is optional.
  • (5 min) Fourth round with the talking object. Everyone takes 1 minute to share their takeaways and biggest insights from the conversation.
Conversation Cafe has the potential to bring life to all the 10 principles of Liberating Structures. Next time when you’re engaged in a Conversation Cafe, see if you can notice them!

Flow of the meetup

Conversation Cafe is obviously the heart of the session. We do recommend including a warming-up and debrief exercise. Here’s the flow we have in mind for the total meetup.

In total, the meetup takes 90 minutes.

  • We’ll open the call 10 minutes early so that we have an opportunity to check connections and get started on time.
  • (10 min) Offer people some extra time to join, and already welcome everyone who joined on time. Explain the purpose of the session and share the sponsors: The Liberators, our Patreon community, and Columinity (our new company which offers tools like the Agile/Scrum Team Survey).
  • (10 min) Form groups of 5 people for Conversation Cafe, and create the breakout rooms. Ask one person to be the host to guide the conversation and to track the individual timeboxes. Give the small groups 8 minutes to get to know each other. By including this step, people already know with whom they’ll be spending 45 minutes for Conversation Cafe, and you can fix problems with group size, people who have technical issues, people who drop out, etc.
  • (5 min) Back in the main channel, you explain the flow of Conversation Cafe and introduce the topic they’ll discuss.
  • (45 min) Move everyone to the same breakout rooms, and have them start Conversation Cafe. They’ll stay in the breakouts for the entire flow of Conversation Cafe.
  • (15 min) Back in the main channel, people can share their biggest insights with the entire group. You can do this room-by-room or simply let it emerge.
  • (5 min) Close the meetup and optionally make people aware of upcoming Conversation Cafe’s.

Questions & answers

  • Who can join the meetups? Anyone can join, it’s not limited to e.g. the members of our Patreon community.
  • How many meetups do I need to facilitate? That’s up to you. Totally fine if you only want to do it once. It might make sense to do it more often, for example, at least 3 times. This gives you the opportunity to become more comfortable running these sessions. If you want to stop after 3 sessions: totally fine! If there’s a lot of enthusiasm, we might even limit it to 3 sessions to create space for others. But this is a bridge we’ll cross once we get there :)
  • Are there any technical requirements for the participants? My preference is that participants always turn on their cameras and microphone. This might make sense, but isn’t common practice. I do find this respectful to the other members of your Conversation Cafe.
Encourage people to turn on their camera. For example, during this session with Scrum.org almost everyone was visible, which makes making personal connections easier.
  • What timeboxes should I use? As a start, use the timeboxes as described in this article (90 minutes in total). Once you’ve gained experience with running Conversation Cafe’s yourself and you want to tweak them: go wild!
  • What tooling should I use? Anything that allows you to create breakout rooms. We often use Zoom but are also playing with the idea of using Butter.
  • Can I use your Zoom (or any other tool) license? No. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to support multiple licenses. So, bring your own license :)
  • Can I run a Conversation Cafe in person? Definitely! Although my assumption is that most meetups will be online, I can only applaud in-person initiatives!
  • Are the sessions recorded? Nope. Most of the conversations take place in breakout rooms, which can’t be recorded. Processing the recordings is also quite time-consuming.
  • In what language are the sessions hosted? In English. I’m definitely interested in supporting sessions in other languages, but this might be something more suited for the local user groups.

Closing

We’re support excited to kickstart this new initiative. Obviously, we’ll learn many things to start, stop, and change along the way. We hope you share our enthusiasm! If so, a good next step is to join our upcoming Conversation Cafe’s. If you like the experience: keep joining as a regular participant, or become a (temporary) facilitator yourself. Whatever you prefer. Most importantly: let’s learn and grow, together!

If you’ve got any questions or comments, always feel free to send us a message at: community@theliberators.com

Check out patreon.com/liberators to support us.

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The Liberators
The Liberators

Published in The Liberators

The Liberators: Unleashing Organizational Superpowers

Barry Overeem
Barry Overeem

Written by Barry Overeem

Co-founder The Liberators: I create content, provide training, and facilitate (Liberating Structures) workshops to unleash (Agile) teams all over the world!

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