I just approved the final proofs for Systems Thinking in Libraries, which comes out in February. There is something both exciting and slightly maddening about reaching this stage of publishing. The book is finished. The changes are made. It is officially time to stop tinkering with it. And, inevitably, I now have so much more that I wish I had included.

I submitted the manuscript to the publisher in January, and in the months since, systems thinking has continued to shape how I approach my work. In fact, I have been intentionally incorporating systems thinking into nearly every workshop I facilitate for library staff. Sometimes that means explicitly teaching a systems concept. More often, it means designing activities that encourage people to look beyond the most obvious explanation, notice relationships and patterns, hear perspectives other than their own, and recognize how different parts of a system influence one another.

One of my favorite ways of doing this is through a World Café.

World Café is not new. I included instructions for facilitating one in Systems Thinking in Libraries, and there is an entire methodology built around the practice. Juanita Brown and David Isaacs wrote The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter about the approach. The basic idea is wonderfully simple: people gather in small groups to discuss meaningful questions, periodically move to different tables, and carry ideas from one conversation into the next. Instead of a traditional workshop in which the facilitator stands at the front of the room and delivers information, knowledge emerges through conversation. Participants encounter different perspectives, build on one another’s thinking, and begin to see connections that might not have surfaced in a more conventional discussion.

That is one reason I find the method so useful for systems thinking. Complex problems rarely belong neatly to one person, department, or explanation. What someone working at a service desk notices may be very different from what a manager sees. Someone in youth services may experience an issue differently from someone working in circulation, administration, technology, or outreach. None of those perspectives necessarily represents the entire system. Put them into conversation with one another, however, and suddenly we can begin to see more of it.

There was just one problem.

Staff were not signing up.

I actually had to cancel my standalone World Café workshop twice because of low enrollment. It would have been easy to conclude that staff simply were not interested in the format. Maybe World Cafés were not a good fit for my audience. Maybe people did not want an entire workshop built around conversation. Maybe it was time to move on to something else.

But that explanation did not quite fit what I was observing elsewhere.

I had incorporated World Café-style conversations into other workshops, and staff participated successfully. Once people were in the room and experienced the format, it worked. They talked. They shared ideas. They responded to one another. They made connections. The experience I was trying to create was not necessarily the problem.

The difficulty seemed to be getting people into the room in the first place.

That distinction matters from a systems-thinking perspective. Low enrollment was an outcome I could observe, but it did not tell me what was creating that outcome. If I treated the outcome as the explanation, I risked solving the wrong problem.

When I looked at the workshop differently, I began to realize that I might have been asking people to register for something without giving them a compelling picture of what they were registering for. A World Café makes sense to me because I know what a World Café is. To someone scanning a professional development calendar, however, the name may not communicate much at all. There was another layer of uncertainty as well. I wanted the workshop to function somewhat like an unconference, where participants would help determine what we talked about rather than arriving to find every topic and question already decided for them.

That openness was one of the things I liked most about the design. It may also have been one of the things making the workshop harder to embrace.

We talk a great deal in learning and development about giving people autonomy and choice, and those things absolutely matter. But choice without enough structure can sometimes feel less like freedom and more like uncertainty. If I ask someone to give up several hours of their workday for professional development, it is reasonable for them to want some idea of what is going to happen when they get there. “Come have conversations about topics that we will partially determine together” may sound exciting to some people. To others, it may feel like a fairly large unknown.

So instead of abandoning the idea, I changed the invitation.

Enter Hot Potato Topics

The World Café did not disappear. It became Hot Potato Topics.

I held the first Hot Potato Topics workshop a couple of months ago, and the response was very different. The core facilitation method was still a World Café, but the workshop now had an identity that made its purpose easier to understand. Instead of asking staff to sign up for a facilitation method they may never have heard of, I invited them to come talk about the “hot potatoes” of library work: the recurring issues, sticky questions, unresolved challenges, and topics that get passed around because there is rarely one simple answer.

That framing also better reflected what I had wanted the workshop to be all along. I did not want to decide in advance which issues mattered most to everyone in the room. I wanted participants to have some ownership of the conversation. The workshop therefore borrows a little from the spirit of an unconference while still providing more structure around how the conversations happen.

At the beginning, we identify the topics that people actually want to discuss. Those become the basis for our café conversations. Participants gather in small groups around tables, with each table focused on a particular question, issue, or challenge. After a set amount of time, participants rotate to another table. A table host can remain behind to help the incoming group understand where the previous conversation went, but the new group does not simply repeat the same discussion. They react to what is already there. They add their own experiences, introduce different perspectives, challenge assumptions, notice connections, and take the conversation somewhere new.

As people move around the room, ideas move with them. Something discussed at one table may suddenly become relevant to a completely different issue at another. Someone may recognize that two problems everyone has been treating separately are actually connected. A person who came into the workshop convinced that an issue had one obvious cause may hear an experience that complicates that explanation.

This is where the World Café becomes much more than a conversation activity for me. It becomes a way of making a system a little more visible.

Systems are difficult to understand precisely because none of us can see the whole thing from where we stand. We experience our piece of it. We know what happens in our branch, department, role, or interactions. We develop explanations based on what is visible from that position, and those explanations may be completely reasonable while still being incomplete. When we deliberately move perspectives around the room, we begin assembling a picture that no individual participant could have created alone.

The first Hot Potato Topics workshop showed me that the concept could work as a standalone experience. Now, in September, I am holding the second one, and I am leaning even further into the playfulness of the theme.

This time, we are adding a Playstorm.

A Playstorm is essentially brainstorming through play. Traditional brainstorming sounds open-ended, but we are often remarkably quick to begin evaluating ideas. Someone makes a suggestion and almost immediately we start identifying all the reasons it will not work. We do not have the money. We do not have enough staff. We tried something like that five years ago. Administration will never approve it. Our building cannot accommodate it. That is not how we normally do things. Practicality matters, of course, but when it enters the process too early, it can shut down exploration before we have had a chance to discover anything interesting.

A Playstorm temporarily changes those rules. Participants get permission to imagine, combine, exaggerate, experiment, build on one another’s ideas, and even be a little ridiculous before we start worrying about feasibility. The purpose is not to walk away believing that every wild idea should be implemented. The purpose is to interrupt some of our usual thinking patterns long enough to expand the range of possibilities we can see. Once we have done that, we can return to the practical work of identifying what might actually be useful, realistic, or worth testing.

That makes play particularly interesting within systems thinking. When faced with a complex problem, there is a strong temptation to move quickly from identifying the problem to proposing a solution. The faster we make that leap, however, the more likely we are to base our solution on our first interpretation of what is happening. Play creates a little room between those two steps. It encourages us to explore the problem from different angles before deciding what should be done about it.

And because I apparently cannot resist committing fully to a theme, I found potato-shaped stress balls that everyone attending the September workshop will receive. We are even bringing in lunch from a local caterer whose hot potato bar is always popular. If we are going to spend several hours talking about Hot Potato Topics, we might as well embrace the potato.

Those details are fun, but I do not think they are irrelevant to the learning design. The title, the stress balls, the lunch, and the Playstorm all help communicate something about what kind of space we are creating. We are going to talk about real workplace challenges, but this is not a meeting where someone puts a problem on a PowerPoint slide and tells everyone the correct answer. It is a space for curiosity, experimentation, conversation, and shared sense-making.

Sometimes the Idea Isn’t the Problem

This is one of those experiences I wish I could sneak back into Systems Thinking in Libraries now that the book is finished.

When the original World Café workshops failed to attract enough registrations, it would have been easy to interpret that outcome as evidence that staff did not want the experience. Instead, the cancellations became information.

The original title, the workshop description, the unfamiliarity of the World Café format, the open-ended nature of the agenda, staff expectations about professional development, and the uncertainty involved in committing several hours to an unfamiliar experience were all potentially interacting. Enrollment was simply the visible outcome of that system.

Changing the name did not fundamentally change the World Café methodology. Giving people potato stress balls certainly did not make the conversations more meaningful. What changed was the larger experience surrounding the method. Hot Potato Topics gave people a clearer entry point into something that had previously felt abstract.

There is a lesson in that which extends far beyond professional development.

When something does not work, we naturally focus on the outcome we can see. Staff are not registering, so staff must not be interested. Employees are not participating, so they must be disengaged. Customers are not using a service, so they must not want it. A program has low attendance, so the community must not value it.

Any of those explanations could be true. But they are conclusions, not necessarily causes.

Systems thinking encourages us to ask a different question: What conditions are producing the outcome we are seeing?

Sometimes examining those conditions will confirm that an idea truly does not meet a need, and letting it go is the right decision. But sometimes the idea is not the problem at all. The barrier is somewhere around it.

In this case, staff had already given me an important clue. When I embedded World Cafés within other workshops, they engaged with them. That meant I had evidence that the method itself could work. Rather than throwing away the idea because two workshops were canceled, I could treat those cancellations as feedback from the system and experiment with changing the conditions around it.

That may be one of my favorite things about systems thinking in practice. It does not mean endlessly trying to rescue every idea that fails. It means becoming more curious about failure before deciding what the failure means.

Sometimes you need to abandon the idea.

And sometimes you just need to give everyone a potato.