ProAction Café
Details
- Category: Frameworks
- Access: public
Description
A small-group facilitation method that turns a roomful of personal projects into structured peer coaching, in three rounds of twenty-five minutes each. Designed in Brussels around 2005 by Rainer von Leoprechting and Ria Baeck as a blend of Open Space Technology and World Café, now a core method in the Art of Hosting network worldwide.
Full text
## 1. What it is
ProAction Café is a small-group facilitation method that runs a roomful of personal projects through three structured rounds of peer coaching. Someone walks in carrying a project, a question, a stuck idea. Someone else walks out three hours later with a sharpened purpose, a list of what was missing, and a set of next steps with names attached to them. It is built for the gap between conversation and commitment.
The basic geometry is a café table with four chairs. One person at the table is the caller, the one bringing the project. The other three are contributors, drawn from the room to ask questions and offer help. The caller stays at the table for the entire session. The contributors rotate between rounds, so the project gets three fresh perspectives in sequence.
Each round runs 20 to 30 minutes and is guided by one question for the whole room. Round one asks what the project is really about underneath the surface presentation. Round two asks what is missing. Round three asks what the caller will actually do next, and what help they need. By the end, every project in the room has been worked on by twelve different minds, and every caller has a harvest sheet they can take home.
ProAction Café is a deliberate blend. Take the self-organising agenda from Open Space Technology, where participants name the topics they care about. Take the rotating café-table form from World Café, where the same question gets answered at every table at the same time. Combine them, and you get a structure that can scale from twenty to three hundred people and still deliver actionable next steps for each project in the room.
It is one of the methods most closely associated with the Art of Hosting community of practice. Practitioners typically describe it as "peer coaching for projects," "an action-oriented cousin of World Café," or "the method that scales personal mentoring." The shorthand most often used in Art of Hosting trainings is simply *the project method*.
The method belongs to the wider family of participatory leadership practices that share a common premise: that the wisdom needed to move a project forward is already present in the room, and that the convener's job is to design the conditions under which it can surface and travel between the people who carry it.
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## 2. Where it came from
The method has a specific origin in time and place. It was conceived around 2005 in Brussels by Rainer von Leoprechting and Ria Baeck, two facilitators working at the edges of the European institutions.
Leoprechting was hosting what he called Pro Action Groups inside the EU institutions, small evening gatherings of about ten to twelve change agents who met monthly to support each other's projects. The format worked, but it was hitting a ceiling. More people wanted to join than the format could hold without losing its intimacy. He needed a way to scale the same peer-coaching dynamic to a larger group without diluting it into another panel discussion.
Baeck was hosting her first World Café in Brussels around the same time, in the back room of a real café. Leoprechting attended as a participant. He saw the rotating table form and recognised it as the scaling mechanism he was looking for. The two of them met in Mechelen, a Flemish city north of Brussels, and walked around the streets sketching out how the Open Space principle of self-named topics could merge with the World Café principle of one shared question per round.
Baeck describes the design conversation as "a collective sensing of how we could blend the piece of Open Space, where people bring their own topics and questions, with the element of World Café, where people mix and are talking about the same question in each round. That is how we came up with the three rounds and the three questions."
The early prototype ran as a monthly evening event in Brussels, with food and drinks after office hours, and conversations that ranged from very personal questions to professional projects. That open public ProAction Café has continued in Brussels for almost two decades, with different hosting teams over the years.
The method began travelling outside Brussels through the Art of Hosting network. Toke Paludan Møller, Monica Nissén, and the wider AoH circle were teaching participatory leadership methods to the European Commission and elsewhere, and ProAction Café slotted easily into their training repertoire. By the early 2010s it had reached North American AoH trainers like Chris Corrigan, Tenneson Woolf, and Amanda Fenton, who began documenting and adapting the method for their own contexts. Corrigan reports having run it for groups as large as three hundred people at a Canadian community economic development conference in 2017.
The method has no canonical book, no formal certification, no foundation. It travels by apprenticeship and by open documentation. The closest thing to an authoritative reference is Amanda Fenton's user guide, which circulates as a PDF and is reproduced across dozens of facilitator websites under Creative Commons licensing.
This origin shape, two practitioners blending two existing methods in a back room in Brussels, then releasing the result into the commons without ownership claims, is itself worth noticing. It matches the broader Art of Hosting ethic: methods are gifts to be passed on, refined, and adapted. The names Leoprechting and Baeck stay attached out of attribution and gratitude, not control.
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## 3. How it actually works
The method has a precise procedural form. The discipline is what makes it scale. Here is the canonical version, adapted from Fenton's user guide and the Art of Hosting core methods documentation.
**Set-up.** A large circle of chairs at one end of the room. Café tables at the other end, four chairs each. Tablecloths covered in flipchart paper. Markers, sticky notes, water. The number of tables is the number of participants divided by four. Twenty participants gives you five tables. Forty gives you ten. The arithmetic is firm: no more than five people per table, four is the design point.
**Opening circle.** Everyone gathers in the large circle. The host names the purpose of the gathering. Anyone can step forward and call a project, that is, name something they want help with, write it on a card, and post it on the agenda wall. The principle is first come, first served. The number of callers equals the number of tables. Participants who do not step forward become contributors. They will support three different projects during the session.
**Tables claim themselves.** Callers go to their numbered tables and sit down with the project card in front of them. Contributors look at the agenda wall, choose a project to support in round one, and sit down at that table. First come, first served. When tables fill up at four (or five), the late arrivals choose another table.
**Café etiquette.** Before round one begins, the host reads the four practices: share from your own experience, listen deeply, look for deeper patterns and common themes, write and doodle on the tablecloth. These are imported wholesale from World Café and are the cultural floor of the method.
**Round 1: What is the quest behind the question? (20 to 30 minutes).** The caller introduces the project briefly. Contributors ask questions that push past the surface presentation. They are not trying to fix the project yet. They are trying to find out what the project is really about underneath the official story. What is the deeper purpose? What is the caller actually trying to bring into the world? The contributors' job in this round is interrogation, not advice.
**Round 2: What is missing? (20 to 30 minutes).** A break, then the contributors rotate to other tables. New contributors arrive at the caller's table. The caller summarises what they heard in round one, naming the sharpened quest. The new contributors then ask: what is missing from this picture? What areas have not been covered? What blind spots are showing? Money, networks, knowledge, partners, structure, timing, allies. This round is about broadening, not narrowing.
**Round 3: What next steps will I take? What help do I need? What did I learn? (20 to 30 minutes).** A break, then contributors rotate again. The caller now turns the harvest into commitment. They name the concrete next actions they will take, the help they need, and what they have learned about themselves and their project during the session. The contributors' job in this round is to ground the caller, ask the practical questions, and offer their own networks and resources where useful.
Many facilitators add a **fourth round**, sometimes called the harvest round, in which contributors visit the table one last time to hear the final harvest and offer any last support. Fenton's guide structures this as a separate reflection step. Corrigan and others fold it into round three. The variation does not change the method.
**Closing circle.** Everyone returns to the large circle. Each caller, in turn, shares two things: what they are grateful for, and what their next steps are. The room as a whole then reflects on what they learned about the practice of peer coaching itself, and what applications they see for ProAction Café in their own contexts. The closing is short, often under fifteen minutes for a group of twenty.
**Time envelope.** Two and a half to four hours is the typical band. Less than two hours strips the method of its depth. More than four hours loses energy. The classical recipe is three hours.
**Number of participants.** Twelve at the low end (three tables of four). Three hundred at the upper end Corrigan has documented. Most practitioners run it between twenty and eighty.
**What you take home.** A filled-in harvest sheet per caller. A list of contributors and contact details where shared. A set of named next steps, ideally with dates. A round of public commitment made in the closing circle.
The discipline is the procedure. Skip the rotation and you lose the cross-pollination. Skip the harvest step and the commitments evaporate in a week. Skip the opening circle and contributors arrive without context. Each piece is doing structural work, not ceremonial work.
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## 4. Where you can see it work
The method has spread widely enough that documented deployments now span continents, sectors, and group sizes. A non-exhaustive sample.
**Brussels public ProAction Café (ongoing, 2005 to present).** The original open public format, running monthly or quarterly in different host configurations for nearly two decades. Questions brought by participants have ranged from "how do I leave my job and start an artisan bakery" to "how do we redesign our EU directorate." The Brussels event is the longest-running ProAction Café in the world and the closest thing to a living archive of how the method behaves over time.
**Art of Hosting trainings (global, 2008 to present).** ProAction Café is now one of the four or five core methods taught in every standard three-day Art of Hosting training, alongside Circle, World Café, and Open Space Technology. AoH trainings happen four to six times a year in major regional centres (Vancouver, Berlin, Brussels, Cape Town, Halifax, Melbourne), with a typical participant base of fifty to eighty per training. The method has been demonstrated this way to several thousand facilitators worldwide.
**Econous 2017, Canadian community economic development conference.** Chris Corrigan ran a ProAction Café for three hundred participants on the final morning of a four-day national conference, with topics drawn from a pre-conference "clothesline" wall of project cards. Forty projects were worked simultaneously across seventy-five tables. The method had to be adapted on the fly to accommodate conference-scale movement and missing project hosts, but the basic geometry held. Corrigan documented the run on his blog as a case study in scaling participatory work inside traditional conference architecture.
**European Commission and EU institutions (2005 to present).** Leoprechting's original Pro Action Groups inside the EU institutions, which were the seed of the method, continued under the brand "Participatory Leadership," which is how Art of Hosting is named within the European institutions. Internal teams in the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, and various Directorates-General have used ProAction Café for strategic planning, project portfolio review, and cross-departmental collaboration.
**Global Ecovillage Network (2010s onward).** GEN's Solution Library lists ProAction Café as a documented governance solution under the social and diversity-and-cohesion regeneration area. Ecovillage practitioners use it during gatherings and trainings to work on community-level projects, from biological wastewater systems to land trust formation to youth program design. The GEN reference frames it as "bringing the wisdom of a group to the support of an individual's task, project, and vision."
**Impact Hub network (2010s).** The Impact Hub Bratislava chapter, and similar nodes in the global Impact Hub network of coworking and social-entrepreneurship spaces, have used ProAction Café as a monthly evening format for member projects. The format almost exactly mirrors Leoprechting's original Brussels recipe: food, drinks, three rounds, gratitude circle.
**Higher education.** The University of Washington's Evans School of Public Policy and Governance has used ProAction Café in its leadership programmes. The University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development documented its multi-year experiment with cultivating Art of Hosting practices, ProAction Café included, in a 2020 conservancy paper.
**Online adaptations (2020 to 2022).** When the COVID-19 pandemic moved facilitation onto Zoom, ProAction Café was one of the methods that translated relatively cleanly. The agenda wall becomes a shared whiteboard. The tables become breakout rooms. The host moves between breakouts during rounds. The harvest becomes a shared document. The method's structural simplicity made it portable.
The pattern across these deployments: the method is durable enough to survive translation across cultures, sectors, and platforms, but it depends on a strong host who holds the time discipline and the rotation pattern. Without the discipline, it collapses into ordinary networking.
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## 5. Where it gets confused or contested
The method is widely loved by facilitators and rarely critiqued in writing. The published critique base is thin compared to Open Space Technology or World Café. But the practitioner community has named several recurring tensions over two decades of running it.
**The caller-as-customer trap.** The method privileges the caller. Three rounds of attention, twelve people working on their project, a public commitment in the closing circle. This is its strength, but it can also tip the room toward a service dynamic where contributors begin to perform helpfulness rather than offer honest questions. The remedy is to brief contributors explicitly that their job in round one is to interrogate the quest, not to be supportive. Helpfulness is a round-three behaviour.
**The thin question.** A caller who arrives with a vague or under-cooked project burns the first round trying to find what they actually want help with. By round two the contributors are already restless. Hosts increasingly screen callers before the session, asking them to write a one-paragraph project brief and confirming they are bringing a real question, not a fishing expedition.
**The follow-through gap.** ProAction Café produces beautiful commitments in the closing circle. Two weeks later, half of them have evaporated. The method depends on a harvester who follows up with each caller two to three weeks after the session to check on next steps. Without that loop, the action orientation is a label, not a result. This is the same harvest gap that affects every Art of Hosting method, but it bites harder here because the method's identity is built on action.
**Rotation done badly.** If contributors stay at the same table for all three rounds, the cross-pollination disappears and the method becomes a small group coaching session that happens to have a procedural structure. Hosts have to enforce the rotation, often physically directing people between rounds. Some hosts use a bell, some use music, some assign tables in advance.
**Cultural fit.** Like World Café and Open Space, ProAction Café assumes a participatory culture: people who feel entitled to interrupt, ask hard questions, and offer unsolicited advice. In cultures with stronger deference norms or higher hierarchical sensitivity, the method needs adaptation. Some Asian and African facilitators have reported that the round-one interrogation style reads as rude unless the host explicitly reframes it as a gift. The fix is usually a longer opening circle and a more explicit cultural briefing, not a change to the method itself.
**The "is this just consulting?" critique.** A skeptical observer can frame ProAction Café as group consulting dressed up in café aesthetics. The caller gets free advice, the contributors get to feel useful, everyone goes home. The deeper claim of the method, that something happens between people during the rotation that does not happen in linear advice-giving, depends on the contributors actually listening for patterns rather than just offering their own opinions. This is the same critique that lands against World Café, and it is the same answer: the discipline is what produces the difference.
**Format-as-routine.** Communities and organisations that adopt ProAction Café as a monthly ritual eventually report that the form goes stale. The same callers bring the same projects. Contributors begin to phone it in. This is not a flaw in the method, it is a flaw in how the method is used. Some host teams rotate the format with Circle, Open Space, and Appreciative Inquiry on a quarterly cycle. Others use ProAction Café only for moments when the room has a genuine cluster of project-shaped questions to work.
The method's design has held up well across two decades. The tensions are practitioner-level rather than methodological. The standard response to most of them is: read Fenton's guide again, brief the room better, and follow up afterward.
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## 6. How it shows up in the archive
The ToGather archive does not have a published interview in which a community names ProAction Café as one of its core practices. The method's lineage runs through the Art of Hosting community of practice rather than through any single community in the archive. This is worth saying directly.
What the archive does have is the surrounding facilitation infrastructure that ProAction Café slots into.
**Feytopia and the Art of Hosting lineage.** Sharon's Feytopia fundraising facilitation brief (March 2026, prepared for a four-hour resource conversation at the Château du Feÿ) describes the Art of Hosting family of methods as the practitioner family ProAction Café belongs to, and explicitly names Open Space Technology, World Café, Circle, ProAction Café, and Appreciative Inquiry as the methods a participatory facilitator picks between depending on the question. Feytopia's culture, with its emphasis on doocracy and self-organising project teams, is exactly the kind of community where ProAction Café would land cleanly. Whether any of the Fey hosts has run a formal ProAction Café session is not yet documented in the archive.
**Tamera and forum-adjacent practices.** Tamera's Forum is a different method (a witnessed-disclosure practice for the inner emotional life of a community) and is not part of Art of Hosting. It is a separate tradition, developed at Tamera from 1978. Tamera also uses Open Space and World Café for project work. Joshua Gottenko's archive interview describes how Tamera moves between containers depending on whether the work is interpersonal or operational. ProAction Café would sit in the operational lane.
**The wider Art of Hosting practitioner network.** The archive's interviews touch the AoH network at multiple points: Mathieu's reference to Reinventing Organizations in his Feytopia interview, Sharon's own facilitation lineage from Midburn (the Israeli regional Burner event founded around 2011), and the general fluency in participatory methods that the post-2010 European intentional community sector shares. ProAction Café is part of that shared vocabulary even when it is not named.
**Where it would surface if asked.** A community moving from vision to action, with a roomful of project-shaped questions and three to four hours, would reach for ProAction Café before anything else. A community in conflict, by contrast, would reach for Forum or Circle. A community with no clear direction would reach for Open Space. The method-selection logic in the field is intuitive and pattern-matched, not codified.
This is also the honest limit of the archive's current grounding for the entry. ProAction Café is documented from canonical practitioner sources, not from inside the archive. As more communities in the archive describe their facilitation practice in interviews, the grounding will deepen.
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## 7. Living examples and entry points for community builders
A community builder reading this entry is probably asking the practical question: when would I actually use this, and how do I run my first one? Here is the answer in five steps.
**1. The trigger.** You have a roomful of people who are already working on real projects, and you want to give those projects a structured boost. Twenty to forty participants is the sweet spot for a first run. The projects are concrete enough to name on a card but loose enough that the caller would benefit from outside perspective. If the room is in conflict, do Forum or Circle instead. If the room has no shared direction, do Open Space.
**2. The room.** Find a space that can hold one large circle and four to ten café tables in the same room. Lay tablecloths. Provide markers, sticky notes, water, snacks. Put a tall agenda wall somewhere visible. The physical container does most of the cultural work. Skimp on it and the method gets harder.
**3. The pre-brief for callers.** Two days before, send anyone who plans to call a project a short note: write one paragraph naming the project, the question you are sitting with, and one specific thing you would want help with. This dramatically improves round one and prevents the "thin question" trap.
**4. The session itself.** Three hours, three rounds of twenty-five minutes each plus a closing circle. Read the café etiquette out loud at the start of round one. Enforce the rotation between rounds, physically if needed. Hold the time. End on time.
**5. The follow-up.** Within seventy-two hours of the session, the host or harvester sends each caller a short note: here is the harvest sheet from your table, here are the contributors you connected with, what is your update at week two? This single follow-up is what turns a good afternoon into actual change. Most commitments fade in the first month if no one asks.
**Entry points for further learning.** Amanda Fenton's user guide (linked in Sources) is the cleanest one-page reference. Chris Corrigan's two blog posts on ProAction Café origins and on scaling to three hundred people are the best practitioner reflections in print. The Art of Hosting network runs regular three-day trainings worldwide; the listings are at artofhosting.org. Local Art of Hosting communities of practice exist in most major regions and welcome new facilitators.
**One caution.** ProAction Café is action-oriented by design. If you use it without a harvest and follow-up plan, you will produce twenty beautiful conversations and twenty quiet evaporations. The method does not own its results. The host does.
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## 8. Companion frameworks and what to read next
ProAction Café sits inside the Art of Hosting family and links outward to several adjacent methods and frameworks worth reading alongside it.
**World Café** (Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, 1995). The rotating-table conversation method that ProAction Café borrowed its geometry from. Read this for the design principles around hospitable space, questions that matter, and cross-pollination. The seven World Café design principles are the operational floor of ProAction Café.
**Open Space Technology** (Harrison Owen, 1985). The self-organising agenda method that ProAction Café borrowed its participant-named topics from. Read this for the Law of Two Feet, the four principles, and the deep philosophical question Owen poses: what would it look like to design a meeting that is all coffee break?
**Tamera Forum** (Sabine Lichtenfels and Dieter Duhm, developed from 1978). A witnessed-disclosure practice for the emotional and interpersonal life of a community. Forum is not part of Art of Hosting. It is a separate tradition that began in a predecessor community to Tamera in the Black Forest and has been held continuously at Tamera, Portugal since the community's founding. Read this as the functional counterpart to ProAction Café: where ProAction Café works on the operational project layer, Forum works on the relational and emotional layer underneath. Communities typically need both, and they come from different lineages.
**Sociocracy 3.0** (James Priest, Bernhard Bockelbrink, Liliana David, 2015). A modular governance pattern library. Read this as the operating system that ProAction Café sits on top of. ProAction Café is a tactical method for working a project room. S3 is the structural framework that holds the organisation week to week.
**Doocracy** (Burning Man, open-source software, Feytopia 2014 to present). The governance principle that says authority follows action: whoever does the work has the say. Read this as the cultural complement to ProAction Café. ProAction Café produces commitments. Doocracy is the cultural floor that turns commitments into work.
**The four practices of the Art of Hosting** (Toke Paludan Møller, Monica Nissén, and the AoH circle, 1990s). Be present, participate, host others, co-create. Read this as the practitioner stance underneath every Art of Hosting method, including ProAction Café. The four practices are the method behind the methods.
**Reinventing Organizations** (Frederic Laloux, 2014). A developmental framework for how organisations evolve through stages of consciousness. Read this for the Teal stage's principles of self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose, all of which ProAction Café tactically supports.
**Theory U** (Otto Scharmer, 2007 and 2018). An independent framework developed at MIT Sloan, distinct from Art of Hosting. It is about how groups sense emerging futures and act from a deeper place, using a seven-stage process of descent and ascent through awareness states. Theory U and Art of Hosting are read alongside each other by many practitioners, but they come from separate intellectual lineages and communities of practice. Read Theory U for the longer strategic arc that ProAction Café can sit inside: a café session can function as a prototyping move on the right arm of the U, but Theory U is not where ProAction Café comes from.
**Liberating Structures** (Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, 2014). A library of thirty-three small-group facilitation methods. Read this for the wider pattern library. ProAction Café is not in the Liberating Structures canon, but several of their methods (1-2-4-All, Wise Crowds, Troika Consulting) work the same peer-coaching territory in shorter forms.
The reading sequence we recommend for community builders is: World Café first (to understand the conversational fabric), then Open Space (to understand self-organising agendas), then ProAction Café (to understand how to combine them for action). If you want a wider strategic lens, Theory U (its own separate framework, not part of Art of Hosting) and Reinventing Organizations are the two most commonly read alongside the AoH family, and both repay the detour.
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## 9. Sources
The references below are the canonical practitioner sources we consulted while writing this entry. The method has no foundational book; the documentation lives in the practitioner network.
- [The origin of Pro Action Café](https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/the-origin-of-pro-action-cafe/). Chris Corrigan's blog, including Ria Baeck's first-person account of how the method was designed in Mechelen.
- [Running a Pro Action Café for 300 people](https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/running-a-pro-action-cafe-for-300-people/). Corrigan's case study from Econous 2017.
- [Pro Action Café (SessionLab)](https://www.sessionlab.com/methods/pro-action-cafe). Methods library entry with step-by-step procedure.
- [Pro Action Café (Social Innovation Canada toolkit)](https://toolkit.sicanada.org/tool/pro-action-cafe/). Bilingual EN/FR documentation, including Fenton's guide as source.
- [Pro Action Café (Redesign Toolkit, UW Evans School)](https://redesigntoolkit.io/pro-action-cafe/). University context, with Vimeo video walk-through.
- [Pro Action Café (Global Ecovillage Network Solution Library)](https://ecovillage.org/solution/pro-action-cafe/). Ecovillage-sector framing of the method.
- [Core Art of Hosting Practices](http://artofhosting.ning.com/page/core-art-of-hosting-practices). The Art of Hosting network's own documentation of its core methods, ProAction Café included.
- Amanda Fenton, *Pro Action Café user guide*, Creative Commons document widely reproduced in facilitator toolkits (PDF available via [Amanda Fenton Consulting](http://amandafenton.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Pro-Action-Cafe.pdf)).
- Sharon Avraham, "Art of Hosting and Open Space, for tomorrow," ToGather Flagship internal brief (March 2026). The facilitation lineage context for this entry.