Juanita Brown Ph.D. is the founder of Whole Systems Associates, an international consortium of professionals dedicated to strategic inquiry and the renewal of complex systems. Since 1974 she has served as a thinking partner, organizational strategist and dialogue host with leaders in business and industry, government and educational institutions, health care organizations, and community service agencies in the United States, Latin America, Canada, Europe and the Pacific Rim. With her partner, David Isaacs, Juanita is also the co-originator of The World Café, a pioneering approach to strategic dialogue being used in multi-sector and multi-stakeholder settings around the globe. Hundreds of thousands of people on six continents have experienced the World Café to address strategy development; client relations; internal and external stakeholder engagement; business innovation; new product development, and other critical issues. Her award-winning book, The World Café: Shaping our Futures through Conversations that Matter, co-authored with her partner David Isaacs and the World Café Community has been translated into 10 languages, and has also been released in mainland China. Ms. Brown has served as a Senior Affiliate with the MIT Sloan School’s Organizational Learning Center (now the Society for Organizational Learning) and was a member of the core research team of the MIT Learning Center’s Dialogue Project. She has served as a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future and as an Associate with the Norwegian Center for Leadership Development. Juanita has collaborated as program faculty at the John F. Kennedy University School of Management, the California Institute of Integral Studies, Columbia University, and the University of Monterrey, Mexico. She serves as a Fellow of the World Business Academy and has been honored among the World Who’s Who of Business and Professional Women. Ms. Brown has served as keynote speaker and seminar leader in the areas of strategic thinking and strategic dialogue, multi-generational collaboration at work, leading learning organizations, building communities of commitment, and catalyzing large scale systems change. Her Keynote Cafes and strategic dialogues have included participants from Fortune 100 companies as well as senior leaders across sectors. Juanita’s clients have included: Procter and Gamble, Kraft General Foods International, SAS Scandinavian Airlines, Intel, IBM, National Bank of Mexico,the Altria Group, National Phone Company and Maraven National Oil Company of Venezuela, and the Skandia Corporation (Sweden). Organizations that have engaged the World Café include Nokia, Shell Oil, Hewlett Packard, Wells Fargo, the European Commission, and the American Society for Quality, among others. Ms. Brown received her B.A. in sociology from Antioch College and her M.A. from Cornell University in consumer economics. Her Ph.D. focused on collective intelligence and the role of conversation as a core process for organizational and societal evolution. She is fluent in Spanish and has conducted specialized study in Latin American Affairs at the National University of Colombia. Her recent articles, focused on Conversational Leadership: Thinking Together for a Change, have appeared in both The Systems Thinker and the Oxford Leadership Journal.
