No room for the piranhas

A learning cafe is learning with fun, says Isabel Willshaw, summing up her baby before confessing that its genesis was ''because I am completely mad''. It is a simple idea: to allow everyone who is ploughing their personal and business furrow in isolation to cross-fertilise ideas and solutions with someone ploughing another part of the field.

Piloted at the Edinburgh Festival, where local business people mixed with festival-goers and tourists from all over the world, the concept came to Glasgow last week with two days of open breakfast, lunch, and tea-breaks, interspersed with self-improvement workshops of the sort which inspires deep suspicion among most Scots. Yet everyone knows people they would like to introduce to one another but don't because of the constraints of time and place or social convention. Willshaw's public salon depends not on invitation (although the hostess in her lines up likely people), but on the frisson of the unpredictable chance encounter.

Inevitably, the first session was heavy with people already committed to BrainPool, the company behind the cafes, and its ideal of bringing together people with different experiences, skills, and contacts to exchange ideas and make ''productive connections'', which is Willshaw's watchword.

Amid the management trainers, astrologers, and creative thinkers already booked for subsequent sessions and the inevitable recently redundant executive clutching his brief-case like a security blanket on the lookout for a stray opportunity, were a number of business people, most of whom had recently set up small companies. There was the usual swopping of business cards, plus a buzz of ideas being exchanged at lunchtime, as Willshaw exhorted her guests to work out what they wanted and ask their neighbours for help, whether it was in finding a baby-sitter or a new office.

Anne Snelling, who had just led a workshop on motivation, confided that she wanted an office in New York. Willshaw's eyes blaze with the light of success and she snaps her fingers: ''I will guarantee that there are people in this room with contacts in New York.'' Three people wave their hands, but having hit on her major theme, she is not giving up: ''There will be more, possibly outside New York, even if it is a friend of a friend,'' she says.

Exploiting this chain of contacts is what BrainPool and her learning cafes are all about. It is one of those inspirational ideas which are both simple and perfect in theory and fiendishly difficult to put into practice; not least because the movers and shakers everyone really wants to meet are moving, shaking, and networking with their peers on their company phones and in their offices rather than spending their lunch hours trawling a pool of unknown people for new talent.

That still leaves, however, a large group of intelligent, interesting, and probably under-stretched and under-appreciated people at a lower level, both in companies and running their own businesses. With such a motley group, Anne Snelling suggests: ''Motivation is one of those things like happiness that you can chase for ever.''

Her partner in Inspired Learning, Dennis Laverty, declares: ''A goal is only a dream until someone else knows about it.''

There follows a series of exercises designed to inspire confidence, like writing down a list of negative traits and instantly turning them into positive ones, then a bit of instant self-analysis achieved by writing down our favourite childhood food followed by the one we most loathed. We have to imagine we are required to eat them both and discuss with our neighbours how we would do it: get the nasty over with and enjoy the nice or get the boost from the one we like before tackling the nasty? ''If you would cut the nasty one into little pieces and disguise it with other food, you have a problem with procrastination of tasks,'' warns Snelling.

It is all good fun with the bonus of a little insight, but before it becomes clear where it's leading, there is some difficulty with people following it too literally and getting bogged down in their long-discarded childhood behaviour. Then Andi declares that she wouldn't eat either and has to acknowledge a problem in carrying out tasks allotted by others, but maybe that's why she is a musician who like to give solo performances, she rationalises.

A swift overview of achievements, struggles, and disappointments, and what lessons we can each learn from weighing one against the other leads to a listing of personal goals by way of some self-arrived pointers to balancing the different roles we all play in our lives.

The surprise comes when after exchanging views with our neighbours again we are asked to find a partner and agree to monitor each other's progress. Suddenly it becomes a serious commitment; the point at which we have to want to work at changing the dream into reality and one or two people slip off to attend to suddenly urgent tasks. Others swop phone numbers and Isabel Willshaw has brought about some more productive connections.

It is the untapped potential which draws people together. The inaugural session was sponsored by Scottish Enterprise, well aware that economic regeneration must take ever more-varied forms.

Networking may already have become a cliche, but few people are prepared to practise it beyond the traditional arenas of the golf and rotary clubs, professional bodies, and the major charities.

Isabel Willshaw, outlining the accelerating change from employment to self-employment to semi-employment, is in the vanguard of a different kind of communication with a different kind of colleague. It seems simplistic, but Willshaw's philosophy requires an open mind and a step back from the debilitating ''me'' culture.

''It is not a transaction, but an attitude of generosity; you have to go into the relationship thinking how you can help the other person,'' she says.

In turn, of course, they have to want to help you. Willshaw adds: ''In the Scottish culture, to say that you want something is a sin, but the only relationships I am interested in are reciprocal and generous.'' Piranha fish find themselves high and dry in the BrainPool.

n Further BrainPool learning cafes are on June 2 and June 3 in Edinburgh and June 9 and June 10 in Glasgow. Details from BrainPool: 0131 229 1576.