Hello Elwin,
It is a nice opportunity to give my perspective about this seems-to-meet-in-conflict OS gathering. Few months ago I faced a similar situation when a company called me for carrying out a needs assessment job for designing a program to improve the team working environment. What I did not know was that the manager was wanting to fire two workers; one of them was his assistant manager who happened to be on vacation at the moment of the diagnosis. It is my guess the boss's desire is to put the 2 person "in evidence" perhaps on their attitude towards working as a team or on some other similar aspect. This is an everyday situation in South America. Some questions came to my mind i.e. why did this office choose a training event/conference to have or to look for a reason? Why did the new boss (or someone else) give you this information? What are his/her expectations about the event, the outcome and your performance? How is he/she going to relate your conference/outcome with having these 2 person gone? Are you going to be used by the boss? Perhaps you would not want to know the answers… I work consistently on Human Relations and make an extensive use of Transactional Analysis tools. If you have a chance, take a look to Eric Berne's *Games People Play*. One of these games is one called "got you damn it!" or something like that; when someone with power (the pursuer) gives confidence and a sense of trust to a subordinate (the victim) so this person acts freely and according to his/her own convictions just to provide the necessary evidence for not so evident pursuer's purposes. The triangle is completed by the rescuer/savior (perhaps you) and in some instances the pursuer turns against the savior if things do not go as desired. Did you find something similar to your situation? In fact Open Space gives the perfect setting; *be prepared to be surprised*and take care to warn everybody about this (including yourself). Good luck! Jaime * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist