Catherine asked;
Do any of you have experiences which didnt turn out to be safe and what happened next in the organization? Do you follow up and ask what happened in your clients organization, e.g. half a year later? I hear some people saying they had one experience in Open Space which wasnt well embedded in the organization and then got frustrated and decided they would never go for it again. This of course is the worst case and bad publicity for our passion, Open Space Please share your bad experiences, we can all learn tremendously from them. I am late in on this tread way behind reading e-mails but here is what I could share , if I hadnt done it before and if so here it is again It was in a public organisation here in Sweden and I and a colleague who worked with meeting efficiency was appointed to work with this organisations meeting efficiency.. The organisation has offices on different places and they where not happy with how their meetings used to be conducted. And not to make the story to long - I will go right to my analysis of what and why it went wrong. Of course the Open Space meeting was not wrong everything went well :-) The trouble begins afterwards when it comes to action and working with the high prioritized topics. Then it came up that there was a deed mouse ~ an employee problem that no one had touched for years. This woman was not participating in the meeting for some reason that I dont know of. So when it came to make the action that they had decided to work on if I remember right it was about climate and trust in the groups, the leadership team was not willing to go forward. This was clear in the follow up meeting I had with them after the OS meeting. They had also felt alone that it was all on their shoulders to do, (and of course they had not gone to action planning they did not wanted that) so yes it was in the leader teams knee.. So they shut down the process, which was schedule to a series of OST meetings. In my eyes this was lack of leadership to much fear to go into the real problem and a very hierarchical organisation. We tried to follow up and report our view with the head of the HR department but he was not willing to hear what we thought and had seen. So they put the lid upon the top of every thing and shut the space down. So what I did wrong -->I took the theme we had talked about before for granted and did not do a proper preparation meeting. I have always before and certainly after :-) done a proper preparation meeting, and if I had done that for example the story line I think there had been a better chance that that problem had come up. And the manager that had the problem in his department couldnt make it to the preparation meeting. So that is another part of it. My lesson --> always does a proper preparation meeting, I would never again say yes to have an OST meeting without that. So I guess this will counts as a failure but, then who am I to decide what is failure it sure was a failure for me, my reputation and Open Space, but I dont know if it was a failure for the people who really liked the process All the best from west coast of Sweden :o) Eva Bästa hälsningar Eva P Svensson EPS Human Invest AB "Verksamhetsutveckling genom människor skapar långsiktigt välmående företag och organisationer!" Anåsbergsvägen 22, 439 34 ONSALA Tfn: 0300-615 05, Mobil: 0706-89 85 50 <mailto:e...@epshumaninvest.se> e...@epshumaninvest.se, <http://www.epshumaninvest.se> www.epshumaninvest.se _____ http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist * * ========================================================== 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 * * ========================================================== 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 * * ========================================================== 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
