Greetings: One of the areas of open space facilitation that fascinates me the most is how the facilitator works to help integrate the explosion of creativity that emerges from the event with the ongoing work and life of the institution.
The strategies below make sense when you are integrating Open Space with a traditional hierarchical organization operating with limited resources, which, for the time being, is just about everywhere. My principal strategies include: 1) Negotiating with the leaders, in advance, about how to manage this explosion of participation. In one case a senior manager said he'd be happy with four workgroups developing four good ideas from an open space event. He got close to 30. Senior people often are unprepared to deal with the level of participation and creative success they experience in open space. 2) Thinking always about how to "bound the space" without "closing it." For me this means clarifying what the client most wants from the event so that I can then provide, up front, discussion templates, convergence strategies, and other aids, as appropriate, to help groups channel their creativity into a form that the organization can relate to. 3) Negotiating with senior management, in advance, what issues working groups must address in any proposals they develop to secure senior management's support. In other words, I ask senior management to define the essential elements of a proposal to get a YES from them. 4) Negotiating, in advance, any decision process and timetable by which senior management will review and approve/disapprove these ventures. The goal, by the way, is that the upfront decision criteria and process, and the support process for emerging leaders, are so clear that management ends up saying yes to just about everything. 5) Planning, in advance, how to communicate these givens to the participants before and during the open space (I have never had a participant object to these clarifications - in fact they are grateful that management has done its thinking about what it can support and can't support AHEAD of time) 6) Planning, beforehand, what steps the organization is committed to taking after the event to coach and support emergent leaders and ideas (these steps can always be expanded during the event as well). These are issues that I raise with every open space client, although these steps are not needed in all situations. I am motivated, as you are, by the desire to do work that is not "lip service," or perceived as "lip service." Life is too short. Good luck, Jay
