Many thanks to the 10 or so people who responded to my panic attack last week at midnight about convergence with 130 people This is an update to what happened in the convergence.
Firstly, your immediate response late at night (3 AM when I got back to my hotel room) made my heart flush with gratitude, warmth, and love...an incredible feeling of not being alone in the world. It immediately relaxed me and reminded me to trust my intuition (along with a couple of ideas offline that I ended up incorporating.) It brought me fully into this wonderful space I have been skirting around. To refresh memories of this OS: 130 fast-paced, high tech people got together to hold a day and a half OS at the end of a week long conference of 900 people. For the most part, they are all working 'virtually' across the US and in 4 other countries. Theme was "How can we meet our goals this year?" Within 15 minutes after I finished the opening, 32 topics were posted and they were hard at work, seated in self-designed circles around the room and in the atrium of the hotel. (One quote I like to use in the opening is "Excellence is not possible with a disengaged heart.") It was truly amazing the stampede of topics and organization and get-down-to-it-energy. Five other topics were added during the day, one of which was "nap." There were six 1 hour 15 minute sessions with 1/2 hour for lunch (buffet). The client was worried few people would post topics, even tho he had hosted an OS for 35 people last year. His worry (possible career limiting decision to hold OS for 130) bounced onto me and then ricocheted onto this list. Need an anxiety defense shield from now on. Convergence: Start time was 9 AM 8 am to 9: Informal walk-the-wall to see what happened in all the groups. I posted whatever came in the previous night, handwritten or typed with a blank page beside it. They were instructed to review topics and add any additional thoughts, names or hyperlinks to other topics or people within or outside the company. I made only 10 hard copies of the session notes and placed them in the middle of the circle. The people who partied the night before really appreciated the sit down review time with the hard copies. We circled-up at 9 AM with directions-they were to meet in the groups that they wished to work with and decide the goal and the very next action step. After 45 minutes, we circled-up again and each session's action step was announced by the convener. (a little boring for me, but others liked hearing the "whole picture") We closed with "What was most meaningful for you this week?" I thought many would pass because there were planes to catch, few did. The majority of comments were about the "face-time" they had with their counterparts, some they had never met. One comment "I got a lot of work done without having my email inbox filled!". They really appreciated the meeting format. After it was all over with, someone came up and told my client that next time she wanted the rest of the conference to be involved. Documentation: This company is going to a "paperless" workplace, so conveners were to send an email (in template format) to my client after the OS and it would be placed on an internal website or emailed to everyone. Thank you, Harrison, for your brilliance. Thank you, emergency response team, for your heart help. Blake * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu, Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html