In another "note from the trenches," I co-facilitated a short Open Space on Monday with an ODN chapter.
There were a few challenges--I was teaming with a very competent facilitator who had never facilitated an Open Space, and had only participated in brief meetings using part of the whole OS design. Time was short, under 2 hours, and the client (the outgoing chapter president) had a strong need to see movement toward implementing ideas. We both learned a lot from OSList discussions in the past two or three weeks, expecially the conversations on short OS, OS within another meeting, assumptions about OST, and nonconverging. And decided that OS really was appropriate, even with the short time. We used Michael's nonconverging model, somewhat abbreviated, and the change of focus for the second round of sessions worked quite well. We saw a lot of chaos, a lot of self-organizing (after a few requests that started "Don't you think we should. . ."), a lot of energy, and some interesting and new ideas. One group worked on the topic, "What can we learn from chaos science?" And the closing circle, much of which happened after the ending time, was very thoughtful, very honest--and welcomed by a number of people, whose hope for the organization was to build more community. Several times in the planning stages, we reminded ourselves of the advice posted here recently to "just say Yes," and it was good advice! Thanks to all of you for your words of experience and your generous spirits. Joelle * * ========================================================== 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