Hi Anu On 20/11/2004, at 9:55 AM, Anu Parmar wrote:
I've gotten some idea on how you have done it but I would love to hear more on how you 'sold' this idea (without explaining what OS is) to academics for them to invest their time and energy in this forum. As well how long, in terms of days was this get-together. Can you give us more details, Viv, please.
They were meeting anyway, and asked a colleague of mine (Geoff) to facilitate. He decided that with 60 people at least two facilitators were needed so negotiated that I be brought in too. I actually never met with the client before the event (I was travelling to beautiful Goa). As far as I know, Geoff didn't mention open space either. Geoff and I met and talked about the event - we discussed all sorts of approaches including Open Space - and spent most of our time trying to work out what the client wanted to achieve (which was basically get the group operating effectively so that he could go back to retirement - he had been called out of retirement to 'fix' the group). All this planning happened months before the event (and I'm not very good at planning that far in advance - in fact I'm not very good at planning at all). After I returned from Goa and the Improv. conference in San Francisco, we met to finalise details and I said we just had to use OS. We reassured the client that we would meet the very long list of outcomes he wanted from the event, told him what facilities we needed and gave him a very general agenda eg welcome, agenda setting, concurrent discussions, afternoon plenary (AKA evening news), action planning, closing. I tend to use the language the client is comfortable with rather than 'educate' them into OS jargon. We even determined the theme without consulting the client! (I can feel people wincing all around the world :-) Then we just did it. It was a nearly two-day residential OS. It was in a basketball stadium. We started by having them seated in theatre style horseshoe. That was familiar. The empty agenda on the wall wasn't so familiar and received some puzzled looks. We did a standard welcome and then some sociometry (mainly line ups and chunking) and then some individual and small group appreciative inquiry storytelling. During lunch we rearranged the chairs into a circle. After lunch I opened the pace and the rest is history. We provided participants with a generic agenda: morning arrival, opening, agenda setting, sessions all afternoon, evening news, dinner (with a guest speaker that was organised by the client - and guess what? he spoke about the importance of following your passion (as a scientist) and taking responsibility! He couldn't have done a more appropriate job if I'd briefed him myself - and I had absolutely nothing to do with it at all). The action planning happened after lunch on the second day - and people went home with the proceedings - quite a novelty for a bunch of academics. Cheers Viv *************************** Viv McWaters Beyond the Edge Pty Ltd PO Box 665 Torquay 3228 Australia (03) 5261 9498 0417 135 406 "Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees. " Schopenhauer * * ========================================================== 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
