You are right Chris -- really good stuff. I particularly liked -- "Cutting down to ten hours on the last day means we lose 20% of the result of that one day. No-you lose 80% of the total result. He's not seeing the effect on the brain, the nonlinearity of the situation, the discontinuity of the result. What you can achieve in a one-day event is not one-third of what you can achieve over three days-it is more like one-tenth.
Bryan Coffman, who has facilitated DesignShop events for over ten years for organizations ranging from the Commissioner of the IRS to components of Walt Disney World, agrees: Only a small percentage of people will break through to enhanced creativity during a one-day session. They have not had the benefit of sleeping on the problem two nights, not been forced to work hard on it from different vantage points. They have had time to come in, listen politely, and go home. "Sleeping on the problem" is a deliberate use of time as a problem-solving technique. You've spent the day in "accelerated learning" or "immersion learning," loading up your head with complexity, new information, new paradigms, and vast new sets of tools to apply to your problem. That night's sleep will shift the learning into long-term memory. When you are handed a creative challenge at 8 AM, your mind comes to work with a different integrated .i.ol kit;tool kit, and perhaps with a restructured view of the world and the problem than you had the day before. The only way you totally immerse in working with a challenge is when you have an opportunity to get away from the mundane; to step away from the habits, thought patterns, and tools we use during our standard days; to see a wide variety of viewpoints. The long hours give you enough time to try out, use up, exhaust, and discard habits and standard ways of doing things that haven't been capable of solving the problem. The long hours give you the time to move into trying out new, experimental forms of problem-solving. You can even use the long hours as a way to relax self-imposed rules that are holding you back-you can try out an idea without being so nervous about the listener's response. You can break taboos with excuse of fatigue, relax with fatigue, become more open to information, including information from your unconscious. Dissolving old structures and reformulating new ones is part of the creative process. It is, quite literally, the chemistry of a solution." Harrison Harrison Owen 7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, Maryland 20845 Phone 301-365-2093 Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html -----Original Message----- From: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu] On Behalf Of Chris Corrigan Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 3:00 PM To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Subject: DesignShop and Group Genius Hi folks: A while ago we had a conversation here about MGTaylor's DesignShop process. Today I found this link http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/99Gathering/lta_chapter03.html which has a lot of insight both into the DesignShop process, but also into why things like time matter in processes like the ones we use. I'm sure some of the conversations with managers recounted in the story will resonate with those of you that have been told to shave your OST event down to a few hours, from a full day, as if time doesn't really matter. Chris -- ------------------------- CHRIS CORRIGAN Consultation - Facilitation Open Space Technology Weblog: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot Site: http://www.chriscorrigan.com * * ========================================================== 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