As Harrison suggested, I've been encouraging and exploring OST related Research for awhile. There are a very small number of referred journal articles about OST and its impact. I have a list of a few of them, many are in German.
I've written and submitted some time ago an article that uses HayGroup data to suggest a substantial impact on employee and in particular management positive regard and moral following Open Space events. The article was being considered by Barbara Bunker & Billie Alban for a journal -- they decided not to include it. It is now being considered as part of a book they will publish. It is already take 1.5 years from completion to getting a publisher. A colleague had a research article written about a corporate open space event. It showed a clear 15% performance improvement attributable to the event and follow-up. The company would not release the article because it suggested that their performance needed to be improved by %15 or more. Peg had that same problem with US West not releasing very interesting data on the impact of the OS in the video. That is one reason a number of us have initiated the data gathering process that was recently announced on the list. I've included it again as a reminder to start gather data. Please join us in a World Wide Inquiry into The Effects of Open Space Technology We have developed research questions and materials. The web site and the web log (blog) for gathering data are now up (http://www.openspaceworld.org/network/wiki.cgi?OpenSpaceResearch_). We will start gathering in English (other language sites may emerge). All of us can access the information. Our overall purpose is to increase the effectiveness of Open Space by deepening our understanding of it: how it is used, what it accomplishes, who is affected and how, as well as the underlying patterns that it teaches us. Many great stories have been told and gathered on the OS list over the years. We want to complement those stories with some more explicit questions to gather information. This particular research initiative is rooted in the Toronto September 2003 Research Conference and the Goa OSonOS in October 2004. An ongoing group from the Toronto Conference developed some "Descriptive" questions focused on getting our clients' language and view. At Goa an Appreciative Inquiry process was used to generate another protocol for research, and a quick version was developed as well. We decided to try both kinds of questions at OSonOS and we have been working on it since. We now invite your participation. At http://www.openspaceworld.org/network/wiki.cgi?OpenSpaceResearch you can find the instructions. We encourage you to go there to learn about the initiative and to download the materials that will help you do the interviews with your clients: --Informed Consent Form; You will need to get your client to sign this so that we are sure the information she/he gives can be used in the research project. --Context Questions: No matter what interview approach you use, we want you to answer the same questions about the organization and the event. --Interview Questions: You have three choices of research questions. You will need to choose one for your interview with your client. Both the Descriptive Questions and the Appreciative Inquiry Questions have their own blog stream for posting information. All are provided on the web site as MS Word documents so you can download them for your use. You can cut and past the responses to questions from your MS Word file into the blog. We believe we can gather world-wide information that can later be analyzed to suggest patterns or relationships between the context information and the perceptions and results of OST events. For example, people from different sectors may use different language to describe the impact of Open Space. There may be a relationship between the length of the event and its ongoing impact in the organization. The initial interviews we have conducted have been fun and informative. We look forward to reading the information that you gather and a number of approaches to finding patterns. We hope you will join us in this venture. If you have any questions that the site does not answer, then e-mail us. Larry Peterson la...@spiritedorg.com Peggy Holman pe...@opencirclecompany.com Chris Corrigan ch...@chriscorrigan.com Michael Pannwitz mmpa...@berlin.snafu.de Viv McWaters v...@thereef.com.au Larry Peterson Associates in Transformation Toronto, ON, Canada 416.653.4829 la...@spiritedorg.com www.spiritedorg.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