Brendan -- sounds to me that you all did "workshop" the issue/question, and it just took a little longer than you anticipated. Interestingly, I have never had the problem you describe. Folks always know what they are talking about -- or at least think they are talking about -- if not they would not have come. Which makes me wonder about the real openness of the invitation. Did they come for the question, or for some other reason?
Harrison Harrison Owen 7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, Maryland 20854 Phone 301-365-2093 Skype hhowen Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org Personal website www.ho-image.com OSLIST: To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit: www.listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html -----Original Message----- From: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu] On Behalf Of Brendan Mckeague Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 9:25 PM To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Subject: Warm Ups, Kick Starting Slow Starters After a recent 2.5 day OS with a diverse group of 35 people, from different (international) organisations and from about 10 different nationalities, the sponsor made the following comments in his reflection of the process: We are still working on some of the details on the follow up to the meeting. It is very pleasing to see how much follow up has been generated. I have talked to a lot of people about the meeting and the process. All have been positive. For your consideration here are a couple of suggestions that people have made. I have mentioned these to you earlier I think and now I am confident the majority of participants would concur with them. First, workshop the question for an hour or so at the start. The strength of the meeting was that we had people with a wide range of backgrounds and levels of understanding about the issues. The disadvantage is that some people with lower levels of understanding took a day or two to work out what was really being discussed. Making sure everyone had a good understanding of what the question really was all about would probably be useful. My curiosity now relates to the clarity with which we had framed the original invitation/question - and I accept that there was a bit of uncertainty about getting it right (at least from where I sat).... and do participants sometimes expect that a certain level of clarification is usually provided at the start of conventional conferences - through sponsor 'distillation' or inputs and thus get 'lazy' about working it out for themselves right from the start? On thinking of some of my own past experiences, I've arrived at many a conference expecting to be slowly and gently 'fed and led' into the working mode...not just left to work it all out for myself from the beginning.. Any thoughts? Cheers Brendan is that * * ========================================================== 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