Hi Jon, One rationale for keeping the ownership within the agencies flows directly from the law of two feet--for any collaboration effort to succeed there needs to be both passion and responsibility. If control is centralized and pulled away from the projects themselves, you essentially cut off the foot of responsibility. Passion will fizzle without real responsibility (or agency or ownership). There needs to be an embedded ownership within these initiatives (genuine/authentic responsibility) or you will seriously truncate and limit their chances of success. Which is probably why your OD sense is tingling. And, as they have hired you to coordinate such collaborative efforts, you also limit your ability to identify the change leaders and emergent leadership within each agency by centralizing control.
Don't know if you can communicate this perspective to these folks, but the best role for the level of support and drive they can bring to these projects is to protect and hold the space for new and emergent structures to arise. One of the big challenges in bringing open space practice more consciously to large agencies is supporting existing leadership to understand a new way of leading. There is often a genuine and understandable human fear operating behind it of loss of relevance (often manifests as controlling behaviour). You will need to help these folks envision and grow into a new sense of their own leadership and of what leadership that supports deep collaboration looks like. Ground your presentation in what you know about Open Space practice and how and why it works, translating the essence and form of it into the language and structures of your organization. Transmitting deep respect for their current roles and helping them to collectively write the story of their own emerging roles may help to channel their passion into a productive direction for your initiatives. Always remembering that conflict is just passion: can you place a little pebble in that flow that will redirect its course into a supportive pattern? In other words, don't stand in the way of it and take the brunt, blend and flow: look for the path of confluence. (If you have facilitation of the meeting, you could start with an appreciative question around their best experience of collaboration and what supported that--then harvest the learnings and together look at how that applies to your current situation.) Best of luck, Wendy -----Original Message----- From: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu] On Behalf Of Jon Harvey Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 3:44 PM To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Subject: needing some advice No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.10.22/923 - Release Date: 7/27/2007 6:01 PM * * ========================================================== 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