I am doing an Open Space in a couple of weeks for about a hundred people in Health Care around the issues of workforce flexibility and structuring. The output will not so much be action plans as the raising of key themes and issues which need to be taken into account by policy makers within the Health Department. This has been communicated in the invitation and will be highlighted again in the Sponsor's introduction/welcome. We have also discussed feedback-loop communications after the event so that people can see how their input was used to shape policy. The sponsor believes (as do I) that it could be useful to invite the group into some preliminary `first cut' analysis of emerging themes as a 'convergence' activity. I am wondering how to do this is way which is somewhat more conversational than the "red dot" system. I quite like the World Cafe convergence question "what do you see as being patterns, themes and emerging questions?", and was thinking of a convergence process which would involve some individual reading time of group reports, then asking people to self organise into groups/circles of 4 people to discuss that question for half an hour or so, then pass the indian talking stick/microphone around to invite reflections from each group. Could this `mixing' of processes (OST and World Cafe) have any downsides I am not seeing? Any thoughts on this idea or alternative ways of converging where it's themes rather than action that need converging?
Michael Wood * * ========================================================== 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
