Echoing Michael's approach here. I learned this from him many years
ago, to pay attention to the clarity of the first five minutes.
Where it gets sticky is in the gut check conversation and that can
take time too. But I also want to put in a plug for skillful practice
of invitation. I often work closley with people not only to write an
invite but practice it as well. In other words beyond just hitting the
send button I find that it supports action better if people use their
networks to invite more deeply. When the meeting is over these
networks often become the place where people continue to connect to
execute action.
And as for my OS that failed I will say that the shape sometimes
doesn't matter. I always try to put people in a circle but on the odd
occaision when that hasn't been possible i have still managed to do
fine.
There is rather something in what I can only call the energetic
architecture of open space that needs paying attention to. Even under
dire logistical conditions getting that right seems to make all the
difference.
That architecture consists of things like the real business issue, the
invitation, the authentic desire to let go of control and outcome on
both the client and the facilitators part and something about the
quality of the space. Get those things right and you have the actual
conditions for space to open. Get them wrong and even the most
orthodox execution of the process will fall flat and seem like a
failure. And people will see that as "open space doesn't work."
Chris
-----
CHRIS CORRIGAN
http://www.chriscorrigan.com
Sent from an iPod, typed with thumbs...
On 2010-06-04, at 7:03 AM, Michael Herman <[email protected]>
wrote:
yes. this is exactly my experience, harrison, with some exceptions
for those cases where the sponsor was already so thought-into the
scene that they didn't tell a very clear story. but for vast
majority of cases, my experiene goes like this...
phone rings. caller introduces self and says some version of
"calling about open space." then proceeds to tick off the
following... organization name, we've always been [whatever] sort of
an organization, we've had this success or that success, but now
things are different. (or now we want them to be different.) (or
then must be different.) we're up against this, that and/or the
other obstacles or deadlines or usual custom (we have this same
meeting every year)... and we want to do something different, so we
thought open space might do the trick"
then we talk about who's coming, or should be coming; wehre it might
happen, what's already in place, what sorts of documenting, how
people already are talking in org with current systems, and then it
comes back to... now what? and the only thing left is to pen the
invite. "invitation?" they ask, "what's that?" -- and i always
point out that they already said it, they just have to write it down
and tidy it up a bit.
there is a bit of reality/gut checking. there is a bit of fishing
around on my part to see if they just want to do a different dance
or if they really want it to rain this time. do they want a
different meeting or a different organization, but mostly, it's
those first five sentences they give me on the phone.
i always pay very close attention to those first five sentences.
not as easy by email. sometimes when it starts that way we're able
to recreate it quickly on the phone. sometimes it takes a bit of
swimming upstream.
and maybe this is one of those lapses in attention... if i miss that
moment of first, true clarity, when that space first opens and
somebody dares to ask if things couldn't be different... you used to
talk about that moment of "wondering...", harrison, then it might
well be that no amount of thinking and such can replace it. that's
maybe the place where a lapse in the quality of attention, in those
first lines and first few conversations, when client and i are still
new to each other, where maybe things get more or less lined up for
success or failure.
m
--
Michael Herman
Michael Herman Associates
http://www.michaelherman.com
http://www.ronanparktrail.com
http://www.chicagoconservationcorps.org
http://www.openspaceworld.org
312-280-7838 (mobile)
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Harrison Owen <[email protected]>
wrote:
One of the themes that seems to be surfacing here is the whole
subject of Invitations. The Invitation (theme) is definitely
important as it sets the raison d’être and frame for the
gathering. I know that some people spend terrific amounts of time an
d effort crafting that invitation – but my experience has taken me i
n a different direction. In fact I have found that the effectiveness
of the Invitation is (oddly) inversely proportional to time/effort
expended. The key, I think is the necessity for a “real business iss
ue” as a first condition for a functional Open Space. And a real bus
iness issue (no matter how you define business) is something that hi
ts you right in the face. You don’t have to think about it very much
, and in fact it is pretty hard to think about anything else. It is
also usually true that the folks in the organization (those who migh
t care) have already named it. That name might be something less tha
n elegant and seemingly lacking in precision as an outsider might se
e it – but for those in the know, the people who care (exactly the r
ight people for the Open Space) – they will instantaneously recogniz
e “it.” Some years ago I received a call about doing an Open
Space. After some initial, rather generalized conversation, the pers
on on the other end of the line said in some deep pain, “Our system
is broke in just about every way a system can be broken and everybod
y knows it.” As it happened that system (business) resided in the st
ate of Arizona – and there was the theme and invitation. “Fixing
Arizona: Issues and Opportunities.” There was no reason to give all
the details, motivational encouragement, pleas for attendance. Every
body who cared already knew.
Actually when you think about it, it is probably true that if you
have to spend a lot of effort developing and clarifying the focal
issue the chances are you don’t have a “real business issue.”
That being the case, doing an Open Space may not be the appropriate
way to go. Without the passion, focus, and caring not too much is li
kely to happen. I guess that is not too surprising as without passio
n, focus, and caring not too much happens in any other part of life
either.
Harrison
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
USA
Phone 301-365-2093
www.openspaceworld.com
www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]
:
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From: OSLIST [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Michael Herman
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 5:50 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: On "Failure"
there are some situations that come to mind, harrison, but is sort
of reminds me of that time when louise mitran brought all the
drumming gear to one our trainings at the carleton. she took a
group out in one session and challenged them to play chaos. they
really had a heck of time doing it, sustaining it. for sure there
were moments of discord and a lot of messiness, but the driving
force underneath it all was the inclination, some sort collectively
mutual invitation, to entrain with each other... and turn it into
music. so i was thinking not so much about any 'grand failures' but
more those moments of confusion, facilitator choice points, apparent
chaos, but pretty much i they always seem to resolve again. moral
of the story might be, when you find yourself under water, go with
the flow, stay in relationship, let the river take you where it's
choosing, try not to get stuck and hold your breath... you'll likely
have another chance for opening and fresh air, soon enough, even if
not exactly soon as you want or expect.
that said, here are some of the situations that came to mind...
a buddy of mine called in sick the day before an event, so i walked
in to open space with no experience with the group. the managers
had written the invitation, and invited 100 folks to come work on
the issues that made their stomachs churn, hands sweat, or kept them
up at night worrying. the were working from a language they'd
developed around "adaptive challenges" based on a book they'd read
together. when the issues all went up, the managers, who had their
own list of issues, looked at the wall, they were astounded to see
that the group had covered all of the mgrs issues. mission
accomplished, or so it would seem. next day, however, morning news
sort of blew up because all the lower level folks were feeling a bit
disheartened, thought they'd failed miserably, because they hadn't
found a single issue that really scared them. turns out what was
freaking the mgrs out was just the everyday challenge to folks down
the hierarchy. the disheartening got turned more confusing when
some of the younger managers, who were very hot for this new
language they'd come up with from this book, tried hard to impose a
"training" in the right way to talk about these things. made for a
long morning news and then required the miracle of "the group
catching up" to the schedule... but none of that is particularly
remarkable. in the end, all the issues that mattered got discussed,
documented, and they made a good run at tackling the various things
that were identified for doing post-meeting.
so is this even a failure? could it have been if i'd made some
different choicse along the way? maybe, maybe not. depends on the
definitions, i think. certainly it was a deviation from the story
told in the user's guide. but we recovered. and i think that's
what happens in every, or almost every, case.
some of the recoveries happen before the event. the client dodges
the real issue and writes an invitation that says "come to an open
space meeting." well, that's not much of a theme, unless it's an
osonos. so we fix that, go deeper, dare to invite the real thing
and get on with it.
then they want to have three short keynoters to open. well maybe we
talk them out of that, maybe we don't. once we had two of three
keynoters cancel. so one guy talked for 20 mins instead of his
allotted 10. circle was 200, statewide group, very diverse, never
worked together. big issue. but this guy was more readily
associated and more active in one side of the story. it set up a
sort of competition because some felt heard and addressed in teh
opening, but others thought they'd been put in second place. i
motioned to the sponsor to pull the plug. he went out and put an
arm around the guy, thanked him and said "let's get started". i
walked in, past the podium he'd been standing at. with one hand, i
tipped it over, laid it down. by the time i got back around to that
point of th circle, interns had carried it off. but the damage was
done. later that morning, one of two key sponsors comes to me and
says "fix it. my people are pissed." she happens to be the one
who's got to sign my check. i tell her honestly, "now can do. it's
in their hands now." on the second day, it started to be dealt iwth
directly, our friend ted ernst raised an issue that began to put the
two 'sides' together. we came up with tons of good stuff, over 2.5
days, but i think it took another couple of annual repetitions of
this first event before everybody really felt like they were on the
same side. didn't help, probably, that one sponsor was a
foundation, funding some and not others. but that's the messiness
we work in. i'm not sure that co-sponsor's view of the thing ever
improved, though she did take a lead role in convening after-event
meetings. a city-wide coalition came out of those meetings and is
now active and very successful 9 years later.
then there is the client who -- after sprinkling a day of open space
sessions into a week of meetings, 150 top people from around the
world, fortune 150 company, all the c-folks there -- came to me, as
the proceedings were just finished being printed, and said "the ceo
says we can't distribute these. there's no time. he hasn't read
them. etc." i pushed hard for a conversation with the ceo and got a
very few minutes, in which i was able to convince notice that he was
trying to stop them from giving out notes about waht everyone in the
room was already thinking and speaking about. he agreed that it was
more dangerous to get in the way of it than to just let it go. but
he scuttled the session, can't recall the exact form, of the
prioritizing or conversing or voting or something that was to be
done with the rpoceedings. actually, i seem to remember people have
to go through and tear out the ballot pages from the books. luckily
spiral bound, so the page was never missed.
and then there is the client that thinks that all they need to do is
call the meeting to order, the facilitator will take it from there,
and they're off the hook forever. you think you've got them lined
up, they get it, they're on for it.. but deep down they want out.
this is the sponsor who might let slip in the opening intro "well,
glad you all could get here. we have no idea what's going to
happen. that's michael's problem now...". oops. checked out. and
when the notes were all assembled, the client i'm thinking of
mysteriously managed to avoid sending them out for several weeks.
mostly the high-end consultants in this company, who'd travelled
from everywhere to london for this meeting think this meeting
failed. no follow-through. but... eventually one person, brand new
in the office and company, stepped up, got the notes from the
leader, sorted things out and sent them around to everyone. the
conversation never recovered, but four years later, it seems that
that moment of leadership on the part of the new person set her up
to take on a leadership role in rebuilding their entire technology
platform. again, failure depends on definition and time frame.
but mostly i don't think of open spaces that failed, as much as some
were more fruitful than others, apparently, and moments when it was
possible to take the easy way out, letting that ceo do what he
wanted without challenge, instead of hanging in, and hanging with,
no matter what, again, apparently, happens to me personally.
m
--
Michael Herman
Michael Herman Associates
http://www.michaelherman.com
http://www.ronanparktrail.com
http://www.chicagoconservationcorps.org
http://www.openspaceworld.org
312-280-7838 (mobile)
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Harrison Owen <[email protected]>
wrote:
Michael – it would be really interesting to hear some actual situati
ons where what you are describing is true. I’ve never seen it, but I
did hear of one. It happened in South Africa where a local consulta
nt took Open Space as a license for absence. He literally left for m
ost of the day. As it turned out (as I heard from one of the partici
pants) the group really didn’t miss him, and was basically sorry to
see him return. And that same participant was sure that there had to
be something more than he had seen. As a consequence he came to a “
training program” (back in the days when I used to do something like
that J) and subsequently opened space all over the place. So I gues
s there was a happy ending after a rocky start. Or something.
But you really put your finger on something – “active
listening” – which is not so much about doing anything but rather
Being intensely. Definitely hard to describe but my best shot is th
e enigmatic phrase – Being totally present and absolutely invisible.
In my experience this is a matter of intention and practice. And th
e best part is that it is all definitely rewarding, not only in term
s of facilitating Open Space, but equally in terms of self understan
ding and personal presence. It feels good.
Harrison
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
USA
Phone 301-365-2093
www.openspaceworld.com
www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]
:
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From: OSLIST [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Michael Herman
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 2:41 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: On "Failure"
i have a teacher who likes to put little reminders on pencils and
pass them around. one of my favorite pencils says: "really easy is
often quite difficult."
i think this is true of open space. i've seen a number of
situations where the facilitator or the process itself was assumed
to be a bit of magic, so nobody needed to do much else to make it
happen. this makes all kinds of large and small "failures" possible
-- all owing to some lapses in the quality of attention, awareness,
relationship.
somebody once told me that carl rogers (some sort of psychologist, i
think) used to listen so intently that he would often break out in a
sweat -- just listening to someone. sometimes i think open space
takes this sort of quality or intensity of attention... or maybe of
awareness. that the heart is this active, even if the body is
apparently doing nothing. like when so many muscles are engaged in
walking a balance beam, or timing a jump. actively pulsing,
checking, on and off, holding and releasing, inviting and reporting.
i'd guess a fair number of "failures" have their roots in forgetting
that os is this sort of active practice, even if a lot of the action
is not outwardly visible or dramatic or difficult. weirdenss seems
to flow from gaps in clarity, in attention, in awareness, in
relationship. not so much, i think, from gaps in actual outer
logistics.
m
--
Michael Herman
Michael Herman Associates
http://www.michaelherman.com
http://www.ronanparktrail.com
http://www.chicagoconservationcorps.org
http://www.openspaceworld.org
312-280-7838 (mobile)
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:07 PM, VISUELLE PROTOKOLLE <[email protected]
> wrote:
Harrison and all,
Another example of an OS that went terribly wrong:
It was a factory producing printing machines, both in Eastern and
western Germany, and the participants were mixed from both areas. We
had the o.k. from the four directors, to whom we had illustrated
what to expect, and a final conference after the OS was already
determined. One of the directors, the one who seemed to be the most
employee-oriented, was choosen to say some words at the end of the
OS. Our partner in the company was a young man from HR, very active,
with good contacts to the directors. So he insisted that he should
brief the director what to say at the end of OS.
Everything went fine. The groups worked with joy and enthusiasm. We
accompanied the whole OS with 3 people visualizing everything, and
that was a big success, because everybody could see what had
happened everywhere. After we had shown the pictures in a final
slideshow, the director stood up and destroyed everything within 5
minutes. He said that he was disappointed, had expected other
outcomes, and that the managers wood have a hard time to use some of
the results.
That was the end of the project for us, but much worse all the
participants were angry and a big chance was lost for the company.
Of course the mistake was to let the young HR-man brief the director.
Reinhard
Reinhard Kuchenmüller
Dr. Marianne Stifel
VISUELLE PROTOKOLLE
Kuchenmüller & Stifel
+39-0566-88 929
www.visuelle-protokolle.de
Am 03/06/10 18:12 schrieb "Ralph Copleman" unter <[email protected]
>:
Harrison and all,
I've had a few that sort of fell flat.
One involved a group concerned about availability of services for
senior citizens across an entire US state. Two-thirds of the room
consisted of seniors themselves and, frankly, a lot of them ran out
of energy about an hour after lunch. So they sat around, a number
slumping in chairs with eyes closed.
Another involved an exploration of customer service issues for an
airline. Lots of corporate leaders from the airline present, along
with their booking agents (this pre-dates internet booking sites),
frequent flyer customers, and corporate travel execs who make travel
policy for their companies. A great mix, actually. We were set to
go from 8:00 a.m to 4:00. About 2:00, a group of participants more
or less seized control of the meeting somehow (I wasn't in the room
when it occurred) and got everyone to agree to shorten the meeting
by a full hour. When I returned at 3:00, someone simply informed
me, and asked that I begin the closing circle. So that's what I
did. I never found out what actually happened.
Not sure how to think about that last one, since I never found out
how it all developed, but the following one is more like a true
failure.
I was asked to convene a two-day open space gathering for about 200
folks from around the US. It would be the annual meeting of an
association of a certain type of public health officer (cannot
recall the details). The whole thing was pretty dead from the
outset –– I mean 200 people posting a total of only 15 sessions
for two whole days!? I found out the theme was all wrong. The plan
ning committee chose an idea that turned out to have no juice for th
e association's members. I had spent hours in conference calls with
the leadership group and the planning committee, and they'd assured
me that the idea they chose was at the heart of the challenges faci
ng them and their organizations. Turns out that was dead wrong. No
body else cared. I don't know how I might have seen through this si
tuation ahead of time.
I essentially agree with you, H. If the conditions are appropriate,
it will work. But, if the three experiences above teach me
anything, it's clear that stuff can always happens.
Ralph Copleman
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