I agree with Birgitt Ingrid. Let the silence go as long as necessary. It does say a great deal about the sponsors and the extent to which they are trusted. That pre-conference work is critical to help them decided to open the space and be clear as to how open it is, and to identify theme. It may take some work with some of the possible particpants before the event to test the theme if the sponsors are totally out of touch.
Even with the very shy Cree in Northen Quebec, the right theme and openness of the sponsor created a flood of people. See OS Canada newsletter on the Global OS web site for details. Larry Larry Peterson Associates in Transformation 41 Appleton Ave., Toronto, ON, Canada, M6E 3A4 Tel:/Fax: 416-653-4829 [email protected] http://www.inforamp.net/~lpasoc -----Original Message----- From: Birgitt Bolton [SMTP:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 1998 8:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Preconference work Hello Ingrid, The silent time even if everyone is uncomfortable is an important time. Hard on the facilitator. And sometimes those times feel like hours and not minutes. It is not about shyness and whatever you do, don't do an icebreaker. It is important to work with the chaos/order. Maybe there is some pre-work you could do differently. Was the topic one that people had passion for or was it an artificial topic? I find that I work a lot to get the right theme/question and that this makes a big difference. Birgitt Birgitt Bolton Dalar Associates/Change Team Canada 55 Ravina Cres., Ancaster, Ontario, Canada L9G 2E8 phone: 905-648-5775 fax: 905-648-2262 ---------- > From: Ingrid Olausson <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Subject: Preconference work > Date: June 25, 1998 5:24 AM > > What happens if nobody comes forward to announce issues? I have always had faith that this will never occur - and that is what I tell clients when they ask this question. But in the last OS with 240 people this was about to happen. It took several minutes to get 3 issues on the bulletin board. We had already told them that they couldnt leave the conference complaining that their issue didn't come up, there was only one person to blame etc. The group was extremely shy and people didn?t want to speak in public. Specially not in a microphone. And they didn?t want to step into the circle. We had to meet them with the microphone, or read the issues for them. At last we had 22 issues on the wall. But it took a long time. > My question is: would it be a good thing to break the group into pairs or smaller group to talk for a few minutes about topics? Just to break the ice. Or perhaps a preconference discussion on the network? The problem is that you don't know before the conference how they will react. I have seen many conferences where the people just throw themselves into the process. > Ingrid
